Robert Browning

Who Let The Speaker Convict Himself · Poet · 1812–1889

The master of the dramatic monologue, who put a poem in a speaker's mouth and let him convict himself of a crime he never admits to.

Who was Browning?

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell in 1812 and educated mainly out of his father's library of six thousand books. His early long poem Sordello (1840) was so obscure that it damaged his reputation for twenty years, and the lesson he drew from it made him: stop speaking in your own voice, put the poem in a character's mouth, and let the situation supply what the poet would otherwise have to explain. In 1842, in Dramatic Lyrics, he published My Last Duchess — fifty-six lines in which a Duke of Ferrara shows an envoy the portrait of his dead wife and, while complaining about her manners, reveals that he had her killed. He never says so. He does not need to. The poem is in rhyming couplets whose rhymes Browning deliberately buried in the run of the speech so that a reader barely notices them, and its epigraph is a single word: 'Ferrara'. Behind it stands Alfonso II d'Este, whose first wife Lucrezia de' Medici died at seventeen amid rumours of poison and who then opened negotiations for a second marriage. In 1846 Browning married the poet Elizabeth Barrett in secret and took her to Italy against her father's will; they lived at Casa Guidi in Florence until her death in 1861. For most of their marriage she was the famous one. His own reputation arrived late, with The Ring and the Book (1868–69), a murder story told twelve times by twelve speakers, each of them certain.

Major achievements

• Perfected the dramatic monologue as an English poetic form
• Wrote My Last Duchess, published in Dramatic Lyrics in 1842
• The Ring and the Book — one murder, told by twelve different speakers
• Men and Women (1855), including Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto
• Made the reader, rather than the poet, responsible for judging the speaker

Life in brief

• 1812 — Born in Camberwell: Educated largely from his father's library of six thousand books.
• 1840 — Sordello: A public failure so complete it shaped everything he wrote afterwards.
• 1842 — My Last Duchess: Published in Dramatic Lyrics, under the epigraph 'Ferrara'.
• 1846 — Marries Elizabeth Barrett: In secret, and they leave for Italy against her father's will.
• 1855 — Men and Women: The monologues of the Italian painters; still not a popular success.
• 1861 — Elizabeth dies: At Casa Guidi in Florence; he returns to London with their son.
• 1868 — The Ring and the Book: One murder told twelve times, and the arrival of his reputation.
• 1889 — Dies in Venice: Buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Explore the life of Browning — five chapters

1. The Boy in His Father's Library — An education with no school in it
2. The Disaster of Sordello — A failure so complete it became a method
3. Ferrara — Fifty-six lines in which a man gives himself away
4. Casa Guidi — Fifteen years married to the more famous poet
5. One Murder, Told Twelve Times — The reputation arrives at fifty-six

Read the five-chapter life of Robert Browning →

Debate Browning in the Agora

Reading is the start. On Incandio an idea counts as mastered only once you have argued it against the person with the strongest claim on it, in structured rounds marked against published descriptors.

• That's My Last Duchess — “The Duke's monologue exposes him against his will — the poem's method is his own loss of control.”

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