ABSTRACT

POETRY AS REVISION: A READING OF ROBERT BROWNING’S THE RING AND THE BOOK

While it is a basic truism that the meaning of a text is largely dependent on

its historical context, models of interpretation that all too readily assume the stasis

of the past and which fail to relativize the present in their will to hermeneutic truth

fall short of accounting for the complexity of our engagement with the past as it is

mediated through various modes of literary representation. A critical tool is

needed in order to rethink our relationship with the past as it is mediated through

literature. The dramatic monologues of Robert Browning offer one way to re-

conceptualize history as a category in our attempt to make meaning out of

complex, self-conscious artifacts. More than anything, his reproach of the abstract

lyrical subject that dominates the Greater Romantic Lyric characterizes the

dramatic monologue as a critical tool that forces us to question, and ultimately

reject, the notion that history excludes craftsmanship. Rather than reinforce a

reductive view of the past, Browning’s experiments with the dramatic monologue

encourage us to reflect on the very preconditions of historicism: our “felt

historicity,” or being in time. The Ring and the Book manifests Browning’s final

attempt to synthesize the dramatic monologue with a long narrative poem that

takes history as its subject. Through the dramatic monologue, Browning attempts

to exorcise vestiges of Romanticism, which threaten to reduce the autonomy of the

reader to a function of the author’s sincerity. By countering inherited beliefs in the

integrity of the lyric persona, he offers a radical revision of history.

Patrick Willey May 2016

POETRY AS REVISION: A READING OF ROBERT

BROWNING’S THE RING AND THE BOOK

by

Patrick Willey

A thesis

submitted in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in English

in the College of Arts and Humanities

California State University, Fresno

May 2016

APPROVED

For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree. Patrick Willey

Thesis Author

Ruth Jenkins (Chair) English

John Beynon English

Laurel Hendrix English

For the University Graduate Committee:

Dean, Division of Graduate Studies

AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION

OF MASTER’S THESIS

X I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in

its entirety without further authorization from me, on the

condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction

absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of

authorship.

Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must

be obtained from me.

Signature of thesis author:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have never been asked to write a thesis before, and I certainly could not

have asked for a better guide through the process than Professor Ruth Jenkins.

This began as a paper I wrote for her seminar on Victorian Poetry. Incredibly, after

a year and a half of layover, much of which was spent vacillating over a topic for

this thesis, this thesis looks like an unraveling of the thinking that took place in

that seminar, as if, unbeknownst to me, it was unfolding during all that time. It’s

hard to say when this thesis began.

In that seminar there were numerous others there that influenced the

direction of this thesis. The revision process could not have been the same without

the guidance of my committee, and I want to thank Professor Laurel Hendrix,

Professor John Beynon, and everyone else on the committee for their guidance.

Things that were taken from all their seminars surely made their way into this

thesis. Numerous others from all their seminars certainly influenced the direction

of this thesis. Finally, I couldn’t have done it without the library and the helpful

staff of the library, which had been my second home during all that time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER 1: HISTORY AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE ...................... 1

Lyric, Dramatic, Elegiac, Apocalyptic .............................................................. 4

CHAPTER 2: LIMITS OF AUTHORITY: LYRIC AND DRAMATIC

ROLES IN THE RING AND THE BOOK ................................................... 16

Romanticism and Empiricism ......................................................................... 23

The Lyric and the Dramatic ............................................................................ 28

The Limits of Authority .................................................................................. 42

CHAPTER 3: HISTORY, ELEGY, AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

IN THE RING AND THE BOOK ................................................................ 48

CHAPTER 4: HISTORY AND APOCALYPSE: THE QUESTION OF

ENDING IN THE RING AND THE BOOK ................................................ 69

The Question of Ending .................................................................................. 71

Prospectivism and Revisionism ...................................................................... 75

The Polar Logic of (the Reading) Process ...................................................... 83

CHAPTER 5: BROWNING AND THE CITY ...................................................... 93

WORKS CITED ................................................................................................... 100

CHAPTER 1: HISTORY AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

The subject of this thesis is Robert Browning’s re-visionary poetics with

particular reference to his long poem, The Ring and the Book. The primary

concern of the proceeding chapters will be to show how legible revision, that is,

the palimpsest of overlapping interpretation that constitutes the form of The Ring

and the Book offers an antidote to a nineteenth century historical imagination

which tended to polarize present and past, in the interests of imperial, ideological,

and economic expansion. The sense that an actual abyss punctuated the past and

gave way to the present led Browning’s contemporaries to conceive their historical

moment as an age of transition and refer to the past as an essence that legitimized

their vision of the coming millennium. This revision of the past relied on ignoring,

or simply omitting, layer upon layer of previous interpretation, a process of

omission, which abstracted the subject from a proximate historical situation and

excluded the present from the charmed ring of historical time. What distinguishes

Browning’s approach to historical revision is that it is historically situated and

embedded in a recursive, self-referential ring of interpretations. The Ring and the

Book revises itself, preserves all its past moments in the form of separate

monologues, and its conclusion returns us to its beginning. The ring of legible

revision, which extends and encompasses the entire gamut of The Ring and the

Book, resists the desire for apocalyptic renewal that reaches a fever pitch in Books

X and XI. This aspect of Browning’s revisionary poetics implies an attitude

toward history, heterodox for his time, which views the past and present as co-

constructors. The form of the long poem and the technical accomplishment of the

dramatic monologue create a fitting stage for a revisionary attitude toward history,

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which distinguishes Browning’s poetic achievement from that of his predecessors,

the Romantics.

This takes us to the second domain in which Browning can truly be said to

be revisionary, and that is in respect to his Romantic forbears, specifically to their

conception of the poet as a visionary. The word “vision” in the abstract singular

has specific connotations with the future: a “visionary” leads the way forward,

toward the future or the frontier, or intends to do so, whether he fails or succeeds.

The conflict between the failures of history and the compensating vision that

Romantic poets attempted to represent in their version of the long poem forms the

terminus for Browning’s revision of their legacy. Rather than turn inward from the

failed dream of the collective to the private consolations of the personal vision,

Browning attempts to wrest a vision of the present from the past. The past for

Browning no longer offers a backdrop for personal woe as it did for Wordsworth;

rather it forms the ground for the otherness and contingency of our present, less a

source of legitimacy for a compensatory vision of the future than it is an

illumination of the disorder of the present. By rejecting the vision offered by the

Romantics, Browning’s re-visionary poetics offers a different interpretation of the

poet’s social role: the poet no longer redeems the past by being an exemplary

individual; he is an empty vacuity who redeems the present by bringing a piece of

its past to life. This way of revising the Romantic legacy presents inevitable

challenges not only for Browning’s self-justification, but also for his justification

and re-articulation of the social function of poetry.

Browning’s revisionary poetics contains a third sense: self-revision. The

Ring and the Book represents a continuation of Browning’s attempt to write a long

poem that could offer an alternative to the Romantic formulas. The resumption of

his effort to forge a new form for the long poem follows from a 28-year hiatus in

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which Browning turned from Sordello (1840), an initial effort to trace the outlines

in the development of the poet’s soul in a dense contextual web of historical detail,

to his experimentations with the dramatic monologue. The Ring and the Book is

situated alongside Browning’s historical monologues in an extensive project of

self-revision, carried over from his initial efforts to discover a form that coincided

with his attempt to supplant the Romantic precedence of the visionary poet. Carol

T. Christ offers a strong interpretation of the implications of this instance of self-

revision in her book Victorian and Modern Poetics. There she argues that the

dramatic monologue allows Browning to free himself from the historical

limitations of his own perspective (113). While I agree with Christ in viewing the

dramatic monologue as a solution to some of the formal problems the narrator

grapples with in Sordello, I argue that the form of The Ring and the Book rejects

the kind of historical blindness Christ attributes to it. That poem’s protagonist,

Sordello, a thirteeth-century troubadour who Dante featured in his Purgatorio and

who Browning appropriates, was the only perspective other than the narrator’s

available to the reader. As a form Sordello is not as fragmented or recursive in its

development as The Ring and the Book, a poem that includes ten speakers and

which has no overarching narrator. The Ring and the Book does not have a

protagonist and examines a historical murder-case through a sequence of dramatic

monologues. Through the dramatic monologue, its development becomes more

recursive, more amenable to the demands of its author’s revisionary outlook.

Browning’s introduction of the dramatic monologue allows him to extend his

critique of nineteenth-century historicism. The accumulation of the monologues as

revisions of one another disrupts the notion that the past is a static object,

definable once and for all, while, at a more local level, the device of the dramatic

speaker forces the reader to interrogate the desire to transcend the present, and

4 4

makes us increasingly aware of the historical limitations of our perspective. As a

revision of the past, of poetic tradition, and of itself, The Ring and the Book

embodies a revisionary poetics that continues to be revised. A full account of all

this remains to be written.

Lyric, Dramatic, Elegiac, Apocalyptic

No longer do we know very well who loans his voice and his tone to the

other in the Apocalypse; no longer do we know very well who addresses

what to whom. But by a catastrophic overturning here more necessary than

ever, we can as well think this: as soon as we no longer know very well

who speaks or who writes, the text becomes apocalyptic. And if the

dispatches [envois] always refer to other dispatches without decidable

destination, the destination remaining to come, then isn’t this completely

angelic structure, that of the Johannine Apocalypse, isn’t it also the

structure of every scene of writing in general? (Derrida 87)

According to the elegiac view of language, loss is the foundational moment

of all discourse; in Derrida’s account of the apocalyptic, it is a future to be gained

which grounds the possibility, the “transcendental condition,” of all signification.

Derrida’s definition shifts our attention from the figurative content of the

apocalyptic as a depiction of the end of the world, toward of the formal conditions

that make the apocalyptic as a scene of unveiling possible. Historically, the

dramatic monologue has been the apocalyptic genre par excellence, at least, that

is, in the Derridean sense; its built-in references to an internal situation that

precedes and inaugurates the scene of inscription leads voices to proliferate until,

as Derrida elaborates in the epigraph, we no longer “know very well who

addresses what to whom.” The proliferation of addresses and possible addressees,

which for Derrida designates the apocalyptic text, is not an essence that we

customarily associate with the apocalyptic mode. Yeats’s “Second Coming” offers

a paradigmatic example of a conventionally apocalyptic poem. The speaker of

5 5

“The Second Coming” has no particular addressee, his message is addressed to no

one and therefore everyone. The universality of the addressee instills the voice

with a hypnotic power to captivate us; we find it increasingly difficult to turn away

from this voice, or confuse it with another. But precisely where this poem’s

speaker succeeds in universalizing his addressee and even momentarily possesses

his audience he fails to realize the apocalypticsm Derrida attributes to the

apocalyptic. The same movement typifies the classical elegy where the poet

mediates between the dead and the living, just as in the apocalyptic he mediates

between the present and the past. The dramatic monologue probes the conditions

whereby the elegiac and apocalyptic become codified in a generic typology. By

reflecting on the strategies speakers enlist in their attempts to circumvent history

and identity, Browning’s dramatic monologues reflect on their own capacity to

captivate us.

One of the premises of my reading of The Ring and the Book is that the

dramatic monologue as a subgenre of the lyric is uniquely situated to call into

question the kind of transaction that takes place between the speaker and the

audience in discursive practices that attempt to accommodate crucial absences, the

absence of the dead in the case of the elegy, or of the past in the case of the

apocalyptic. The development of the dramatic monologue as a durable form

represents one of the key poetic contributions of the Victorians. In principle, the

form that the Victorians developed was opposed to New Critical values of unity

and coherence—identities in the dramatic monologue are unstable, voices are

multiplied, and destinations are re-routed and decentralized. There is a

concomitant move away from a romantic commitment toward sincere expression

to a consciously performative poetic. In the dramatic monologue, the high-

mindedness of the greater Romantic lyric is exposed to the bathos of self-parody

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and the rigid attitude of burlesque is mingled with philosophical rumination. At

the same time, there is considerable overlap between the Victorians’ formal

experimentations and the high-modernist critique of lyrical subjectivism, a

continuity which is usually implicit, but which can be detected in the way Eliot

and Pound echo the scientific metaphors and chemical analogies by which the

poet-speaker of The Ring and the Book characterizes his poetic method in their

efforts to mount a revaluation of poetic technique in the first quarter of the 20th

century. The dramatic monologue is part of a sustained, and ever renewed

critique, of the authority of the omniscient lyrical subject who, by addressing

everyone and no one, evades the problem of history.

That is not to say that lyric subjects do not have histories, only that when

we read a typical lyric poem, we are not encouraged to be aware of our historicity,

or the constitutive effect history has on our perception of the poem. A generic

correlative of the dramatic monologue, its next of kin in terms of historical

development, is the historical novel, and one of the attractions of the dramatic

monologue is the inexhaustible appeal of the past, not only in its ability to define

the present but also in its capacity to foreground and set the terms of its otherness.

The Ring and the Book magnifies the scale in which the dramatic monologue

conducts its inquiries into the impulse to attribute meaning to our present out of

our relationship with the past. In the process it connects us to many different

presents. According to Christ, the long poem is one of the key forms connecting

Victorian and Modernist poetics. The Ring and the Book in particular, offers a

crucial link to the Modernist project of reconciling historical particulars with

mythic structure; its fragmentation into dramatic monologues respects the integrity

of “particular angles of vision” and creates a “pluralism of form” at the same time

as it allows an underlying order to emerge that appears objective (115). In Christ’s

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view, this synthesis provides a precedent for the Modernists in their approach to

the past. Through a pluralism of form, they present the very chaos they attempt to

transcend through a mythic structure. The modernist project of ordering the chaos

of the present has its beginnings in the Victorian long poem.

My project is a structured attempt to show how the pluralism, hybridity,

and heterodoxy of The Ring and the Book disperses authority in such staple

manifestations of the lyric as the elegiac and the apocalyptic, actively questioning

the notion of subjective sincerity as the touchstone of poetic truth. This attempt

gains additional relevance when placed in the context of a post-romanticism at

odds with the subjectivism of its origins. The Ring and the Book is part of a long

line of attempts to make authority a feature of the poem rather than of the poet.

Rather than view this attempt to shift responsibility for the meaning of the poem to

a reader as an inherent failure of the contradiction between an objective

historicism and a de-historicizing subjectivism, we need to turn our attention to the

dramatic monologue and the way this formal device subverts the notion of a stable

historical perspective. In order to do so, we need to suspend, for a moment, the

habit of adopting a moral high ground in relation to the past, a high ground that

allows us to find comfort and security in notions of modernity, progress, and

evolution. We must question the abstract historicism of objectifying and sterilizing

the past, as if history’s only function were to convey a moral, or feed us

comforting illusions about the superiority and timelessness of our modernity, and

substitute what Herbert F. Tucker calls “the awareness of our own being in time,

our own felt historicity” (“Browning’s Historicism” 30). After all, not everyone

comes to these poems with the abstract, objectifying gaze of the Victorianist; they

speak volumes about the impulse to make meaning of a time-bound condition that

as beings we share. The final obstruction to the centrifugal pull of the dramatic

8 8

monologue, the last bastion of authoritative thinking, is the authoritarianism of the

present.

