The speaker of Browning’s poem is a historical figure named Alfonso II, a sixteenth-century duke of the Italian city of Ferrara. Like the historical personage, our speaker is a wealthy patron of the arts who’s eager to show off his status and power. He does so by giving a tour of his palace to a visiting emissary, stopping to show him particularly valuable works in his personal collection: a portrait of his late wife painted by Fra Pandolf, and a statue of Neptune cast in bronze by Claus of Innsbruck. The Duke boasts about the artists as a way to demonstrate how well connected he is. Yet both pieces also reveal his unspoken obsession with control. While discussing the portrait of his “last Duchess,” the Duke discloses, in so many words, that his late wife was excessively flirtatious and that he orchestrated her death. The portrait that now hangs on the wall shows the Duchess “as if she were alive” (line 2), thus effectively containing and imprisoning her in the Duke’s private gallery. Likewise, the statue of Neptune depicts the Roman sea god taming a seahorse, which offers another powerful image of the Duke’s desire for control.

Over the course of the Duke’s monologue, it becomes increasingly clear just how unreliable he is as a narrator. Consider the moments in the poem when he gestures to his apparent lack of rhetorical ability. In lines 21–23, for instance, he briefly stumbles as he tries to describe his wife to the emissary:

                               She had
     A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
     Too easily impressed

Then again, in lines 35–43, he explicitly claims to lack “skill / In speech”:

                    Even had you skill
     In speech—which I have not—to make your will
     Quite clear to such an one . . .
     E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
     Never to stoop.

In both cases, however, the speaker’s gestures to rhetorical incapacity are performative and hence made in bad faith. Given the sensuous quality of his language, which is characterized by constant use of assonance and consonance, it’s clear that the Duke is a gifted rhetorician. But more important than these bad-faith claims is the speaker’s unreliable account of his late wife’s apparent flirtatiousness. The Duke’s description of the Duchess’s demeanor grows increasingly obsessive, and his ravings imply that his wife’s supposed transgressions likely took place in his own mind. The Duke is clearly a jealous type, and even though he had her killed, his jealousy hasn’t diminished. Ironically, then, although the Duke believes he’s in perfect control as he heads into a new marriage, he’s still in the thrall of his “last Duchess.”

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