\Browning's Dramatic Monologue:

A dramatic monologue is dramatic discourse usually employing the following elements: a fiction speaker, an
implied audience, a symbolic setting, dramatic gestures, and emphasis on speaker’s subjectivity. Dramatic
monologues provide interesting snapshots of the speakers and their personalities.
Robert Browning is often considered the master of the form of the dramatic monologue – if not the first to
“inaugurate [the first] to perfect this poetic form.” In Browning’s dramatic monologues the speakers lay bare
his inner thoughts and feelings –that is why they are regarded as the soul studies. Browning admits: “the
soul is the stage; moods and thoughts are characters.” He emphasizes: “My stress lay on the incidents in the
development of a soul: little else is worth study.”
Well-known for his expertise of dramatic monologue, Browning made a special feature of it in his work. The
dramatic monologue verse form allowed Browning to explore and probe the minds of specific characters.
This particular format allowed Browning to maintain a great distance between himself and his creations: by
channeling the voice of a character, Browning could expose evil without actually being evil himself. His
characters served as personae that let him adopt different traits and tell stories.
Browning’s terrific monologues worked as a tool to examine issues of the day that may not have been
examined otherwise, particularly domestic abuse and religious hypocrisy. Browning has popularized
dramatic monologue influencing Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and many other British poets of the next
generations.
The typical speaker of a Browning monologue is aggressive, often threatening, nearly always superior
intellectually or socially to the listener, a typically eloquent rhetorician who has complete control over what
he speaks and which is capable of lying. The speaker is often attempting to use his words to alter radically
his listener’ perception.
One of the best illustrations of Browning’s psychological analysis can be seen in the depiction of the Duke
in My Last Duchess. The combination of villain and aesthete in the Duke creates an especially strong
tension, and Browning exploits the combination to the fullest. The crafty duke wants to overwhelm emissary
by his meandering insinuation as well as overpowering intimidation.
As a chronicler of “events and incidents in the development of soul” Robert Browning often allows his
speaker to reveal or condemn his own behavior. The Duke is authoritarian and expected absolute obedience
from his Duchess. Daunted by his wife’s freedom of spirit, he complains that she “was too easily impressed”
by anyone and did not appreciate his “gift of nine hundred years old name”. As she did not reserve the
singularity of her “earnest glance” solely for him, the Duke was embarrassed by her flirtious nature. When
her behavior escalated, “[he] gave commands; /Then all smiles stopped together.” Although the Duke was
unable to control the duchess when she was alive, after her death he is in complete control of her as he puts
it: “… none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you but I”, revealing that how he values the most beautiful
things he can control. On their descent he points to a bronze bust of Neptune taming a horse–again
signifying his controlling nature.
“Porphyria’s Lover” is another shocking example of domestic violence. The young Porphyria, venturing all
the social and physical barriers, comes to her deranged lover and makes herself ready for him. The lover,
swelled with pride and happiness, decides to capture and eternalize that moment: “I found/A thing to do, and
all her hair/In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around/And strangled her.” He
justifies his murder by claiming that she felt no pain – “No pain felt she/I am quite sure she felt no pain” –
and that she now is happy – “Her head, which droops upon it still/The smiling rosy little head/ So glad it has
its utmost will.”
The dramatic monologue “The Bishop orders his Tomb” is another well accomplished work, notable both
for its command of voice and its sharp psychological portrait of the dying bishop. The bishop has obviously
broken almost every rule of conduct imposed by the Church on the clergy; yet he deludes himself that he has
earned the right to a magnificent tomb in a choice spot in the church. The bishop admits to his own vanity
quoting the Bible in the very first line of the poem: “Vanity, saith the preacher vanity”, yet it is the least of
his sins. He has fathered children out of wedlock: “Nephews – sons mine…ah, God, I know not!, covets
what others have: “Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;/ Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner
South/He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!”
The bishop has rejected the scriptural teachings of God and instead embraces his own notion or Paradise, He
notes how a magnificent tomb will equate him with “the airy dome where live/The angels.”
As he continues to describe the magnificence of his tomb, he notices that his sons are whispering to each
other and comes to realization that they are plotting against him by replacing his precious Lapis Lazuli with
ordinary travertine. He pleads them to at least decorate his tomb in jasper and choose an epitaph worthy of
his legacy. He tries to evoke their conscience by saying that, “A ye hope/To revel down my villas while I
grasp/Bricked over with beggars mouldy travertine/Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at”
When he realizes that his sons will work dishonourably against him, he falls to accusing them of ingratitude
He resorts to threats as the monologue concludes: “All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope/My villas!”
E. T. Young observes: “The poem is penetrating study of soul dissection and the emotions which welter in
the bishop’s mind.”
Browning expanded the idea of multiple perspectives by writing poems that work together such as 'Andrea
del Sarto' and 'Fra Lippo Lippi'. These poems demonstrate how different people respond differently to
similar situations. Andrea del Sarto" is unique in Browning's dramatic monologue in that it has incredibly
melancholic tone and pessimistic view of art. Andrea tells his wife Lucrezia, that though many praise him
for creating flawless paintings, he is aware that his work lacks the spirit and soul that bless his
contemporaries Rafael and Michelangelo. Considering himself only a "craftsman", he knows they are able to
glimpse heaven whereas he is stuck with earthly inspirations. "Fra Lippo Lippi”, on the other hand,
contemplates on the purpose of art and the responsibility of the artist. Probably the most resonant theme in
the poem is Lippo's dialectic on the purpose of art. Basically, his dilemma comes down to two competing
philosophies: where he wants to paint life as it is, thereby revealing its wondrous complexity, his superiors
want him to paint life through a moral lens, to use his painting as an inspirational tool.
Another beautiful illustration of interior monologue is the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”, in which a
splenetic monk grumbles against his fellow monk. It begins with the speaker trying to articulate the sounds
of his “heart’s abhorrence” for a fellow friar. Presenting himself as the model of righteousness, the speaker
condemns Friar Lawrence for his immorality; but we soon recognize that the faults he assigns to Lawrence
are in fact his own. Perhaps most importantly, the speaker describes a bargain he would make with Satan to
hurt Lawrence, which reveals the malevolence and hypocrisy on his part.
On the whole, it can be safely said that Browning uses his dramatic monologue in the most peculiar and
exemplary fashion to yield an unfamiliar and unheard of art product that was to glorify his legacy for
generations to come.