It is one of the ironies of literary history that we tend to project our own

historicizing habits onto the Victorians, presuming that they could never abdicate

the moral high ground of their historical moment. This may be true in cases where

the object is polemical, but in aesthetic matters, the Victorians are largely the

inheritors of Romantic nostalgia, and, in the case of the dramatic monologue, they

combat this nostalgia without necessarily privileging the perspective of their

historical moment, or succumbing to idealizing notions of historical progress. Old

ways of thinking about poetry inherited from the New Criticism continue to blind

us to the intricacies of the dramatic monologue, and this has implications for the

way we characterize its formal engagement with history. One of the common

assumptions about the Victorian dramatic monologue is that by substituting an

invented, historicized “I” for an authorial perspective, which continues to inhabit

the margins, the form de-historicizes its own perspective, facilitating the idea that

the present moment transcends history. For Christ, one of the defining features of

Browning’s monologues is the notion of an epistemological high ground, a kind of

historical version of dramatic irony. Browning’s characters lack “historical self-

consciousness,” they find themselves in moments they do not understand,

moments that impose a blindness on them which keeps them from understanding

the movement of history. At the same time “Browning’s structuring of the

poem…implies the very understanding his characters lack” (113-14). In other

words, the dramatic monologue privileges us with insight into an historical

meaning, a telos, that the speakers themselves lack. Adena Rosmarin echoes this

view in her comparison of the historical imagination of the Victorians and the

Modernists. Rosmarin argues that the dramatic monologue “depends for its effect

9 9

upon the split between the speaker’s meaning and the poem’s meaning”; it

“demand[s] we judge their speakers: they always return us to the present, which is

to say, to our Victorian selves: they always reaffirm the norms of the time in

which they were written” (13). Rosmarin goes on to show how the Modernists

divested themselves of this patronizing relationship with the past by developing

the mask poem, in which the speaker’s meaning and the poem’s meaning are the

same (13). Each of these critical stances, while similar in approach, widely vary in

their results, and implicitly replicate the New Criticism’s dismissal of authorial

intention as a valid criterion in the meaning of a poem. In particular, Rosmarin’s

formulation elides the role of both reader and author; we are supposed to merge

our historical perspective with that of the historical moment in which the poem

was written without questioning the historical limitations of the author’s

perspective or our own. Only by ignoring the intentional structure of the poem can

we get away with the kind of reading that ignores the historical limitations of the

author’s perspective in our attempt to make meaning of it. In the next chapter, I

am very attentive to this underlying intentional structure, and the role of the

historical author as it is elaborated in Books I and XII. One of the running

arguments of chapter 2 is that, by interpolating himself into the poem, Browning

points to the historical limitations of his own outlook and encourages us to

question the notion of an ahistorical perspective of the past.

The conception of the dramatic monologue put forth by Christ and

Rosmarin is also problematic for its reduction of the reader’s role, since the reader

of the dramatic monologue is understood to be the passive recipient of a truth

about the past, a truth she is privileged to know, in the same way that the reader of

a mystery solves the riddle before any of the characters. Like the mystery genre, or

detective fiction, the historical monologue creates a demand for a historical irony,

10 10

which forms part of a telos, visible to the reader, yet unknown to the speaker of the

monologue. This view of the reader’s role is connected to Robert Langbaum’s

notion of the centrality of sympathy and judgment in our experience of reading the

dramatic monologue; we sympathize with readers as long as we are capable of

passing judgment over them, a judgment which they themselves are not capable of

making. But, as Rosmarin points out, the distinction between sympathy and

judgment becomes harder to make (12). In order to judge someone, or something,

we often feel the need to sympathize with some aspect of it; we would not

deliberately seek to sympathize with it, unless it were also capable of being

judged. While Rosmarin aligns sympathy with the speaker with the lyric, I

understand both sympathy and judgment as part of a process associated with lyric

reading. As I argue in chapter 2, the poet-speaker is concerned with synthesizing

the lyric reader’s focus on sympathy and judgment, with a dramatic awareness of

more complex motives and the historical limitations that condition the reader’s

perspective. The device of the dramatic speaker is less of a precondition for our

judgment of the speaker, than it is of an interrogation and a confrontation with

what makes us want to escape from the limitations and contradictions of our

historical moment in the first place.

Browning’s poem “Cleon” provides Rosmarin with an example of a

dramatic monologue which leads abruptly from sympathy to judgment, ultimately

returning us to the Victorian era, where we are graced “with a superior historical

perspective and, by implication, with a superior moral perspective as well” (12).

“Cleon,” presents us with an epistolary monologue from a first century Greek

Renaissance man of sorts, Cleon the poet, painter, musician, and polymath in one,

11 11

addressing his colonizer, and liege-lord “Protus in his Tyranny” (line 4).1 Cleon’s

flattery of the Tyrant, his acceptance of Protus’ gift of a group of slaves, and his

rejection of Christianity and the apostle Paul, combine to create an unsympathetic

figure for us, whose values stem from a democratic, post-secular tradition. If our

reading remains on this superficial level, we will ultimately reject “Cleon” as the

unfortunate product of an outdated worldview, whether or not we can follow his

existential angst and begin to understand him “as he understands himself, from

within. . . as in all lyrics” (Rosmarin 12). But what drives the author of “Cleon” to

want to impersonate someone from the first century; what drives us to want to read

a Greek polymath’s response to a tyrant? Faced with the prospect of a modern

audience, Wordsworth courted the consoling outlook of “a pagan suckled in a

creed outworn” (Wordsworth 270); Keats sought “an age so sheltered from annoy

/ That I may never know how change the moons, / Or hear the busy sounds of

common sense” (Greenblatt 909). While the Romantics internalized the process of

retreat they prescribed to modern man, Browning’s historical monologues question

the very desire to understand the past, which leads us to attempt to impersonate

Wordsworth’s pagan. "Cleon" is in part, a dramatization of the Romantic attempt

to escape from a Judeo-Christian conception of time, and from the bad

consciousness that this conception of linear time engenders. Ironically, as badly as

the Romantics want to transcend the Christian notion of time, Cleon wants to

transcend the classical notion of time as cyclical. As we project our own desire

into the past, we find ourselves irrevocably estranged from the mind or

consciousness that we wish to inhabit. The innocence of the past, of the pagan who

1 Throughout this thesis, references to individual poems are from Robert Browning: The Poems,

ed. John Pettigrew (New York: Penguin, 1982). References to The Ring and the Book are to Robert

Browning: The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick (New York: Penguin, 1971).

12 12

watches Proteus rising from the sea, is something we project in order to escape

from the awful burden of moving on. But Cleon can only show us the inverse of

our desire. The poem recognizes this irony, by showing how unsympathetic Cleon

is to the historical actualization of the hypothetical doctrine of time he most

desires.

Rosmarin’s reading of “Cleon” is based on the assumption that character is

the expression of an author, rather than an outcome of the formal features of the

poem. Rather than foreground character as a “mask” for the author, the form of the

dramatic monologue encourages us to view the historicized situation the author

creates as a ground for the formation of character. The poem begins with Cleon’s

address to “Protus in his Tyranny,” but it does not introduce Cleon as if he were a

static object of the narrative. A number of choices arise as a consequence of this

insight, and perspectives scatter like rays of light reflected on the glossy surface of

a page: we can view this monologue from the perspective of a first century tyrant,

of Cleon in his patronage, or of a post-romantic or a post-modern consciousness;

each in their own way contributes to a complex rhetorical structure that cannot be

reduced to a thesis. In order to feel what its like to be obliged to address a tyrant

from the inside we must place ourselves under the sway of a literal tyranny

through an act of the imagination. Our ability to understand “Cleon” does not

hinge on our capacity to sympathize with him and pass judgment on history; rather

it depends on our capacity to surpass the threshold of our historical moment by

exercising the faculty of the historical imagination.

By focusing solely on aspects of the reading process that activate sympathy

and judgment we lose sight of the limitations of our perspective and the necessary

negotiation between irreducible angles of vision that constitutes the historical

sense, and fall victim to a presentism that reduces all history to an endlessly self-

13 13

fulfilling prophecy. This tendency leads Joseph Bristow to conclude that “Cleon”

is a failed prophet who “speaks on behalf of a Protestant belief in God. . . although

he remains without the privilege to comprehend the full implications of what he is

saying” (112-13). This identification of authorial intention with the views of the

dramatic speaker is too narrow, and it leads us to view each of Browning’s

monologists as a fictional prefiguration of Robert Browning. At this point critics

usually cite Browning’s belief in historical progress, and his idealization of failure;

nevertheless, the idea that every “Cleon” is a failed prophet prefiguring the “fail

better” of Robert Browning makes identifying the secret meaning that the speaker

utters but cannot comprehend the telos of the reading process. For Bristow,

Cleon’s tragic failure is that “by virtue of his historical position, [he] is unable to

progress to the critical point of knowledge marked by the advent of Christianity”

(112). What this view of the poem ignores is that the monologue supports more

complex forms of reader-engagement. We cannot fault “Cleon” for using the past

to confirm our values or the transcendence of the historical moment they grow out

of, especially when we are the ones projecting that desire on the reading process.

“Cleon” is about the desire to transcend our own historical limitations, but not in a

way that leaves them unaccounted for.

While there is a tendency to read The Ring and the Book either as a

collection of separate works that can be enjoyed in isolation, or as a novel-in

verse, it’s important to view it as a long poem.2 Only as a long poem can we grasp

2 See Hawlin, who argues that it is “not necessary to read it all to get a sense of how it works” and

that reading the poem as a novel-in-verse will yield much more to the reader (191, 200). I recognize

Hawlin’s effort to make the poem more accessible to readers, but I am obviously opposed to this kind of

reading, for the reasons cited below. It certainly does not hurt to use the novel as a context for the poem. In

her reading of the poem as a “verse novel,” Dino Felluga does just that; the problem is that she is not as

attentive to the rhetorical features of the dramatic monologue as other readers have been. Bakhtin’s notion

of dialogism may be more aptly applied to the dramatic monologue than to anything identifiably

“novelistic.” For more on the distinction between dialogism and the novel, see Blalock.

14 14

the full implications of its inclusion of dramatic techniques, techniques that pull

apart the lyric seams, and expose assertions of atemporal authority to the

contending claims of history; it is The Ring and the Book’s engagement with

particular discursive practices which rely on a representative ego, an ego that tends

to elude the identities that history inflicts on its subjects and that manages to be

nowhere and everywhere, to address no one and everyone. The poem is much

more about speakers’ attempts to appropriate authority, whether it comes in the

form of a timeless lyric subjectivity, a deceased “author” haunting the margins of

the text, or history itself. For this reason, my reading of the poem is thematic,

rather than chronological. I do not offer a complete exegesis of the poem, but an

exploration of the dialogical techniques of the dramatic monologue in relation to

three different modes that typically rely on an abstract, monologic entity to

authorize its claims: the lyric, the elegiac, and the apocalyptic. In chapter 2, I read

Books I and XII in the context of the nineteenth-century distinction between the

lyric and the dramatic, and I examine the historical difficulties that beset

Browning’s attempt to transcend this categorical opposition as he attempts to re-

define his poetic role and model the synthesis of lyric and dramatic reading that

the formal innovations of his long poem requires in order to be deciphered. My

focus in chapter 3 is on the dramatic monologue’s engagement with the politics of

the elegiac mode, as it foregrounds contesting ways in which the dead are

appropriated and exploited as speakers seek to convert death into a source of

authority. In chapter 4 I turn my attention the eschatological import of Books X

and XI and the way the poem’s recursive design disrupts an apocalyptic vision of

history by questioning the presentism and prospectivism that underlie nineteenth-

century theories of history. Finally, in chapter 5, I return to the theme of the

apocalyptic, this time through the image of the city, which I view both as a

15 15

metaphor and as a formal correlative of Browning’s long poem. The project as a

whole traces an arc, demonstrating how conventional lyrical modes are subjected

to revision and incorporated as an extension of the post-romantic attempt to make

authority a function of the process of negotiating between discrete, historically

limited angles of vision rather than of an informing mind.

CHAPTER 2: LIMITS OF AUTHORITY: LYRIC AND DRAMATIC ROLES IN THE RING AND THE BOOK

“I incline to think my nature is too undramatic, and I want all poetry to be

direct utterance of some congenial feeling—this is too narrow”

Julia Wedgwood, letter to Robert Browning, February 21, 1869.

Julia Wedgwood’s discerning eye for the “dramatic improprieties” of The

Ring and the Book was characteristic of many of Browning’s readers. Ever since

the publication of Men and Women, Browning’s reputation was based largely on

his ability to conjure up vivid personalities from the past, men and women viewed

as personifications of a place or an age, and present them in the form of “so many

utterances of so many imaginary persons not mine” to the scrutinizing eye of the

British public. Browning was hampered by the constraints his reputation as a

dramatic poet entailed, as his correspondence with Julia Wedgwood on the issue

of The Ring and the Book’s “strange mixture” of the “strongly and incompletely

dramatic” illustrates (Curle 157). Here Browning is seen to “lead us through [his]

picture gallery and [his] stable yard at exactly the same pace, which impartiality is,

I suppose, the test of the dramatic, as distinguished from mere lyric, feeling”

(Curle 157). But Wedgwood faults Browning for not extending that impartiality

fully enough. Browning’s intellectual sympathy overflows the dramatic channel of

the monologues and is scattered about indiscriminately in the speeches of the

supposedly admirable and in those of those we are supposed to revile. As

Wedgwood remarks, “It is your lending so much of yourself to your contemptible

characters makes me so hate them” (Curle 159). In her criticism of the “strange

mixture” of the “strongly and incompletely dramatic,” Julia Wedgwood seems to

be calling Browning’s attention to the moral perils of simultaneously withholding

17 17

judgment of his characters and portraying them all on the same intellectual level as

their creator. Perhaps, Wedgwood hates them even more because she finds them

seductively refined and well mannered despite their moral culpability.

The way the “dramatic” role plays out for Browning is very similar to the

way the blot of predetermined guilt plays out for Guido in The Ring and the Book.

The role of dramatic poet places Browning in a bind, for, as Wedgwood explains,

he is required to be the poet in absentia, he must exercise his moral authority over

his creatures while maintaining the illusion of presenting them as they are, in their

unique individuality, without any admixture of his own thoughts and

preoccupations. Failing to do either of these things, or both, as the author of The

Ring and the Book does, the poet runs the risk of seeming too partial, or of making

his portrayal of evil too sympathetic. The “dramatic” role pushes the poet into the

margins of his own text, and when the dramatic mask is raised to the level of our

awareness, the effect of the “incompletely dramatic” is that it seems to be

expressing one side of the poet, while leaving the other side in a pristine state. It’s

no surprise then that the poet feels exasperated when Wedgwood imputes all the

poem’s “ugliness” to its author, and all the poem’s goodness to whatever seems

“copied from a model” (Curle 162). Browning repeatedly defends himself and his

poem against these charges on the grounds that both the goodness and the ugliness

have their basis in the truth of the trial documents upon which the poem is based.

The plot of The Ring and the Book takes place after a triple homicide in 17th

century Rome. A trial ensues, and Guido, the offending party in the murder, is

found guilty and sentenced to death. However, he appeals to the pope and awaits

the outcome of the pope’s decision in a jail cell. The last monologue takes place

on the eve of his execution. The plot is implied by a series of monologues and the

events that shape them are alluded to but never told. That’s because the plot is

18 18

shown; there isn’t a narrator interpreting the action. The monologues that compose

the plot are bookended by the poet-speaker’s discovery of the Old Yellow Book,

the title he gives to the bound volume of court documents used in Guido’s trial, the

event which fills the middle portion of the plot. In the first and last monologues

the author, Robert Browning, speaks in propria persona, offering both a synopsis

of the Old Yellow Book and a defense of his poem.

