ROBERT BROWNING 1812-1889

ROBERT BROWNING 1812-l889

LIFE AND WORKS: he was a son of a scholarly bank clerk whoso huge library offered him wide and varied reading. He started writing poetry quite early and then turned to drama. Not much success. From the two he developed the dramatic monologue.

The most crucial event in his life was his secret marriage in 1846 with the poetess Elisabeth barret. They settled eventually in Florence and had a son. After her death  browning returned to London where he became well-known and much admire public ure. He continued to travel abroad and died in Venice.

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: this poetic form, which he perfected and popularized, presents a fragment of an action ( story) through the voice and from the point of view of a character involved in that action. Its features include:

a first- person speaker who is a character separated from the poet

a listener who don't speak but who affects the development os the monologue: his presence is to be inferred from clues in the speaker's monologue

a specific time and place

revelation about something about the dramatic speaker's life

colloquial and spontaneous speech

tone determined by the speaker's character and by the nature of the story

MY LAST DUCHESS: the situation concerns the prospective marriage of the duke of este and the daughter of a count. The duke reveals his character vividly as he narrates the fate of his last duchess: he's proud , possessive and class-conscious.

The characters in Browning's monologues are both historically and psychologically particularized and the essence of a period is often successfully captured. The duke of ferrara is a clearly renaissance character with his worldliness, pride, love of art and luxury.

The Italian renaissance was a period that fascinated B. he avoided commonplace and contemporary subject-matter, preferring to reveal or recreate individuals against historical or exotic background.

ANTI-ROMANTIC REACTIO: in his dramatic monologues he showed signs of reaction against the inwards-looking tendency of romantic poetry. His characters are set firmly apart from the poet and speak with the colloquial vigour of their own individuality like characters in a novel. Under the influence of Victorian development in the biological and physical sciences he felt that the human personality was best identified through detailed description of individual psychology. The physical and social environment and language. His interests lay in the exploration of the psychology of the individual and was much influenced by the new concept of the personality as a multiplicity of selves rather than a single coherent self

LANGUAGE: several characteristics of spoken language: direct address, contacted forms, pauses, fillers, disjointed syntax of everyday conversation.