Medieval and Renaissance European Settings
Browning set many of his poems in medieval and Renaissance
Europe, most often in Italy. He drew on his extensive knowledge
of art, architecture, and history to fictionalize actual events,
including a seventeenth-century murder in The Ring and the
Book, and to channel the voices of actual historical figures,
including a biblical scholar in medieval Spain in “Rabbi Ben Ezra”
(1864) and the Renaissance painter in the
eponymous “Andrea del Sarto.” The remoteness of the time period
and location allowed Browning to critique and explore contemporary
issues without fear of alienating his readers. Directly invoking
contemporary issues might seem didactic and moralizing in a way
that poems set in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries
would not. For instance, the speaker of “The Bishop Orders His Tomb
at Saint Praxed’s Church” is an Italian bishop during the late Renaissance.
Through the speaker’s pompous, vain musings about monuments, Browning
indirectly criticizes organized religion, including the Church of
England, which was in a state of disarray at the time of the poem’s
composition in the mid-nineteenth century.
Psychological Portraits
Dramatic monologues feature a solitary speaker addressing
at least one silent, usually unnamed person, and they provide interesting
snapshots of the speakers and their personalities. Unlike soliloquies,
in dramatic monologues the characters are always speaking directly
to listeners. Browning’s characters are usually crafty, intelligent,
argumentative, and capable of lying. Indeed, they often leave out
more of a story than they actually tell. In order to fully understand
the speakers and their psychologies, readers must carefully pay
attention to word choice, to logical progression, and to the use
of figures of speech, including any metaphors or
analogies. For instance, the speaker of “My Last Duchess” essentially
confesses to murdering his wife, even though he never expresses
his guilt outright. Similarly, the speaker of “Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister” inadvertently betrays his madness by confusing
Latin prayers and by expressing his hate for a fellow friar with
such vituperation and passion. Rather than state the speaker’s madness,
Browning conveys it through both what the speaker says and how the
speaker speaks.
Grotesque Images
Unlike other Victorian poets, Browning filled his poetry
with images of ugliness, violence, and the bizarre. His contemporaries,
such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in contrast,
mined the natural world for lovely images of beauty. Browning’s
use of the grotesque links him to novelist Charles Dickens, who
filled his fiction with people from all strata of society, including
the aristocracy and the very poor. Like Dickens, Browning created
characters who were capable of great evil. The early poem “Porphyria’s
Lover” (1836) begins with the lover describing
the arrival of Porphyria, then it quickly descends into a depiction
of her murder at his hands. To make the image even more grotesque,
the speaker strangles Porphyria with her own blond hair. Although
“Fra Lippo Lippi” takes place during the Renaissance in Florence,
at the height of its wealth and power, Browning sets the poem in
a back alley beside a brothel, not in a palace or a garden. Browning
was instrumental in helping readers and writers understand that
poetry as an art form could handle subjects both lofty, such as
religious splendor and idealized passion, and base, such as murder, hatred,
and madness, subjects that had previously only been explored in
novels.