The monologues are presented from the point of view of nine different

characters. After Browning’s poetic persona speaks in Book I, Half-Rome, The

Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid offer representative views of the murder.

These monologues tell the story of Pompilia and her parents from beginning to

end and, while the speakers perform much of the meaning in an attempt to

persuade their interlocutors, this portion of The Ring and the Book is primarily

concerned with interpretation and narration. It’s difficult to find something the

speakers of these books agree on. At some point Pompilia is adopted by Pietro and

Violante, though in some versions she is Violante’s daughter by birth. Eventually,

she marries Guido, either for social advancement, or out of her mother’s sense of

shame at having fooled Pietro into believing she is her child. In either case,

Pompilia is unhappy with Guido in Arezzo. After finding Guido penniless, her

parents move back to Rome. She nearly despairs after a number of failed attempts

to win her freedom, but she finds a rescuer in the priest Caponsacchi. On her

return to her parent’s home in Rome she has a child. Whether the child is

Caponsacchi’s or Guido’s is disputed. In the final monologue, the poet-speaker

leaves off, unable to trace Pompilia’s child, long dead. The intervening

monologues offer the perspectives of the three main actors in the murder, Guido,

Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, in that order. These monologues are more recursive.

They are primarily concerned with self-representation; presentations of character

19 19

predominate over interpretations of the murder. The next three monologues

present the perspectives of the defense, the prosecution, and the pope. Finally,

Guido offers the last of the monologues that compose portions of the plot. By the

time we get to Browning’s second monologue, the ultimate book of the poem, the

story has been told and retold; its facts and counter-facts built up in incremental

fashion; the pile has been fitted into a ring of “rough ore” suitable to stand fast,

next to his deceased wife’s “rare gold ring of verse” (XII, 865, 869).

While The Ring and the Book was hailed as a great success and critics

referred to it as Browning’s opus magnum, declaring it ready to stand alongside

Milton’s Paradise Lost as one of the great English epics, reviewers tended to

reduce the generic indeterminacy of the poem, and Browning’s poetic role

continued to be defined against lyricism and in terms of the opposition between

the dramatic and the lyric. While reviewers of the poem observed Browning’s

“dramatic improprieties” with less opprobrium than Julia Wedgwood, the same

dramatic conventions were applied to their critique of his performance. Frederick

Greenwood found the poet’s “open declaration” of his partiality bad art, but he

goes on to commend his “dramatic skill,” which is so great that, “even after we are

told who really is right and who wrong, we follow every turn of the story with

suspense” (314). Though they were divided about how “dramatic” the poem was,

reviewers were nearly unanimous about the absence of “lyrical joyousness” in The

Ring and the Book (Bagehot 304; Buchanan 294). Though Browning’s capabilities

as a lyricist were acknowledged by some, Robert Buchanan contrasted the cool,

analytical gaze of Browning with that of his late wife, Elizabeth Barrett, pointing

out that in The Ring and the Book “we miss altogether the lyric light which saved

‘Aurora Leigh’ [EBB’s long poem, published in 1857] from mediocrity as a work

of art” (296), and Walter Bagehot compares Browning’s “wonderful intellectual

20 20

analysis” with Tennyson’s “acute emotional analysis” in order to qualify the

emotional detachment, and lack of “lyrical joyousness,” which he detects in the

poem (303-04). Denoting proximity, nearness, intimacy, and emotional intensity,

the lyric is neatly divided from the dramatic sense of detachment that characterizes

Browning’s monologues; though Browning is portrayed on an equal footing with

the likes of Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he is, nevertheless,

unconvincing in the role of the lyric poet. The designation of Robert Browning as

a “dramatic” poet has two important consequences: for one, the term “dramatic”

intimates its otherness from the unmixed integrity of the lyric—even though

Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett both experimented with the long form, they were

still considered “lyric” poets, using the long form only as an elaborate framework

for their display of “lyric light.” Cases of fortunate let down, their long poems

were critical failures that could not help betraying their integrity as lyricists. The

generic murkiness of the term “dramatic” when applied to the form of a poem has

additional implications for the “dramatic” poet; a “dramatic” poem is neither

purely novelistic nor purely poetic, but adopts an indeterminate position between

these poles. The term “dramatic” designates a caste-status in the pantheon of

Victorian poets and in the hierarchy of poetic genres; it predicates a failure of

lyrical self-affirmation, and threatens to alienate what little remains of a public

demand for poetry. Browning’s marginalization from traditional sources of poetic

authority, and from the inheritance of the greater romantic lyric, generates a crisis

of authority.

In her book Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy, Britta

Martens situates her reading of The Ring and the Book in the context of the

increasing commercialization of literature, the growing popularity of the realist

novel, and the marginalization of poetry among the reading public in the 1860s.

21 21

Reading the framing books of the poem as dramatic monologues enables her to

view the poet’s claims to absolute and empirical truth in light of his constrained

relationship with these audiences. But for Martens, the poet-speaker of Books I

and XII is a highly composed rhetorician, a skillful manipulator of his audiences,

as quick at concealing his relativism, as he is compelling in his self-construction of

a fluid literary persona. Martens’ reading is a part of a larger tendency to view the

poet-speaker as someone who evades self-definition, unflustered by his reputation,

and the historical categories that condition his reception. Browning’s

indeterminate status and the way he struggles to assert himself goes unnoticed in

Marten’s reading; by being attentive to this crisis of self-representation, I hope to

show how Browning intervenes in the debate over poetic values by attempting to

redefine the role of the reader. While he is certainly concerned with the problem of

self-representation, he soon realizes that the project of poetic re-definition is

compromised by an irresolvable tension between “lyric” and “dramatic” roles; this

recognition forces him to construct a new kind of reader who can synthesize lyric

and dramatic modes of apprehension. By foregrounding the way our roles and

perspectives are always mediated, the poet-speaker dramatizes the social processes

through which authority is consolidated; he suggests that authenticating roles are

not timeless, universal properties, but historically contingent constructs.

One of the ways The Ring and the Book upsets traditional notions of

authority is through the formal device of the dramatic monologue. The degree to

which the dramatic monologue may be considered a distinct genre has been

debated ever since the term was coined in the late nineteenth century; currently,

there is a growing consensus that the dramatic monologue is a subgenre of the

lyric. The distinction between the lyric and dramatic modes goes as far back as

Plato, who in his Republic describes the dramatic, which masks the identity of the

22 22

poet, as an imitative ode, and the lyric, in which the poet speaks in his own person,

as simple narration (Plato 85-88). Plato’s characterization of the dramatic mode

suggests a duplicity on behalf of the poet, as well as a kind of plurality in terms of

perspective; not only does the dramatic poet imitate characters who bear no

resemblance to the poet, he also submerges his identity in theirs, staging identity

as a kind of performance rather than as something essential and accessible to truth.

Not only does the dramatic monologue question the notion of an essential self, it

also dramatizes the process whereby speakers struggle to order and consolidate

their own identities. As E. Warwick Slinn points out, dramatic monologues

highlight “the effort of speaking subjects to maintain an identity within the

dissemination of discourse, within the fluid mobility of signifiers” (“Dramatic

Monologue,” 84).

As inheritors of the Romantic legacy, Victorian poets were tasked with

appealing to a public who invested poetry with a divine status and proclaimed its

superiority over all other arts, a public for whom poets functioned as divine

intermediaries between god and man. Herbert F. Tucker notes, this conception of

poetry and the role of the poet was a partial misreading of the legacy of

Romanticism (124); nevertheless, Victorians continued to look to poets for moral

guidance and tended to value the lyric “I” for its sincerity and spontaneity,

qualities diametrically opposed to the historically contingent, ironizing

possibilities of the dramatic “I” and its implicit critique of the notion of a coherent

self. Paradoxically, as lyric poetry was gaining status as a genre, it was losing

relevance among readers: more and more of them turned to cheap, consumable

prose fiction. Another way that The Ring and the Book challenges traditional

outlets of authority is by blurring the boundary between poetry and forms of

popular entertainment. As commentators have noted, The Ring and the Book

23 23

shares many similarities with the novel, both in terms of form and subject matter.1

The poem’s affinity with the novel stems from its intertextuality. It was based on a

series of trial documents written in Latin and Italian that the poet picked up in a

bookstall in a square in Florence. In a self-referential play reminiscent of

Cervantes, the poet-speaker of the framing books encourages us to question the

epistemological status of representation and the nature of historical truth he

presents us. The narrative unwinds on multiple levels, as each speaker revises an

absent source, the discovery of which, rewritten into the story, undermines the

truth claims of the poet, at the same time as it mocks his pretensions to authority.

All these factors push the boundary of what may and may not be considered

poetry—the poem recedes from the self-identity of the lyric and enters the murky

indeterminacy of the dramatic. Whatever alluring affinity The Ring and the Book

may have with the novel ends here: for the poet-speaker ultimately commits

himself to an audience who presumes the superior status of lyric poetry. His initial

attempts to appeal to an audience that includes empiricists and Romanticists

collapses in his effort to determine the purpose of adapting found material into a

poem, forcing him to side with Romanticism and making him the captive of a lyric

audience. This decision leads to a crisis whereby the poet-speaker feels excluded

from his principal audience and attempts to compensate for the indeterminacy of

his poetic role.

Romanticism and Empiricism

The poet speaker disrupts our identifications very early on as he parodies

the role of the dramatic poet that has been thrust upon him by foregrounding the

1 See Hawlin (191, 200). For an analysis that focuses on the shared formal features with novel, see

Blalock.

24 24

performativity of his assertions of the facticity of his source and the poem’s

fidelity to it. The poet begins Book I by asking the reader a series of questions

about the eponymous “ring” and “book” of the poem’s title before presenting a

history of the objects and linking them together in a metaphor, which he hopes

will explain the poem’s method. The poet addresses his audience with a

combination of deictics, interrogatives, and imperatives: “Do you see this square

old yellow book [?]”; “Examine it yourselves!”; “Here it is, this I toss and take

again”; “Give it me back!” (I, 33, 38, 84, 89). Our initial impression is that the

poet addresses us directly as readers; but if we look closely, we observe that he is

also addressing an interlocutor in the poem, someone who sees the physical ring

and handles the tangible book before being admonished to give it back. The skill

with which the author weaves together an allusion to the title of the poem,

reminding us that we are readers outside a determinate time or setting, and a

cluster of deictic words, interrogatives, and imperatives that force us into the text,

places us at a remove from the determinate interlocutor. Just as the author is

divided from his persona, the speaker of Book I, the audience is divided from the

interlocutor who cannot see the entire context in which his response to the author

is embedded. The different roles correspond roughly to the different habits of

mind involved in reading lyrical and dramatic poetry. Valuing intimacy over

detachment, the reader of lyrical poetry is limited in her interaction with the text;

her agency is restricted by the overbearing proximity of the lyrical “I” in much the

same way as the voice of the interlocutor is silenced and her agency remitted by

the speaker’s discourse.

As paratexts and works of fiction in their own right, Books I and XII

attempt to compensate for the poem’s generic indeterminacy and resolve the

ambiguity concerning the roles of poet and audience. Though the poet ultimately

25 25

addresses himself to a lyric readership, the potential inclusivity of his audience

may help to account for his stylistic idiosyncrasies. The indeterminacy of The Ring

and the Book’s form forces the speaker to jolt his readers out of their absorption,

bringing them back to the mediacy of the dramatic situation. His poem is

interspersed with aural disruptions, which have the effect of drawing an audience’s

attention to the constructed nature of the rhetorical situation. These disruptions of

metrical conventions and standardized harmonies call our attention to the

fundamental materiality of language. They disrupt the consequentiality of

narrativized time and remind us of the fictive basis of the speaker’s situation. The

cacophonous succession of trochees in many of these phrases shocks the reader

into an awareness of the material component of reading, such as when the poet

interrupts the summary of the pleadings and counterpleadings of the lawyers with

the assonance of, “thus wrangled, brangled, jangled they a month” (I, 241) or, to

use another characteristic example, when he apostrophizes a crowd in a market

place as the “motley merchandising multitude” (I, 903). Such moments are

hallmarks of Browning’s unorthodox style, less the signs of willful negligence on

his part, than they are means by which Browning calls our attention to the

performativity of the monologue.2

By obviating the necessity of establishing a fixed role for his audience, the

poet-speaker makes it possible to diverge from and ultimately reject his initial self-

presentation as an impartial dramatic poet. He begins his monologue by addressing

his interlocutors in what seems to be a private study, and we learn later on that he

is in London (I, 422, 775). While remaining stationary in his study, he spends a

2 For many reviewers Browning’s stylistic flaws were enough to demote him from his public role

as a poet to a second rate imitator of Carlyle; see the reviews by John Doherty and Alfred Austin in The

Critical Heritage.

26 26

considerable amount of time recounting events and encounters that took place in

Florence and Rome. As is typical of most dramatic monologues, the dramatic

situation of Book I is the tip of an iceberg, beneath which the speaker careens back

and forth between proleptic and retrospective narration. The speaker of Book I

adds another layer of temporal depth by refashioning the material of the Old

Yellow Book into three different narratives. As the performance of the monologue

unfolds in a room in contemporary London, the stories of the poet’s encounter

with the Old Yellow Book in Florence, a few years prior to his monologue, and

the trial of Count Guido, along with the murder of the Comparini in 17th

century

Rome, are told on simultaneous levels of narration. This proliferation of settings

and temporalities makes it difficult for the reader to adopt a stable position in

relation to the speaker.

In his attempt to answer the objections raised by a corporate entity referred

to as the “British public,” the poet-speaker recognizes that his only recourse is to

appeal to the values of sincerity and proximity esteemed by a lyric audience. The

poet’s effort to anticipate objections to his poem signals a startling departure

represented by the suggestion that he throw his book into the fire, “as who shall

say me nay, and what the loss?” (I, 375-76). This move is not only inconsistent

with his self-composure up to this point, but also incongruent with the dramatic

situation he has established: an intimate scene with a sympathetic interlocutor. The

discontinuity indicates the poet’s intimation of another audience, a more critical

and impersonal entity referred to as the “British public” (I, 410). The poet’s

addresses to the “British public” are distinct from those addressed to an

interlocutor within the constructed situation, or to a reader outside the situation

and indeterminate in respect to time and place; the corporate entity referred to as

the “British public” is contemporaneous with the author. Browning’s appeals to

27 27

his British public steer a fine line between alienating them and attempting to

correct their habit of forfeiting their perspective to a figure of authority. By

juxtaposing them with the citizens of Rome, whose habitual reliance on empirical

standards of truth-worthiness leads them to dismiss his poem, the poet is forced to

make concessions that modify earlier claims of objectivity. Confronted with the

possibility of losing the Old Yellow Book to the flames, the poet speaks of the life

cycle that inheres in truth. “Was this truth of force?” he asks, “Able to take its own

part as truth should, / Sufficient, self-sustaining?” (I, 372-74). The book is an

extension of the living body; it might provide the last material trace of the “heads

and hearts of Rome”—all has been leveled down “as smooth as scythe could

shave” in the collective memory (I, 413-21). The poet confirms this in Rome,

where he searches for documents he can use to supplement the Old Yellow Book.

