Browning's highly individualized style and his usage of dramatic monologue fascinate modern

scholars as much as these elements troubled his early critics. John Woolford and Daniel Karlin
demonstrate that in using the dramatic monologue format, Browning was primarily interested in
the creation and development of dramatic speakers and dramatic situations. The two critics also
analyze Browning's style, finding that his poetry, in its focus on the speaker, insists on being read
aloud.

Woolford and Karlin further argue that Browning develops two distinct voices in his poetry,
voices Browning himself described as "saying" and "singing" voices and which the critics
contend result from the influence of the Romantics on Browning's work. In a separate essay,
Daniel Karlin examines Browning's use of binary oppositions, finding that "every Browning
poem is oppositional in nature." Karlin studies in particular the opposition between love and
hate, maintaining that Browning explores hate not simply as the opposite of love, but as a force
with its own purpose, a force which can lead to love as well as self-realization.

As a chronicler of "the incidents in the development of a soul," Robert Browning often allowed a
speaker's own words to reveal, and condemn, his or her own behavior. The Duke's monologue in
"My Last Duchess" unveils his persona as courteous, cultured, and terrifying, as he describes a
portrait of his late wife in stark detail

Robert Browning’s poem “My last Duchess'; is spoken from the perspective of the Duke and
conveys the Dukes personality through the literary form of a dramatic monologue. It involves a
fictional account of the Duke addressing an envoy from the Count to talk of details for the
hopeful marriage to the Count’s daughter. The subtitle of this monologue is “Ferrara,'; which
suggests an historical reference to Alfonso II, the fifth Duke of Ferrara in Italy in the mid-
sixteenth century. The objective of the Duke is to attempt to sway the envoy’s opinion of himself
to obtain the maximum dowry possible in pursuit of this marriage.