In this passage we learn that this is not the first time the Old Yellow Book has

been rescued from the flames; it has been revealed that the records the poet is

looking for met with no such luck: the occupying French armies have burned them

(I, 431-33). But the citizens of Rome are not in a mood to celebrate this discovery

or thank the poet. They accuse the poet of being partial towards the British and

biased against the Church before they have even read a word of what he has

written. The Romans’ unquestioning acceptance of the homology between truth

and scientific prose, their dismissal of extra-empirical claims, and their prejudice

against whatever seems foreign, reflects the poet’s fear of a British public

thoroughly enslaved to the values of empiricism more than it reflects the

prejudices of Roman citizens. By rejecting the narrow-minded empiricism of the

citizens of Rome, the poet is left with no other option than to revert back to the

epistemology of Romanticism. His only hope lies in appealing to a lyric audience.

28 28

As he turns to Romanticism for authority, the poet begins to update his

image; deemphasizing the poem’s reliance on archival sources, he shifts the stress

from the Old Yellow Book to the Old Testament. His comparison of his role as a

“resuscitator” of lifeless facts to that of the prophet Elisha is consistent with his

notion of embodied truth. His conception of facts as extensions of the body allows

him to draw an analogy between his reconstruction of the past and Elisha’s

resurrection of the dead. Through this analogy, the speaker invests the act of

creative appropriation with the spontaneity valued by the Romantics. He then

claims that due to man’s fallen nature he can only create through mimicry, and

only God can create ex nihilo (I, 707-72). This collapses the distinction between a

poem inspired by the absolute and one based on found material. His appeal to

scriptural sources of authority shows how the poet-speaker attempts to compensate

for his reputation as a “dramatic” poet, in order to catch up with the expectations

he’s established for his audience.

The Lyric and the Dramatic

In his effort to redefine the role of poetry, the poet-speaker models the

development of a poetic reader, and Book I becomes an allegory of the transition

from lyric absorption to dramatic detachment. The poet-speaker begins this

bildung by juxtaposing his dramatic persona with his lyric persona. In the ring

metaphor, the poet counters a dramatic cliché of the ring craftsman who initiates a

process of “mimic creation” with a Romantic cliché of the vates, or poetic

visionary, chosen by providence to reveal an oracular “truth” to a worldly

audience. These clichés expose the limits of self-representation, while

foregrounding the synthesis that will take place between the two concepts of

poetry. Initially, the poet embodies an idealized notion of the dramatic poet. The

29 29

malleability of his identity is conveyed by the derivative nature of the ring maker’s

“imitative craft” and the iterability of the ring making procedure (I, 3). In the

chemical analogy the poet establishes, 3 the ring maker’s art is directly at odds

with the hegemony of the lyric. In his description of the ring metaphor, the poet

reiterates well-known clichés about the nature of the “dramatic” role. The art of

the dramatic poet is relativist—the craftsman stands both outside and inside the

ring, which denies him access to a center. The dramatic poet mirrors nature—like

the craftsman, his creative function is mimetic and his procedure is predetermined,

repetitive. While the ring denies an absolute perspective, the ring-making

procedure precludes the personal spontaneity of Romantic lyricism. We find it

hard to identify the personality of the craftsman with his personae because he is

abstracted from the process of creation, rather than an emanation of that process.

This makes the craftsman a recognizable cliché, a perfect stand in for the

“dramatic” poet. The craftsman forms a recognizable equivalent of the dramatic

poet, but it provides an inadequate description of Browning’s poetic method. Just

as the “craftsman” imitates the character of Etruscan rings at Chiusi, the

“dramatic” poet imitates characters of life; his art is life-like. His fancy is

redundant; the poet compares it to the wax an artificer melts with honey and

invites the reader to wipe its trace away, as if it were an excrescence (I, 18-19,

1388). By understating the role of fancy and overstating the importance of facts in

the ring metaphor, the poet’s self-presentation at the beginning of Book I adheres

to a clichéd notion of the “dramatic” role.

3 Browning’s use of scientific metaphors looks ahead to the legitimizing techniques of the

modernists. In the early 20th century, enlightenment beliefs in technological and scientific progress offer the

critique of lyric hegemony a more profound outlet of authority. Though the appeals are not as convincing

when seen through a Victorian context, Browning provides us with a kind of pre-history of this technique

of legitimization in Books 1 and XII. For more on the modernists’ use of scientific metaphors, particularly

in the context of modern physics, see Albright.

30 30

In the very next passage, the poet-speaker’s intimations of a providential

order and his assertions of the teleological character of his poem’s origins

seemingly obviate his aspiration to the ring-maker’s transparently “imitative

craft.” These propositions—more characteristic of the Romantic vates than they

are of the dramatic poet—are heralded in the section that follows from his

elaboration of the ring metaphor:

Do you see this square old yellow Book, . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I found this book,

Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just,

(Mark the predestination!) when a Hand,

Always above my shoulder, pushed me once,

One day still fierce ’mid many a day struck calm,

Across a Square in Florence, crammed with booths,

Buzzing and blaze, noontide and market-time. . . (I, 33, 38-44)

Notice the clutter of consonants: the repetition of the plosives b and p, break out

into an alliteration of d’s in the line, “One day still fierce mid many a day struck

calm,” only to be sundered by the repetition of the nasals n and m in the phrase

“noontide and market-time.” The clutter of consonants conveys a derelict scene of

disorder and dispersal. With a tightly compact, diverse array of sound-values,

these lines complement the thematic tension between the providential order of an

invisible hand and the centrifugal chaos of a noontide market at the Piazza di San

Lorenzo. In the midst of this jumble of “odds and ends of ravage” (I, 53), the poet-

speaker is guided to a bookstall, spots the book amid “five compeers in flank” (I,

75), and makes his selection without hesitation. The poet instructs his interlocutor

to “Mark the predestination!” and throws in a plea for gratitude, “Providence be

31 31

praised!” (I, 60). Taken in its entirety, the passage suggests that, despite the

random incoherence of historical particulars, the poet-speaker was assisted by

providence in his discovery of the book. Beneath the chaos of modern life, history

has an agency of its own; it seduces the reader with an invisible hand and strips

bare its secrets. This rendering of his poem’s providential origins provides a

counterpoint to his account of the origins of the ring. Simulacra of Etruscan

circlets unearthed at Chiusi, the rings are interchangeable, and their origin offers

an infinite number of iterations. This origin may not differ in kind from the origins

of The Ring and the Book, but the narration of the poet-speaker cloaks the affinity

between the ring and the poem; the source of the Old Yellow Book is what

absorbs his attention. In addition to being a material artifact, the book embodies an

oracular truth; its discovery is nothing short of miraculous. As a sign with a secret,

it operates on another level of signification, and its discovery singles out the poet.

Each origin refers back to a different concept of time: the ring suggests a version

of time that returns upon itself, while the book suggests a straight line in ascension

from right to left, front to back.

The poet-speaker’s self-absorption produces “lyrical” effects that force us

to observe a discontinuity from the “dramatic” overtones of the passage in which

the speaker touts the ring smith’s “imitative craft.” By interspersing allusions to

the ring metaphor, Browning continues to identify with the “dramatic” poet, while

also making his underlying rapport with the “lyric” persona of this passage more

explicit. His allusions to the ring-metaphor support the notion that he adapts the

raw material of life without modifying it. The referent of the poem is “pure crude

fact”; “indisputably fact, / Granite”; “The lingot truth” (I, 35, 86, 665-66, 459).

“Thus far take the truth,” the poet tells us, “The untempered gold, the fact

untampered with, / The mere ring-metal ere the ring be made!” (I, 364-66). These

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extensions of the ring metaphor reinforce his objectivity—he merely pieces

together what is already given. He understates the role of “fancy” by comparing it

with the alloy that stands in the same relation to the poem as a scaffolding does to

the building it supports before being dismantled. The tension between the

objectivity and impersonality of the “dramatic” persona and the sincerity and

spontaneity that accompany the “lyric” persona strains to the point of damaging

the speaker’s credibility. By refusing to resolve these contradictions, the poet-

speaker calls our attention to the artifice involved in the construction of these roles

and the poet’s desire to evade self-definition.

The poet’s ambivalence toward the opposition between the “lyric” and

“dramatic” has broader implications for his treatment of history. The poet’s sense

of indecision when it comes to self-definition is reproduced and then transcended

in his dramatization of the conflict between positivism and Romanticism in his

approach to history. By attributing a life cycle to the facts, the speaker invokes a

Romantic notion of history as a process that can only be known immanently. On

the other hand, his confidence that the facts will yield up “the whole truth” (I, 117)

through organization and analysis echoes a positivist notion of history as a static

accumulation of empirical facts. The poet is critical of the positivistic tendency to

reify the historical process, however much he claims to be able to deduce the

“whole truth” from the “facts” of the Old Yellow Book. Indeed, the poet’s

problematic use of the word “fact” has tended to obscure the distinction in Book I

between the relative merits of a positivist and Romanticist approach to history.

The word “fact” conflates an ontological fact with an epistemological fact; the Old

Yellow Book, which is a compilation of print and handwriting and a material

thing, is a “pure crude fact / Secreted from man’s life when heart’s beat hard, /

And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since” (I, 35-37, 86-88; my italics).

33 33

The word “secreted” has the added signification of conveying something that is

hidden as well as something that is expelled. Positivists would insist that empirical

facts aren’t immediately apparent, that they remain hidden at first and reveal

themselves retroactively. Romanticists would view these facts as living realities in

themselves, something immediately apparent and always on the verge of a kind of

death. The “pure crude fact” of the Old Yellow Book combines both of these

meanings: the facts are something “secret,” truths hidden from sight, known only

retroactively, and “secreted,” living features of the past transplanted in an alien

context. A “fact” is both a product and a process: as an ontological fact, it has a

life-cycle and a habitat; as an epistemological fact, it has an ideal existence that

can be ordered, arranged, amassed, and made to yield the “whole truth” of its

original content. The latter sense is signified by the poet’s affirmation on his way

home from the Florentine market that he had “Mastered the contents, [and] knew

the whole truth, / Gathered together, bound up in this book” (I, 117-18). But the

poet’s idea of historical truth differs ultimately from the notion of truth put forth

by positivists because for him truth is closely linked to memory; only facts that

produce real affects for the reader, not facts in the abstract, create what we call

“truth.” This leads him to side with Romanticism to the detriment of his effort to

fashion a reader capable of questioning inherited ideologies. His claims to have

raised the dead facts of history to life threaten to restrict the freedom of the reader

to formulate her own insights, just as they jar with the reserved gaze of the

craftsman who brings a hard, exacting methodological rigor to bear on the

resistant subject of his creative labor.

Despite his reliance on a variant of Romantic historicism, the poet

ultimately endorses a view of history that compliments the centrality of the active

reader in his poetics; the freedom he grants the reader decentralizes the authority

34 34

traditionally invested by positivists in a transcendent objectivity and by

Romanticists in the notion of an absolute perspective. By interpolating his own

perspective onto the past, he destroys the illusion of a transparent objectivity, and

rejects the solution of absolute perspective.4 The poet rewrites his discovery of the

Old Yellow Book into the story of the Roman murder case in order to emphasize

the impossibility of attaining an absolute perspective of the historical process. This

induces the irony of the poet’s claim that he “disappeared” from the book to let the

facts tell their own story, an irony which is surpassed by our sense that Book I is

ultimately about the poet’s experience of projecting himself into the past as he

reads the Old Yellow Book (I, 687, 1388-89). The irony of the poet’s claims to

objectivity underlies the only possible moral we can draw from The Ring and the

Book: our efforts to transcend the historicity of our perspectives are in vain, for,

the moment we become interpreters of an event, we rewrite ourselves into its

history. The poet’s approach calls attention to the rewriting that goes on whenever

the idea of history is invoked; like the ring-maker’s relation vis-à-vis the ring,

there can be no absolute perspective, no place outside the ring of the historical

process. Though the poet claims to have disappeared from his text, the

interpolation of his discovery of the Old Yellow Book in his account of the past

belies his suggestion that he remains detached and impartial toward the facts.

In Browning’s attempt to synthesize “lyric” and “dramatic” conceptions of

poetry he makes use of the metaphor of the drama, in which the actor is

4 Critics are usually split on whether Browning’s presence implies that his version of the facts is

authoritative, or whether it implies that no version is completely trustworthy. For representatives of either

view, see Peckham and Baker. Peckham argues that Browning’s self-interpolation exposes his own

distorting interest in piecing together the facts while Baker argues that Browning’s self-presentation reveals

a naive Romanticist insisting on the absolute truth of his version of the facts. While I side with Peckham,

Baker’s critique offers an important contribution to my understanding of the intellectual context that fuels

Browning’s historicism.

35 35

encouraged to view herself in a play and as part of her own audience. Though the

experience of going to a play is not reducible to reading a poem, the poet

encourages us to read as if we were acting out the meaning of the poem and

watching ourselves act, in the hope that this will distance us from our emotional

involvement in the action. The actor provides a focal point for the way the “lyric”

is reconciled with the “dramatic” in the poem. As Charlotte Kemper Columbus

points out, the carnival atmosphere of The Ring and the Book breaks down the

distinctions between the actor and the audience, encouraging readers to become

actors, “if only by the act of interpretation” (Columbus 244). While other critics

have called attention to the theatrical tropes in the framing books, they are not as

attentive to the way Browning interrogates the dual roles of audience and actor.5

Just as the poet highlights the tension between the authority of the “lyric” and the

“dramatic” poet, and just as he attempts to view the historical process objectively,

without alienating his readers or relinquishing his claims to vatic insight, he also

emphasizes the conflict between the roles of the audience and the actor in his

account of the poem’s creation. Though it’s possible to view the poet-speaker as

someone who, like a “stage-director,” mediates between audience and spectacle,

the framing books are just as concerned with conveying the poet’s experience of

reading the Old Yellow Book as they are with setting the stage for the reception of

The Ring and the Book, and in this way the poet’s persona manages to encompass

the roles of audience and actor. While these roles seem predicated on excluding

one another, the poet demonstrates his capability to unite them in a marriage of

contraries, a synthesis that also characterizes the attitude of his ideal reader.

5 For two contrasting viewpoints on the poet’s role-playing, see Gibson 97-99 and Blalock 48.

Blalock refers to the persona of the framing books as a “stage-director” while Gibson argues that Browning

fashions himself as a tragic dramatist.

36 36

The manner in which the poet harnesses the mutually exclusive roles of the

detached audience and the sympathetic actor can be seen in the range and variety

of attitudes he adopts toward Guido, the “main monster” of his tragic play (I, 551).

While the poet-speaker’s displays of sympathy and disgust towards Guido align

him closely with a lyric elevation of the didactic mode, his translation of Guido

into many different contexts gives rise to a carnivalesque proliferation of

interpretations and encourages us to adopt a more open-ended attitude toward the

reading process. Browning’s presentation of the monologue as a stage and his

treatment of identity as a performance encourages us to view his monologists’

statements in the context of underlying tensions between the self and the other,

and as ironic commentaries on the very conditions of subjectivity. The endless

translation between monologues encourages us to look for the effects of actions

rather than their motives and to judge action on an affective basis. The poet’s

shifting attitudes toward Guido show us how we can strike a balance between our

affective response to the actors in the drama and our desire for a more

comprehensive perspective.

In the poet-speaker’s revision of his initial stance toward Guido, he presents

in allegorical form the growth of a reader’s mind from emotional absorption to

critical detachment. At first, the speaker is sympathetically involved in his

portrayal of Guido, as an actor who, in attempting to imitate life, gets caught up in

his character and ignores the immediacy of his surroundings, making an open

display of his emotional investments and his repudiation of Guido’s actions. The

poet’s emotional display forms the grounds of a premature judgment of Guido;

departing radically from his persona as an impartial observer, the poet-speaker

becomes an actor in the “tragic piece” he dishes up for his audience (I, 523). In

Browning’s first narration of the murder case we get only a mediated view of the

37 37

emotional core of the story: the persecution and confinement of Pompilia, her

deliverance and flight from Arezzo, and her death at the hands of Guido and his

henchmen. It’s not until he clarifies the purpose of the poem before the citizens of

Rome that he recommences his narrative in an emotive tone fully commensurate

with the lyric mode: only then does the poet attempt to redefine himself. He takes

us back to the night when the “book was shut and done with” (I, 472). Ready to

begin “smithcraft,” now that the facts of the Old Yellow Book have taken to the

alloy of his fancy, he steps out onto the balcony of his home in Florence and

reenacts the “tragic piece” (I, 470). The overture makes it apparent that he is no

longer the impartial observer he was in his first rendition of the tale:

The life in me abolished the death of things,

Deep calling unto deep: as then and there

Acted itself over again once more

The tragic piece. (I, 520-23)

The poet’s absorption in the “tragic piece” is demonstrated by the shift into the

present tense and his affirmation that he sees the events he describes; the past

tense of the verb “to see” occurs seven times in the span of about eighty lines (I,

523, 538, 544, 563, 569, 577, 604). Approaching the scene of the crime, he shifts

again into the present tense: as Guido, and his pack of sinister-looking “were-

wolves” close in for the kill, the poet interjects with an exclamatory aside, warning

his reader to “Close eyes!” (I, 611, 627). The poet-speaker’s self-censorship

testifies to the strength of his emotional response; his sense of outrage, not his

reason, underlines the assumption that Guido is guilty. The proximity of his

perspective and its absorption in the scene augments the authority of his insight.

But the lack of distance distorts our perception of the actors; the passage presents a

hybrid of medieval romance and caricature. While Caponsacchi is compared to St.

38 38

George, Guido is cast in a subordinate role; he is a “main monster,” a “wolf,” kin

of a “satyr family” of “obscure goblin creatures,” a descendant of a mother with a

“monkey-mien,” an embodiment, in short, of the vast spectrum of the non-human

and the abject (I, 549-51, 570-71). The hyperbole of this style reflects the poet-

speaker’s need to make a display of his emotions as a sign of his lyric authority. In

his commentary on this passage, Frederick Greenwood, the reviewer in the

February 1869 issue of The Cornhill Magazine, directs Browning to observe the

dramatic poet’s duty to observe no more partiality towards his creatures “than

nature herself who first created them” (Litzinger 314). But the emotional

absorption of the poet-speaker is a necessary moment in the development of a new

kind of reader, part of a process that leads to a synthesis of lyric and dramatic

reading.

Besides implicitly acknowledging the impossibility of remaining objective,

Browning includes this passage for strategic reasons: the emotional display

distances himself from the moral estrangement of the dramatic poet. The passage

offers perfect support for Browning’s response to Wedgwood’s charges that he

had made Guido too sympathetic by “lending so much of [himself] to [his]

contemptible characters” (Curle 159). Forced to defend his method against charges

of moral relativism Browning asks, “is there anywhere other than an unintermitted

protest (which would be worth nothing were it loud) against all the evil and in

favour of all the good? Where does my sympathy seem diverse from yours so long

as we watch the same drama?” (Curle 176). Browning is aware he has made his

sympathies “against all the evil and in favour of all the good” known; rather than

declare them outright, he makes a display of them; the performativity of this scene

detracts from his sincerity and makes it possible to detect a strain of pragmatism

behind Browning’s declaration. Even if we believe Browning is being sincere,

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scenes of direct moral condemnation in The Ring and the Book are few and far

between, intermittent and loud, which makes them “worth nothing” in Browning’s

scheme of things, other than a demonstration of Wedgwood’s arrested

development. Browning’s momentary demonstrations of lyric didacticism allow

him to deflect charges of moral relativism, even if they ultimately fail to provide

the direct authorial guidance of the omnipresent lyric persona. Indeed, the

inconsistency with which the “lyric” is employed in the poem encourages us to

view our emotional response to the characters and events depicted with detached

scrutiny, as we learn to make the affects subject to an interminable process of self-

revision.

Browning’s reply to Julia Wedgwood demonstrates that the metaphor of the

“drama” was an important one for him. Because the drama takes place in the

public eye where one is at a further remove from one’s inner, private self, it

imposes the kind of emotional distance between audience and performer necessary

for critical reflection. The drama is also collaborative, formed through the

interaction among different modes of labor—acting, stage design, costume,

lighting, music, dance—which tell different, overlapping versions of the same

story, forming a number of different thresholds, thresholds that reflect a broad

spectrum of social relations. The poet-speaker reflects the experience of watching

the drama through the lens of such a palimpsest, reveling in the ways in which our

perspective varies as the threshold from which we behold the action multiplies and

interpenetrates. The showman, or stage-impresario, is the persona that comes

closest to encompassing the roles of the actor and the audience. After describing

the scenes on the “round from Rome to Rome” (the city of Pompila’s birthplace

and the scene of her murder) as if he were a living witness of every event along

the way (I, 526), the poet provides another summary of the murder story, a

40 40

summary that is more restrained and unobtrusive than either of his previous

renditions, before he launches into a sustained overview of the “voices [that]

presently shall sound / In due succession” (I, 824-5). He signals his resumption of

the “dramatic” voice by presenting his drama as a showman: “Let this old woe

step on the stage again!” (I, 824). Sullivan has remarked concerning this passage

that “the ‘I’ truly disappears and the ‘you’ (the audience) is called to the fore to

hear (rather than see) the actors in the drama” (Sullivan 14). Though there is still

very much an “I” at work in this, the fourth summary to date of the Old Yellow

Book, the poet comes closer than ever to merging his perspective with his

audience by presenting his poem as a play.

The poet-speaker’s revisions of the murder story suggest the importance of

context in establishing the meaning of an event, since our ability to see things

from different thresholds allows us to scrutinize our emotional absorption and

suspend judgment. In his re-contextualization of events in the Old Yellow Book,

the poet-speaker aligns himself closely with the pope, who transplants the scene of

Guido’s execution from the “bridge-foot close by Castle Angelo” to the People’s

Square, the “city’s newer gayer end,” under the Pincian gardens, setting the stage

for the “spectacle” of the execution which is recounted by three different speakers

in Book XII (I, 350-59). The pope’s decision to switch the venue of Guido’s

execution gives rise to a number of interpretations. In Book I the poet provides

two of these interpretations. Because the “custom” of holding the execution at the

bridge-foot by Castle Angelo has “somewhat staled the spectacle,” the pope

believes Guido’s execution is significant enough to warrant a relocation to the

“gayer end” of Rome (I, 352). The relocation will also teach the aristocracy a

lesson, for the poet points out that the “proper head-and-hanging place” was “not

so well i’the way of Rome, beside, / The noble Rome, the Rome of Guido’s rank”

41 41

(I, 350, 353-4). The poet-speaker provides additional perspectives in Book XII,

where he quotes a letter written by a Venetian describing the execution in Rome.

Detailing the carnivalesque excesses of the execution, the Venetian voices his

reproval of the pope’s decision, arguing that the relocation comprises a

“conciliatory sop / To the mob” (XII, 108-09). He goes further by attributing it to

the pope’s “malice” toward the nobility (XII, 147). This is similar to Archangeli’s

interpretation, who, in another letter quoted at length, expresses his desire that

Rome “stigmatize the spite” which caused the “indecent change o’the People’s

Place / To the People’s Playground” (XII, 311-12). The speculation that results

from the pope’s decision to transport the execution to a different venue illustrates

the importance context has in shaping our opinion of the meaning of an event. The

translation between media gives rise to a proliferation of interpretations that make

the pope’s motive irrelevant. The relocation makes class a visible factor and it

gives rise to a general mood of lawlessness and irreverence. But these are the

contingent effects and chance efflorescence of switching venues, rather than

expressions of some innate intention. The change of venues foregrounds power

relations from another threshold, rousing the ire of the nobility; they impute

malicious motives to the pope, but whether or not these motives factor into his

decision is never made known, and, furthermore, is beside the point. The episode

highlights how the dramatic metaphor allows the poet-speaker to think of context

as a space of interaction; like the pope’s relocation of the execution, the poet-

speaker’s appropriation of the Old Yellow Book delimits a relationship between

reader and text characterized by immersion and critical detachment.

42 42

The Limits of Authority

The poet manages to inculcate a more complex understanding of his poetics

by exploiting the full range of meaning secreted in the concept of the “dramatic,”

but the conditions for self-representation remain what they were at the outset; the

poet-speaker finds himself subordinated to the role of the lyric poet, and the

process of poetic redefinition, dogged by the historical opposition between the

lyric and the dramatic, is brought to a halt because of the very indefinability of the

“dramatic.” As Nietzsche puts it, “only what has no history is definable”; the

ahistorical character of the lyric makes it particularly amenable to redefinition and

reconstruction, but the terms by which the poet undertakes a reappraisal of his

public image remain outside the bounds of lyric identities (453). Faced with this

dilemma, the poet draws on his autobiographical connections with his dead wife in

an attempt to consolidate his authority; as a lyric poet, she is an unproblematic

figure of authority that the poet-speaker willingly exploits. Her own verse novel,

Aurora Leigh, serves as a precursor to The Ring and the Book, and the poet-

speaker’s moniker for her, “Lyric Love,” references her ability to inhabit and

redefine the role of the lyric poet (I, 1391; XII, 868). In his addresses to Elizabeth

Barrett at the conclusion of each of the framing books, the ring serves as a potent

metaphor, not only for the formal distinctions that set his long poem apart from

hers, but also as a symbolic assertion of his right to appropriate her poetic

authority. The ring becomes a kind of talisman, conducting the person of his late

wife back to earth, hypostasizing the authority of a legitimate lyric poet to round

out the ring of his poem and shore up whatever deficiencies it may have in respect

to the hegemony of lyric. The poet’s entreaty to “Lyric Love” at the conclusion of

Book I forms the posy of his ring—an inscription which authorizes the poet-

speaker’s performance. In Book XII the poet’s ring of “rough ore” takes its place

43 43

as a guard ring around Lyric Love’s “rare gold ring of verse” (XII, 865, 869). The

poet’s homage to the rare gold ring of verse observes standards of decorum, but

not the superiority of lyric in itself—since there can be no vantage point, no place

of centrality, the placement of the guard ring around the lyric does not align the

latter with an absolute perspective. Nevertheless, it alludes to a significant point

of distinction between the lyric and dramatic. The poet’s ring is rough because it is

a compound of elements. Its ore constitutes a strange mixture of the lyric and

dramatic that can’t assert its identity like the purity of the gold ring. The identity

of the lyric is placed on a higher level than the difference of the dramatic. The

poet-speaker’s stress on the purity of the lyric’s “rare gold ring of verse”

ingratiates himself with his “lyric” public, without diminishing the role of critical

detachment in his concept of poetry.

The poet’s statements about art in the section that precedes his concluding

invocation to “Lyric Love” in Book XII forms the clearest attempt to push beyond

the opposition between lyric and dramatic verse. In this passage he compensates

for the ambivalence of his conclusion, in which he and “Lyric Love” resolve into

separate spheres, by making a case for the poem qua poem, rather than as a

truthful account of what actually happened. No longer referring to the Old Yellow

Book he presents to the interlocutor at the beginning of Book I, but to the poem he

wrote, the poet-speaker dissociates his poem from a literal account of what

actually took place. Unlike factual accounts of the past which attempt to reveal the

“truth” through negation, by pointing out when others lie, and stacking the

evidence against them, art remains “the one way possible / Of speaking truth” and

performs the “work of truth” through falsehood (XII, 839-40, 853). While art may

“twice show truth” because it calls attention to its medium, historical discourse

can only undermine previous truths. Art is less concerned with proving the

44 44

soundness of its arguments than it is with producing affects that “breed the

thought, / Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word” (XII, 856-57). The

poet no longer dismisses the role of his fancy in shaping the facts of his poem, as

he was intent on doing in Book I. In Book XII he dismantles the cliché of the

dramatic poet and advocates an art of falsehood over an objective rendering of

facts. Poetry, whether “lyric” or “dramatic,” constitutes a kind of knowledge of

world that does not privilege meaning over the materiality of the “mediate word.”

By opposing the literal truth of empiricists and positivists, the poet finds a

common ground between his poetics and the imposing inheritance of the greater

Romantic lyric; he appeals to an audience more inclined to view the poet as a

prophet without compromising his perspectivism.

Despite the failed effort of his attempt to redefine his poetic role, the poet

still manages to encompass lyric and dramatic habits of mind in his approach to

the historical material that supplies the “rough ore” of his rounded ring. His

reconceptualization of reading as an exercise in extensive self-revision has ethical

implications, since it encourages us to question the universality of particular social

roles and scrutinize our own convictions and the social positions that presuppose

them. The process of self-revision inhibits the narcotic effect of authority over the

reader, and, at the same time, it models the balancing act that must take place

between lyric and dramatic readings of the poem. The peril of such an approach is

that it embraces a model of perspectivism that runs contrary to nineteenth-century

investments in forms of absolute apprehension. The denial of absolute perspective

implied by the poem’s method is amplified in the metaphor of the electric egg, in a

passage that precedes the invocation to “Lyric Love” in Book I. As John Killham

explains, in his comparison of man to a “glass ball” that at a shift of a “hair’s-

breadth shoots you dark for bright” (XII, 1367, 1371), the poet-speaker alludes to

45 45

an “electric egg,” a nineteenth-century device “used to show the effect of an

electric discharge in a glass vessel partially exhausted of air” (Killham 167). This

is not the first time the poet uses a scientific metaphor to describe the reading

process; but, unlike the craftsman of the ring-metaphor, the observer of the “glass

ball with a spark a-top,” is in a much less stable position in relation to the “Action

[which] now shrouds, now shows the informing thought” (XII, 1366-7). The

change in perspective that a hairbreadth shift creates, “baffl[ing] so / Your

sentence absolute for shine or shade” (1372-3), alludes to the reciprocity between

the roles of the poet-speaker and his audience. The criteria for judging “man’s act,

changeable because alive” (I, 1365) is modified according to our roles: as long as

we rely on the notion of an “author” we forfeit our own perspective. Where we

stand in relation to man establishes the criteria we use to judge “man’s act.” By

playing with the limitations inherent in these roles the poet encourages us to view

our sympathy from a distance and withhold our judgment. The same can be said of

our affective response to the action, which supposedly shrouds an informing

thought; we are always revising the way we feel about it and can never

consummate that process once and for all.6

6 My reading of this passage as an indication of the perspectivism of The Ring and the Book

differs from Killham’s argument that the glass ball is an “obscure image for human beings who, by lying,

put on a false appearance to the world” (Killham 167), and J. Hillis Miller’s suggestion that the Ring and

the Book attempts to “transcend point of view” by “multiplying points of view on the same event…and

reach at last God’s own infinite perspective” (Miller 149). Both of these readings assume that the poet-

speaker’s observations are reliable and his perspective of the events is absolute and authoritative. If, as

Killham argues, the glass ball is a metaphor for the deception of appearances, the poet-speaker must be

included among the liars, and all truths, including the reader’s, must be equally inadequate. Similarly, if we

accepted Miller’s argument, we would have to deny the possibility that some perspectives are more

legitimate than others. Both arguments assume negative definitions of truth and perspective. But for the

poet-speaker “truth” is something positive and alive, a process and not a product. He makes the case over

and over again that we cannot rely on received authority for the truth.

46 46

It is ultimately, then, a lyrical reading of history and a dramatic reading of

his own argument which destabilizes the “author” of The Ring and the Book as a

repository of meaning and which establishes the poem’s ideal reader as someone

who can negotiate between an affective, lyrical response to the actors, and an

ironizing, dramatic attitude to the “informing thought” that lies behind the

utterance. By foregrounding the way our roles and our perspectives are mediated,

the poet-speaker dramatizes the social process through which authority is

constructed. In a diary entry dated May 26, 1868, six months before the

publication of his “forthcoming new [p]oem,” William Allingham describes how

Browning entertained him by pulling him into his study to show him the book the

poem was based on:

He takes me into his study, and shows me the original Book, a small

brown quarto, printed account of the trial of Count Guido, with some

original MS. Letters, stitched in at the end pleading for his respite.

B. bought it off a stall in Florence for a few pence. He has told the

story over and over again to various friends; offered it to A. Trollope

to turn into a novel, but [Trollope] couldn’t manage it; then R.B.

thought, ‘why not take it myself?’ (Allingham 180)

“Why not take it myself?”—in hindsight, Browning’s epiphany seems

predetermined, but Browning’s attempt to unload the “small brown quarto” into

the hands of a novelist suggests that the thought of basing a poem on a historical

document was far from paradigmatic. For poets to base their poems on History in

the abstract was nothing new, but Browning calls deliberate attention to his

appropriation of the “original Book,” encouraging us to read it. He does not turn

the book into poetry with the hope we will accept it transparently as the truth; in

other words, it is not as an historian that he presents us with the book. His practice

47 47

is to show us how the effect of truth is based on our performance of certain roles,

roles that cannot be inhabited by just anyone. The effect of this appropriation

unsettles us, takes truth and reveals its arbitrary status. Removes the ground of

certainty from our interactions with others. It is not the expression of an informing

thought, but the possible consequences of laying claim to an authority outside our

reach; this is the risk we must be willing to take if we are to follow the poet-

speaker’s lead.

CHAPTER 3: HISTORY, ELEGY, AND THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE IN THE RING AND THE BOOK

And what has hitherto come of it? Who preserves

The memory of this Guido, and his wife

Pompilia, more than Ademollo’s name

The etcher of those prints, two crazie each,

Saved by a stone from snowing broad the Square

With scenic backgrounds? Was this truth of force? (I, 367-72)

It is one of the paradoxes of the elegiac that even as it resists closure it

succeeds in intervening in the name of the dead, inheriting a voice that

compensates for the absence of the deceased, at the same time as it appropriates its

power of address to admonish the living for a lapse into forgetfulness. The voice

may belong to an aspect of the collective memory, the voice of memory’s

conscience addressing a collective audience. This is the case in the dramatic

monologue where the “I” of the meditative lyric consciousness is dethroned by the

force of historical particularity. In his ability to appropriate the voices of the dead,

the dramatic poet participates in the historian’s task of ventriloquizing the past. J.

Hillis Miller notes that the “dramatic monologue is par excellence the literary

genre of historicism” (108). The telos of the dramatic monologue is to recover the

kernel of difference in every age and perspective. It is a resuscitative art. It

admonishes the present for its blind superficiality, as much as it acts as a visible

ledger for the way a culture wishes to remember itself. It is equally a case of

utopian reminiscence and cultural narcissism.

Traditionally the elegy is inward looking, but at the center of The Ring and

the Book is a concern for a more public mode of address. “Public” has a number of

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different connotations in the poem. It refers alternately to the factious multitude,

who along with the poet, review the murder case, as well as the popular audience

to whom the poet addresses his justifications of the poem. It signifies a quality

inhering both in the documentary evidence and the poem, both made available to a

public. It’s a quality that inheres in the form of the dramatic monologue, so many

of which are eponymously titled, after the name of a fictionalized “I.” These

names contain an incantatory power; they have the ability to start the “dead alive”

for those of us always on the verge of forgetting (I, 733). Often the speaker speaks,

or is alluded to, while the name is withheld from us. In the passage quoted above

the poet addresses the public, at the same time as he reveals the name of the etcher

he withheld upon first mentioning the prints (I, 65-71). The tone of the passage is

plaintive and admonitory. It is plaintive because near oblivion is the condition

upon which Browning bases his poem—his public is unaware of the “fact

that…such creatures [as Guido and Pompilia] were” (1, 662), and they seem

equally indifferent to the other fact that their trace “trickles in silent orange or wan

grey / across our memory, dies and leaves all dark” (XII, 17-18). It is admonitory

because this lapse of remembrance, made more acute by the disclosure of the

etcher’s name and the reproach that we will have already forgotten it by now,

implies that the public is spiritually impoverished and open to reproach. By

naming the “etcher of those prints,” the poet acknowledges Ademollo’s obscurity,

at the same time as he redeems him from obsolescence. The past imposes the same

kind of injunction on the present as the dead do upon those who have survived,

and by invoking names we should know but have forgotten, the dramatic structure

of The Ring and the Book engages in a dynamic of remembrance and reproach

similar to the one found in the elegy, albeit one with a more public mode of

address.

50 50

With the exception of a few scholars,1 critics of The Ring and the Book

have overlooked the central figuration of death, loss, and the “work of mourning”

in Browning’s long poem. By grounding our reading of The Ring and the Book in

the theory of elegy, the extent to which it may be classified as an elegiac long

poem will become apparent and will contribute to our understanding of elegy as

well as our appreciation of the poem. Contemporary scholarship on the elegy has

taken Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” as a point of departure. Peter M.

Sacks was the first to explore this avenue. Sacks uses the Freudian account of

successful mourning to explain the elegiac process. According to Sack’s

framework, elegy provides a flexible heuristic for a healthy negotiation between

private loss and social obligation, guiding the bereaved past the stages of grief

toward substitutions for the lost object and reconciliation with the community. But

Sacks’ model tends to overlook the political dimension of the elegiac, which is

often more adversarial in its interrogation of cultural norms and objectives. In his

reappraisal of the modern elegy, Jahan Ramazani attempts to correct some of

Sacks’ oversights by historicizing the elegy, placing greater emphasis on the

dialogue between elegy and other modes of commemoration, such as obituaries

and funerary practices, but he remains dependent on Freud’s account of normal

and melancholic mourning, and fails to transcend Freud’s focus on the personal

dimensions of mourning. As R. Clifton Spargo notes, Ramazani and Sacks pay a

considerable amount of attention to the “structures of symbolism or idealism that

nourish identity and maintain the social order,” while overlooking the political

1 For a discussion of the motif of the reanimated body in the dramatic monologue, with particular

reference to Books 1 and XII of The Ring and the Book, see Fox. Her reading of The Ring and the Book

builds off of the suggestions of Roberts and O’Gorman who survey Browning’s experimentation with elegy

throughout his corpus; see Roberts and O’Gorman. My interrogation of the relationship between history,

elegy, and the dramatic monologue in Books VI and IX of The Ring and the Book is indebted to these

articles.

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dimension of the elegy’s interrogation of “the symbolic social structures that

contain and reduce the meaning of the other who is being lamented” (11).

The form of the dramatic monologue and the design of The Ring and the

Book with its multiplication of viewpoints, makes it difficult to deal satisfactorily

with the loss that haunts its pages—the murder of Pompilia. In this sense, the

poem is about both the ethical stakes involved in claiming the right to represent

and appropriate the voice of the dead, and the problem involved in negotiating a

public sphere in which contesting interpretations of the meaning of the other who

is being lamented are necessarily reductive, making the completion of a successful

act of mourning impossible. Rather than internalize this process, the form of The

Ring and the Book makes this interrogation of mourning a public matter entangled

in a complicated discursive atmosphere concerned with establishing guilt and

innocence. The multiple perspectives of the long poem opens up a number of

possible stances towards the murder: the commemorative stance concerned with

accountability toward the other, the utilitarian stance preoccupied with exploiting

a relationship with the deceased for ideological purposes, and the forensic stance

concerned with using the body of the deceased as a master signifier. Though the

stances often intermingle and implicate one another, my reading focuses on

Caponsacchi as a representative of the utilitarian stance and Bottini as a

representative of the forensic stance.2 In either case, the attempt to speak

convincingly for the dead, or to appropriate the body of the dead as a guarantor of

2 There are two basic factions in The Ring and the Book, the pro-Pompilia and the pro-Guido

factions. The former are concerned with defending Pompilia’s reputation, while the latter are concerned

with justifying Guido’s actions. It makes sense to focus on Caponsacchi and Bottini since these are the last

two speakers in the pro-Pompilia camp, though their perspectives are worlds apart. Interestingly enough,

the speakers share many of the same characteristics as the speaker of Book 1 and XII. As youthful versions

of Browning, they represent “unsuccessful” versions of the relationship between the mourner and the

deceased while the relationship between Browning and EBB in the framing books represents a more

“successful” version of this relationship.

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truth, subsumes the commemorative impulse of the elegiac under the rubric of

forensic truth and retributive justice. As institutions jostle for the power to

appropriate the voice of Pompilia, the impulse to account for her loss becomes

subsumed by a rationalizing logic, which in its blind pursuit of truth and

reparation, turns Pompilia’s death into a means devoid of meaning. As a result of

this, we experience the absence not of any one individual, but of death itself. The

dead speak in various guises in the poem, but the recognition they are dead

remains conspicuously absent.

While mourning is usually depicted as a process complete within itself,

with a beginning, middle, and end, The Ring and the Book depicts it as a process

without termination. Its recursive structure confounds the linearity of the Freudian

“work of mourning” as it resists the reader’s desire for elegiac closure. The poem

is disturbingly silent in respect to closure, and openly complicit in what Ramazani

terms the “economic problem of mourning”—the spirit of opportunism with which

the elegist seizes upon the loss that predicates his or her poem for rhetorical or

aesthetic purposes (Ramazani 6). The violence done towards the memory of

Pompilia serves throughout as a dominant trope for the creative process, refracting

the corrosive effect of historical amnesia that motivates Browning’s poetic

intervention, at the same time as it makes mourning a central concern of the long

poem.

The classical reading of Browning’s long poem sees its perspectivism as a

weakness rather than a strength, arguing that it detracts from our sense of the

poem’s unity. In the criticism of such classical commentators as Henry James,

Browning’s effort to present death from the perspective of the polis becomes

displaced, and the meaning of Pompilia’s death becomes subjectivized. In James’s

view, the poem’s multiple points of view frustrate readers’ attempts to establish a

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consistent attitude toward Pompilia: “amid the variety of forces at play about her

the unity of the situation isn’t. . . handed to us at a stroke” (394). He chooses

Caponsacchi as a reasonable focal point because he concentrates an emotional

complex centered on the figure of Pompilia. James ignores the way that Browning

rejects the elegy’s emphasis on a solitary mourner by exposing Pompilia’s death to

the contesting interpretations of various speakers in the poem and, by doing so,

interrogates of some of the elegy’s unexamined assumptions: What qualifies the

“I” of the elegy to appropriate the voice of the dead? Under what conditions and

with what ends in mind does the elegist lay claim to the right to resurrect the dead,

so to speak? The perspectivism exposes the claims of the solitary elegist to those

of the polis revealing the way power is implicated in or attempts to account for

death.

No portion of the poem maps out the contentious terrain in which speakers

contest the meaning of Pompilia’s death better than “Half-Rome” and “The Other

Half-Rome”—the titles of these books testify to the way Pompilia’s death forms a

public event in the theatrical context of the city, giving rise to public debate over

its significance before Pompilia has even had a chance to die from her wounds.

The speakers of these books illustrate some of the differences between the forensic

and utilitarian stance. In the latter speaker we see traces of the utilitarian stance

that will be a major feature of Caponsacchi’s monologue, while in the former

speaker’s response to the murder we see strains of the forensic stance that will

come to predominate in Bottini’s monologue:

Case could not well be simpler,—mapped, as it were,

We follow the murder’s maze from source to sea,

By the red line, past mistake. . . (II, 182-85)

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“Half-Rome” purges his account of pathos; he is only interested in the fact, the

bare geography of the murder. The “source” conflates the motive of the crime with

Pompilia’s maimed body, and the absent series of events that led up to the murder

is conflated with traces of blood, a “red line” that the body-as-evidence leaves

behind. The latter speaker summarizes the murder in the following terms:

Truth lies between: there’s anyhow a child

Of seventeen years, whether a flower or weed,

Ruined: who did it shall account to Christ—

Having no pity on the harmless life

And gentle face and girlish form he found,

And thus flings back. (III, 83-89)

The objectivity of Half-Rome’s account of the murder is displaced by the lament

of the “Other Half-Rome” who tries to persuade his interlocutors by appealing to

the pathos of the situation. Pompilia is “ruined” in a double sense: her sexuality is

“ruined” and so is the quality of her presence. From now on, she occupies a

liminal space between life and death. The Other Half-Rome seizes upon

Pompilia’s “ruined” presence and makes it into the object of our sympathy. The

true motive of the murder is not the speaker’s object; whether Pompilia is a

“flower or weed” is irrelevant. Nor is the evidence of the body considered an

embodiment of truth, as it is in the forensic stance of Half-Rome—instead, the

speaker’s appeals to ethos attempt to persuade us of the sincerity of his portrait of

Pompilia. Rather than pose a question, death offers a means to an end: it allows

the Other Half Rome to condemn the living and demand retribution on behalf of

the dead. It is “utilitarian” to the extent that it subsumes the death within a spiritual

economy; while the utilitarian elegist sanctifies the dead, he augments the spiritual

credit that he inherits.

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Besides juxtaposing divergent stances toward the murder these passages

offer competing models of troping: metaphor and metonymy. Returning to the

scene of the crime as Half-Rome does becomes a centrifugal tendency, a

destabilizing force in the poem, capable of regenerating language. Just as the

forensic stance pulls back to reveal the traces and marks left on the site of the

maimed body, metonymy analyzes and abstracts. In Half-Rome’s mapping of the

murder the color red stands for blood—a metonymy of a metonymy. It’s an

abstraction of an abstraction; we hardly realize that the referent is the body of a

murdered girl. The Other Half Rome represents the centripetal movement, or

stabilizing force of the poem, which augments the metaphorical framework of the

poem, finding new metaphors to fill in the sutures. While the metonymic process

engenders new ways to conceptualize the murder, it tends to neutralize the

referent, a consequence that threatens to desensitize us to the violence perpetrated

on the victim. On the other hand, it prevents the metaphorical configurations it

presupposes from ossifying; dealing a blow to the idealizations of the utilitarian

elegist, it rejects conventional treatments of the deceased. The inclusion of

metonymy allows for the possibility of self-critique, since it tends to expose the

forensic elegist’s attempts to consolidate the meaning of Pompilia through

metaphor.

Half-Rome and the Other Half-Rome dramatize the pitfalls of the utilitarian

and forensic stances. There are dangers involved in sympathizing with the victim,

not because speakers risk projecting their subjective bias on the outcome, but

because they risk emptying the victim of her individuality, as the Other Half-

Rome does. The appeal to his audience’s sense of pathos forces the Other Half-

Rome into a sentimentalizing rhetoric that idealizes Pompilia. This idealization

makes it possible to subsume Pompilia’s death within a retributive framework—

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the living are made to feel the debt in the wake of her “ruined” presence. But if

the utilitarian stance errors on the side of sentimentality, the forensic stance

participates in the same “economic problem of mourning” that the utilitarian

stance does, desensitizing us to the violence of death, at the same time as it uses

the death to advance an argument. But because its claims refer to the body of the

deceased, rather than the character of the deceased, the forensic stance is more

explicit about the way it exploits death—its participation in the “economic

problem of morning” is self-critical and encourages us to question those who refer

to the dead in order to bolster their own ethos.

Book VI introduces us to Caponsacchi. Like Bottini he resembles an

immature version of Robert Browning: his literary aspirations contend with his

social obligations in a way that stunts development in either direction. Bottini

finds himself in a less compromised position than Caponsacchi. He is working on

a draft of a speech that he will present before the court. Without having to worry

much about how he will represent himself before the court, he feels confident he

will win his case. Caponsacchi, however, is charged with defending Pompilia’s

reputation. The need to establish the credibility of his own ethos places him in the

compromised position of having to exploit her death. Pompilia’s death allows him

to occupy the moral high ground in relation to his interlocutors and those he

perceives as his enemies. The demands of the rhetorical situation impede his

capacity to grieve for Pompilia. Caponsacchi’s response to this impasse

foregrounds the tension between the ethical need to confront his loss and the

practical need to adopt rhetorical postures that subsume the self and turn the

experience of loss into self-mockery.

In Caponsacchi’s monologue the movement is from self-recrimination to

blame and then compensation. Caponsacchi clamors against the destructive force

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of his grief at the news of Pompilia’s death and finds a source of stability in the

image of the “hollow rock” (VI, 72), an ambivalent symbol for the church and a

personal source of comfort. In time, he ceases to act the part of the indignant lover

and, in order to compensate, fulfills a sacerdotal role, as an otherworldly soul who

sacrifices his will in order to reveal a redemptive truth to mankind. For this

Caponsacchi, Pompilia’s death serves as the vehicle for the redemption of his

interlocutors. By this time, the monologue, which had commenced with remorse

and self-censure, resolves itself into the empty, stock gestures of the pulpit and the

funeral parlor.

Caponsacchi recognizes that his need to “show Pompilia who was true”

(VI, 172) is bound up in the ethos he presents to his interlocutors. In order to

contest Guido’s presentation of Pompilia as his lover he must prove himself a true

priest. He cannot adhere to the ethical imperative to present the “death / that’s in

my eyes and ears and brain and heart” (VI, 191-92). Instead he must submit to the

forensic stance of proving himself “taintless” (VI, 197), Pompilia a “wonderful

white soul” (VI, 200), and Guido a “murderer calling the white black” (VI, 201).

His rhetoric recalls the Other Half-Rome in his tendency to characterize Guido and

Pompilia in terms of opposed types. Like the Other Half-Rome, the destructive

energies of the elegiac are turned against Guido in a way that demonizes him as

“devilish and damnable” (I, 247) and sanctifies Pompilia as a “snow-white soul”

(VI, 195). In order to consolidate his identity as a priest, a role which gives him a

much needed advantage over Guido, Caponsacchi must deny his sexual feelings

for Pompilia and must exploit her death in a way that is compatible with his vow

of celibacy and his claim to have undergone a spiritual transformation at the

instigation of Pompilia’s revealed truth.

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Caponsacchi can never come to terms with Pompilia’s death because he

must categorically deny his sexuality. His interlocutors would not recognize his

legitimacy if he disclosed his love for Pompilia. He needs the authority of the

priestly role in order to discredit Guido’s version of the story. He is a “priest and

loveless” (VI, 1654); it is “a priest [who] speaks: as for love, — no!” (VI, 1969).

His role as priest precludes his role as lover. Consequently, Caponsacchi is

ambivalent towards a role that presents a barrier for his capacity to grieve his

lover. The situation Caponsacchi is in prevents him from responding to this

imperative in a satisfying way. The structure of the monologue calls our attention

to the way social formalities hinder us from thinking about the values involved in

being accountable for the other.

Caponsacchi’s inability to describe Pompilia in terms other than a “snow-

white soul” comes back at him with a vengeance in Bottini’s monologue. We may

be offended at Bottini’s misogynistic portrayal of Pompilia, but this violent

response toward Caponsacchi’s construction of Pompilia is actually more requisite

to the ethical demands her death raises than the sentimentalizing pathos of

Caponsacchi’s monologue. One may reject Bottini’s misogyny, while recognizing

that his monologue fulfills a demand that has been left up for grabs by the

complacency of other speakers. Bottini plays off of the reader’s desire for elegiac

closure, which is epitomized by troping Pompilia as the “true effigiem of a saint”

(IX, 1397), and replaces it with a version of events that actually parodies the

compensatory gestures that become fused to the objectless will to grieve.

Bottini tropes Pompilia in contrasting ways. On the one hand, she is a

metonymization of virtually every female heroine ever recorded in classical

antiquity. For Bottini, Pompilia is beautiful and uses her looks and passive

feminine instincts to escape from a disastrous marriage, one that threatens her life

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and the honor of her husband. She uses the “right means to the permissible end”

(IX, 1416); for the “greatest sin of womanhood” is “that which unwomans it,” and

Pompilia’s means are in accord with her “nature,” though “prettily perverse” (IX,

791-93, 804). While she was still alive Pompilia’s sex provided the motive for

murder. Now that she is dead it provides Bottini with evidence for his contention

that Pompilia was innocent. Bottini encourages us to read the gendered body in the

place where the “truth” of the murder secretes itself. The edifice of the forensic

quest for knowledge of guilt and innocence is erected around the sign of the

gendered body and the forensic stance opens out into the “economic problem of

mourning.” After all, Pompilia’s death “enabled [Bottini] to make the present

speech” (IX, 1423). The lawyer callously reaps the aesthetic profit that has

accrued to him over the loss of Pompilia.

In the early stages of his monologue Pompilia is less of a person in her own

right than a condensation of a number of classical figures. The way Bottini

deploys this metonymic process which pieces Pompilia together from a number of

disparate sources mirrors the way a painter patches together a painting of the Holy

family from a number of preliminary studies (X, 17-118). Bottini uses the example

of the painter in order to point out the shortcomings of metonymy. The painter,

Bottini maintains, must turn away from the “fragmentary studied facts” and

synthesize them into a whole (IX, 102). This comparison of assembling a case to

creating a painting illustrates Bottini’s aestheticization of the murder case. Even

though he maintains the superior value of the synthetic view of the case, he

quickly reneges from his own advice and reverts from the painting of the Holy

family to a portrait of Pompilia, and finally, to the painter’s model which is,

ultimately, the gendered body of Pompilia (“I must let the portrait go, / content me

with the model” [IX, 170-71]). Bottini is incessantly driven back to his key piece

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of evidence in the case: the body of his model. Like the example of Lucretia,

whom Bottini invokes in this scene, the body of Pompilia is paradoxically

“ruined” and “virginal”—it becomes a piece of evidence that Bottini can twist and

turn in any direction he desires. Regardless of how incongruent his synthesis of the

case is from his portrait of Pompilia, he can win his case by tossing those canvases

aside and presenting the body of the model.

While the metonymies of Pompilia threaten to hypertrophy into yet another

stereotypical image of femininity, Bottini deconstructs the utilitarian idealization

of Pompilia by presenting Pompilia as a metaphor for the encomium he is

composing. Bottini continues to weave a complex fabric of classical allusions as

he deploys the following metaphor, which equates Pompilia with a magnetic force:

Shall modesty dare bid a stranger brave

Danger, disgrace, nay death in her behalf—

Think to entice the sternness of the steel

Save by the magnet that moves the manly mind? (IX, 482-85)

The metaphor of the poem as a magnetic force, which here is being used to trope

Pompilia’s seduction of Caponsacchi through her love letters, goes back to Plato,

though Montaigne dresses it up more to our purposes in his essay “On Cato the

Younger”:

It can more easily be seen in the theatre that the sacred inspiration of

the Muses, having first seized the poet with anger, grief or hatred

and driven him outside himself whither they will, then affects the

actor through the poet and then, in succession, the entire audience —

needle hanging from needle, each attracting the next one in the chain

(Complete Essays, pp. 260, trans. M. A. Screech)

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Bottini, with his intimate knowledge of classical oratory, would have been

acquainted with the metaphor. The way he uses it here links Pompilia with the

creative act of composition that aligns poet, actor, and audience together like

needles in a chain. This metaphorical displacement of Pompilia comes closer to

confronting her death than the heap of classical heroines, goddesses, and

demigoddesses Pompilia carries in her metonymic train. It does this by collapsing

distinctions between the poet, Pompilia, and the audience. The play between

metonymy, which calls our attention to the centrifugal energies of the poem, and

metaphor, which reconstructs the image of Pompilia, makes her a much more

problematic figure of presence in Bottini’s monologue.

As a figure of sexual aggression, appropriating the master’s pen and

Guido’s sword “in the garb of truth” (IX, 889), Pompilia becomes a destabilizing

force in Bottini’s monologue. The eroticization of Pompilia correlates to Bottini’s

sadistic plotting of the murder, which, in its eroticization of death, problematizes

the conventions of the elegy at the same time as it foregrounds the misogyny of

the legal system and the hidden cruelty of transpersonal forces. Bottini transforms

a scene in which Caponsacchi carries an unconscious Pompilia to her bed in the

inn at Castelnuouvo. Caponsacchi had described this altruistic act in terms fitting

his sacerdotal role:

I never touched her with my finger-tip

Except to carry her to the couch, that eve,

Against my heart, beneath my head, bowed low,

As we priests carry the paten. . . (VI, 1617-20).

The metaphorical association of Pompilia with a paten provides an ironic

commentary on Caponsacchi’s compromised position as a priest making an

account of his actions before a court of law. Altick and Loucks describe the

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corresponding passage in Bottini’s monologue as the “most audacious sexual

scene in Victorian literature” (180). The rape scene, which Loucks and Altick

quote at length, depicts a sexually repressed Caponsacchi suddenly losing control

over his baser instincts, as he stoops over a sleeping Pompilia. For Altick and

Loucks, the rape scene is part of Bottini’s ongoing attempt to discredit Pompilia;

they never question the uncanny similarity between Bottini’s testimony and

Caponsacchi’s account of what happened at the inn. The parallel accounts lead us

to question whether either’s testimony represents a “true” version of Pompilia. In

each case the rhetorical situation circumscribes what counts as a permissible

representation of Pompilia’s character. In the first instance, Caponsacchi addresses

a tribunal of priests. Though he is ambivalent about his role, it is the only thing

that guarantees him status. To declare his love for Pompilia would undermine him

in his attempts to persuade his interlocutors, and it would lead to his ostracization

from society. Bottini’s monologue is addressed to a legal profession that is more

openly misogynistic. In his defense of Pompilia, Bottini acts out the role of St.

George, a role that Caponsacchi could never legitimately play. By teasing out the

possibility that Pompilia and Caponsacchi were lovers, Bottini is titillating his

audience. It doesn’t damage his own position; on the contrary, it makes his

argument more persuasive without damaging Pompilia’s character. There is no

reason why we should treat one version as “truer” than another. Regardless of

what we may think of each character, they are both in compromised positions in

respect to their audience.

In Caponsacchi’s monologue we saw how the objectless will to grieve

became fused to the forensic and instrumental aims of the speaker. Caponsacchi’s

self-authenticating priestliness was offered as a demonstration of Guido’s guilt and

unworthiness, and his troping of Pompilia as a “saint and martyr both” (I, 909)

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constituted a crass exploitation of her death that really evaded ethical

accountability by turning her death into a means. Bottini sets himself the task, not

of proving Guido’s guilt, or Pompilia’s innocence, but of demonstrating how her

actions conform to stereotypical feminine traits. More than any other monologue,

his comes closest to classical lyric form because he can ignore the facts and appeal

to the poets for authority. Oddly enough, Pompilia becomes less of a stereotype

than a complicated semantic site, in which stereotypical traits contend with a

power of assertion comparable with the constructive energies that bring poetry to

life. Rather than silence Pompilia’s sexuality, Bottini makes it both the subject and

the substance of the poem. By rejecting Caponsacchi’s idealized depiction of

Pompilia, Bottini comes closer to fulfilling the ethical demands that elegies

account for, without succumbing to compensatory fantasies that attempt to profit

from the loss.

Bottini calls the embedded value structure of the elegy into question by

transforming the build up to the murder into an attenuated play between delay and

gratification; this build-up becomes an objectifying striptease of Pompilia, the

violence of which foregrounds the economic problem of mourning. But Bottini’s

objectification of Pompilia is not total: her passivity as object serves to foreground

her activity as a destructive force, as in the scene where she appropriates Guido’s

sword in her “garb of truth.” Describing her nakedness as a “garb” coaxes out the

ambiguity implicit in the relationship between subject and object. In Pompilia’s

case, even as the “authors of her being” (IX, 827) fashion her into a passive object

of the male gaze, there is also a violence that disrupts that passivity. Like her male

authors, Pompilia learns to “play the scribe” (IX, 458) and become her very own

author. Even in her passivity there seems to be an immense amount of activity. In

respect to gender, Bottini’s portrayal of Pompilia is surprisingly ambiguous, but

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Bottini’s narrative plays into the desires of a patriarchal audience eager for some

sort of reprisal for this indeterminacy. Bottini calls attention to this by teasing out

the ambiguities of the murder scene. As he builds up toward the scene of the

crime, Bottini pictures Pompilia waiting expectantly at her parent’s house, filling

the interval with interjections like “O let him not delay” (IX, 1235) and “Husband,

return then, I re-counsel thee” (IX, 1299). Bottini’s account of the murder presents

Pompilia’s death as an ironic (sexual) consummation of her relationship with

Guido. Pompilia’s catastrophic rendezvous with Guido does not entirely do away

with the ambiguity: she enters an intermediate stage between life and death, past

and present, presence and absence. The ambiguity of her death scene restores a

sense of activity to Pompilia, even in her death. This is confirmed by the fact that

Pompilia survives the murder long enough to deliver her testimony of Guido’s

“immitigable guiltiness” (IX, 1478). Though Bottini continues to refer to

Pompilia’s sex as a key piece of evidence in his interpretation of her death, his

narrative calls attention to the formal conventions of Caponsacchi’s monologue

that objectify her death and render it passive.

Caponsacchi managed to avoid broaching the issue of Pompilia’s death by

shifting responsibility from himself to the legal system in charge of protecting

Pompilia. His canonization of Pompilia is no less an act of appropriation, because

the church, like the court, is a significant cultural institution and demands

canonization as a means to attract worshippers and consolidate its authority.

Bottini, on the other hand, does not need to idealize Pompilia, he only needs to

show how her death confirms his argument that Guido endangered her life to the

very end and in her flight from Arezzo she acted according to the dictates of her

sex. Here the economic problem of mourning focuses less on the character of

Pompilia than on the character of her death. Her death becomes erotically charged

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for Bottini because it acts both as a reprisal for her masculine energies and the

occasion of Bottini’s self-confirming rhetoric. As such, Bottini becomes oblivious

to the actuality of death, and even callous in the way he objectifies it in order to

attack his adversary, Arcangeli. Bottini’s subordination of Pompilia’s death in

rational economy of means and ends, exemplifies the way representatives of

various institutions get so carried away by their language games they loose sight

of what it is they refer to, like in the following passage where Bottini confronts his

opponent:

Listen to me, thou Archangelic swine!

Where is the ambiguity to blame,

The flaw to find in our Pompilia? Safe

She stands, see! Does thy comment follow quick

‘Safe, inasmuch as at the end proposed;

But thither she picked way by devious path —

Stands dirtied, no dubiety at all!

I recognize success, yet, all the same,

Importunately will suggestion prick. . . (IX, 947-55)

Comments like “safe she stands” and “I recognize success” show that the

conversation between the advocates is hardly about a murdered girl, or the values

involved in their legal machinations, it is about separating guilt from innocence,

and success from failure. The passage shows how far his rhetoric falls short of

addressing existential themes in a meaningful way. The lawyers are too self-

absorbed, too preoccupied with dismissing each other out of hand and searching

through musty books for external authority to reflect on the value of a person’s life

or to begin to account for her death. How can someone’s death amount to a

success? The notion is as absurd as a language game that legitimizes itself by

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claiming to refer directly to what is real, and an example of how demoded that

language becomes which seals itself off from the world.

Bottini’s attitude of callous indifference is not only a product of the

language games of his institutional role; it is also a condition of his ethos as an

aspiring poet. In the same way, Caponsacchi finds himself caught in a middle

ground, between his role as priest and lover. But whereas Bottini foregrounds the

conditions which make the exploitation of Pompilia’s death possible in his roles as

poet and lawyer, Caponsacchi masks his exploitation of Pompilia in religious

allegory and cultural myth. While Bottini’s plotting of the murder equates death

with sexual climax, Caponsacchi’s fantasies of Pompilia equate erotic frenzy with

a desire for death. His desire for Pompilia parallels his masochistic dependence on

the church for his sense of a discrete self. When he thinks of reneging on his

“plighted troth” to the “mystic love / o’the lamb” (VI, 977-78) he envisions

himself before the apple in the “fabled garden” in range of the “seven-fold

dragon’s watch” (VI, 1002, 1009). Pompilia is both a forbidden fruit and a damsel

of medieval romance. Caponsacchi’s ahistorical allegorization of his relationship

with her makes it easier to evade the economic problem of morning. Unlike

Bottini, his authority is not derived from particular classical authors like Virgil and

Ovid, whose place in Christian dogma is problematic, but from pervasive cultural

myths. Bottini’s references are much more problematic because he fashions

himself as a pagan author, adhering to a bygone ethical code. His models include

the aforementioned authors, in addition to classical orators like Isocrates, to whose

“famed panegyric” (IX, 1571), advocating the invasion of Persia, he compares his

own speech, not too unfavorably, for he excuses his deficiencies on historical

grounds, “being born in modern times / With priests for auditory” (IX, 1576-77).

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Bottini’s classical models tend to historicize his treatment of Pompilia. Pompilia’s

death gives him a chance to emulate the classical authors he admires.

For all his ambivalence about his role, Caponsacchi cannot break his

dependence on the priestly ethos. Bottini’s incompetence offers a more effective

critique of his institutional role. His aestheticization of his defense is explicit about

the way instrumental reason subsumes death and turns it into a political end.

Bottini doesn’t even attempt to excuse himself or anticipate charges of criminal

negligence as he opts to defend his client instead of going on the offensive. In his

willingness to dispense with such formalities, Bottini satirizes the institution he

serves. Rather than allow them to become fused to the utilitarian stance, as they do

in Caponsacchi’s monologue, Bottini liberates elegiac energies to work against the

prevailing cultural mythologies in a way that ironizes them, and keeps death from

perpetuating those mythologies and the institutions that they serve. Bottini makes

it possible to view the appropriation of Pompilia’s death from a critical distance.

It’s worth noting that in carrying out his forensic aims, Bottini emphasizes

the very aspects of Pompilia Caponsacchi found it prudent to ignore, namely, that

aspect of sexuality which asserts itself in any formidable attempt to confront

death. Bottini’s critique of the forensic approach to the murder depends on

overturning the binary of innocence and guilt, “the liker innocence to guilt / the

truer to life is what [Pompilia] feigns” (IX, 544-55). For Bottini, the distinction

between innocence and guilt is an imaginary one. We may always impute good or

bad motives to Pompilia’s actions. By doing so we may transform guilt into a

semblance of innocence, or vice-versa. So the point is not to prove Pompilia

“perfect in the end, / perfect i’the means, perfect in everything” (IX, 1437-38) but

to show how guilt may do the dirty work of innocence, “grime is grace / to whoso

gropes amid the dung for gold” (IX, 550-51). For Bottini, not only is perfect

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innocence impossible, it is not a goal worth pursuing, for then, Pompilia would be

the purely passive victim others make her out to be. It’s purposeless to quibble

about guilt and innocence, especially when Pompilia’s guilt is what makes her

innocent. This revaluation of values is highly audacious coming out of the mouth

of a public prosecutor, and it corrects reductive readings of Pompilia by the other

speakers.

Ultimately, Bottini’s monologue frees up forces that counter the

compensatory drives of the utilitarian stance and addresses shortcomings in the

other monologues. Bottini shows how “guilty” sexuality feeds off of “virginal”

death in a way that ironizes attempts to distinguish between them and undermines

attempts to subsume death within a sterilizing discourse. It’s possible to argue that

Caponsacchi’s monologue does this by foregrounding the way he evades the issue

of sexuality rather than indulging in a semantic play that encourages us to view

death ironically. In that case, Bottini’s monologue provides both the diagnosis and

the antidote for Caponsacchi’s repressive maneuvers in a way that frees up

meaning and allows us to reflect on the value of elegiac energies in our attempts to

confront death and make an account of the defunct. How can we confront

mortality without reifying the will to grieve by settling on a socially conditioned

substitute? How can we account for the dead without reducing a life into a vapid

abstraction, place filler for an ideology that can take on any meaning? These are

questions Bottini’s monologue confronts us with as we attempt to square his

approach to Pompilia’s death with other efforts in The Ring and the Book. Any

attempt to account for the poem must consider the self-conscious way in which

grief is put off and the full encounter with death postponed and the implications

this has for an ethics of elegiac reading.

CHAPTER 4: HISTORY AND APOCALYPSE: THE QUESTION OF ENDING IN THE RING AND THE BOOK

Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while

Out of the world of words I had to say?

(XI, Guido, 2415-16)

I seem not to have begun, even, to say the many things I had in mind to say.

Robert Browning to Julia Wedgwood, 19 Nov. 1868

Robert Browning was reconsidering the ending of The Ring and the Book

as late as 19 November 1868, a few days before the publication of the first

installment of the poem. Browning had already posted the first two volumes,

printed and bound, to Julia Wedgwood on 5 November. In a May 26 diary entry

William Allingham had recalled the poet’s rationale for publishing the poem in

separate installments. Browning was preoccupied with the reception of the poem

and wanted to combat his reader’s habits of skipping to the end of a lengthy piece

of writing. The monthly installments would give people “time to read and digest

[the poem], part by part, but not to forget what has gone before” (181). The poet

clearly wanted his poem to be experienced as a continuous process in which no

part claimed primacy over the whole. He identified in the reading habits of the

British Public the same nihilistic tendency with which Guido struggles in the

penultimate Book: “sick, not of life’s feast but of step’s to climb / to the house

where life prepares her feast, — of means / to the end” (XI, 1901-03). By

privileging the end over the process, the British Public had turned reading into

active drudgery, a means to an end without end.

Despite his best efforts, Browning’s tactics seem to have merely replaced

an ending with an end. Wedgwood was representative in this respect, dismissing

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most of the poem except for the monologues of Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and the

pope. In her judgment of the poem Wedgwood repeats the division between means

and ends through the metaphor of the picture and its frame. Guido and the lawyers

make an “ebony frame for that pearly image of Pompilia” (Curle 158) — “a

somewhat slight picture has been put into an elaborately carved frame” (170) —

making it difficult to infer the end from the means. Wedgwood believes that

means should correlate to their ends. But this belief is predicated on a distinction

between means and ends that no mere attenuation of the poem into monthly

installments on the part of the author could dispel. She keeps grasping for an end

in identifications that appeal to her and in doing so turns the reading process into a

product-driven pursuit.

Wedgwood’s correspondence with Browning is significant because it

shows the poet engaging with his historical audience at the moment he was writing

his poem. This dialogue surely weighed on him as he approached the poem’s

terminus. As his letters indicate, he was revising the poem’s ending up until the

end, even as the early volumes were coming out, debating with himself whether or

not he should bring back Caponsacchi, giving him space for “a final word to add

in his old age” (146). In its interrogation of ending, The Ring and the Book also

deploys the thematic concerns of a long line of generic precursors. E. Warwick

Slinn contrasts the poem with Paradise Lost, noting that Browning rejects the

transcendent perspective of Milton’s God. According to Slinn, the multi-

perspectival basis of The Ring and the Book seems to question the teleological

imperatives of the Miltonic precedence, in contrast to other Victorian long poems

that were more likely to accommodate such a perspective. However, despite

Slinn’s contention that “a conclusive telos, towards which all events lead, is

neither within nor outside the text” (Discourse 120), it can hardly be denied that

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the importance of ending, of a last-ness whether of words-as-performance or

performance-as-words, has a considerable amount of stress placed on the end in

these concluding monologues. Without denying their contingency, these final

monologues call attention to the performativity of ending by dramatizing the

disjunction between the poem’s prospective telos with its termination. Before

pursuing the implications of Browning’s methodology toward a reading of history

in the poem, we shall pursue the critical context surrounding the following

questions: What is the significance of the poem’s conclusion, and how does it

encourage us to reevaluate the meaning of the poem?

The Question of Ending

In her essay, “The Ring and the Book: the Uses of Prolixity,” Isobel

Armstrong pinpoints two different ways of viewing the scheme of Browning’s

long poem. On one hand, there is the tendency to view Browning’s poem as a

relativist poem, “an amorphous gathering of points of view and of endless moral

possibilities” (178). Armstrong repudiates this view because it cannot account for

our experience of the poem as a whole or explain why Browning ended it the way

he did. The relativist reading of the poem “makes the existing termination of the

poem purely arbitrary and ignores Browning’s firm assertion that the poem is

completed, formally and morally, by Guido’s last monologue” (178). On the other

hand, Armstrong mentions the tendency to view the poem as a “process of growth

and discovery” (179). In order to lead the reader from confusion to clarity, the

poem “continually doubles back on itself in order to go forward” (179). This

“spiral of repetition” enables readers to make discoveries of their own about the

moral content of the poem. Rather than passively register the facts of the story, the

form of the poem allows readers to expand their “imaginative grasp of the nature

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of the moral questions Browning explores so that we end by knowing in a richer

way what we already know” (180). Armstrong argues that the poem is not as

open-ended as the relativist reading would have it. She argues that it encourages us

to delve beyond a merely “notional” understanding of the case to a real

understanding of it. The structure of the poem is designed to facilitate this growth

in the reader. In Armstrong’s view, the number and the sequence of the

monologues, the notorious prolixity of the poem, builds up enough “analogies and

cross-references. . . to arrive at a controlled statement about the nature of a ‘self

authorized’ intuitive act of judgment” (184). The poem works toward a kind of

closure, resolving its own aporia through a dialectic process which leads to a

reconfirmation of what we already know.

Armstrong’s reading of the poem has affinities with Robert Langbaum’s

reading of the poem. For although Langbaum, notable for renewing critical

discussion of The Ring and the Book as it wallowed in a harsh climate beset by the

formalist tenets of the New Criticism, famously described the poem as a relativist

epic, he shares Armstrong’s preoccupation with closure. According to

Langbaum’s definition, the poem is “relativist” in an epistemological sense but not

in the sense that the poem lacks a definitive resolution. He and Armstrong see eye

to eye on this point. While Armstrong saw the poem as arriving at a “controlled

statement about the nature of a ‘self authorized’ intuitive act of judgment,”

Langbaum views the poem as progressing towards a definitive statement about the

poem’s moral vision. In his view, the pope’s vindication of the good and Guido’s

last-ditch recognition of the pure worth of Pompilia represent the poem’s

denouement. The manifold deformations of evil are repudiated, and existence is

finally redeemed by the embodiment of absolute goodness in the form of Pompilia

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and the recognition of this by even the most evil of characters—Guido (“Relativist

Poem” 111).

Both Langbaum and Armstrong adhere to some form of what E. Warwick

Slinn calls the “tacit humanist belief in the unmediated nature of human

subjectivity” a view which overlooks the “inseparability of character and

language” and the impossibly of expressing the former through “fictive inventions

and rhetorical processes that constitute selves in real life” (“Dramatic Monologue”

83). Readings of the poem that adopt poststructuralist critiques of the

incommensurability of the self usually hone in on Guido’s second monologue, the

penultimate monologue of The Ring and the Book and the last of the monologues

spoken by characters other than Browning.1 In contrast to, Armstrong and

Langbaum, who focus on the teleological aspects of this book, these readings use

the book to critique the humanist conceptualization of character that permeates

earlier readings, not because of its privileged position in the sequence of

monologues or the insight it might provide into the trajectory of the poem as a

whole. The poststructuralist critique of humanist notions of the self offer new

ways of reading the poem, but its adherents have been unable to return to the

problems of development and closure that are posed by critics like Armstrong and

Langbaum. In short, these readings fail to move beyond the “relativism” that

Armstrong criticized for its inability to account for our experience of the poem as

a whole, complete within itself, rather than an agglomeration of parts. 2

The poststructuralist critique of humanistic conceptions of character is

persuasive and it forms the foundation and terminus for my reading of The Ring

1 See Potkay 143-57 and O’ Connor 139-58.

2 See Potkay 152-53. For all its good points, Slinn’s reading of the poem in The Discourse of Self

also neglects the questions Armstrong raises.

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and the Book. With this perspective the “relativistic” explanations of the ending

can be avoided. I agree with the basic tenor of Armstrong’s description of the

poem as a “spiral of repetition” (179), a “self-qualifying structure, re-examining

its presuppositions and values as it proceeds” (184). This view can help us account

for the peculiarity of Browning’s procedure in the poem. But I don’t see this

procedure as an exclusive and continuous line of argumentation, nor do I see it

“arriv[ing] at a controlled statement about the nature of a ‘self-authorized’

intuitive act of judgment” (184). The poem remains conflicted by a desire for a

revelatory ending and an impetus towards endless deferral. It is a conflicted desire

that becomes highly conscious of itself in the penultimate and the antepenultimate

books of the poem, in the monologues of Guido and the pope. Perhaps it is by

paying attention to this conflict that we can illuminate the significance of the

ending of this monumental long poem.

In short, I want to question Armstrong’s conclusion: “Guido’s recognition

that he lacks the sense of a ‘nucleus’ of the self completes the spiral of the poem

for it suggests that whatever weaknesses the sanction of ‘self-authorized’ action

carries within itself it at least posits some feeling of identity, a centre, a stable ego,

by which the world can be given shape and meaning” (195). The whole purpose of

what follows is to come up with an alternative explanation as to why Browning

ends the poem the way he does. By remaining within the time frame of the trial

and concluding with Guido’s monologue, Browning resists the urge for historical

closure that the pope relies on in order to justify his interpretations. Guido’s

revisionism encourages us to be skeptical of the pope’s metahistorical claims by

demonstrating how our versions of the past are provisional and contingent upon a

fluctuating present.

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Prospectivism and Revisionism

One of the most startling things about the penultimate monologues of the

Ring and the Book is that one monologist begins by calling a halt to an

interminable process of judgment, while the other concludes a lengthy monologue

by attempting to begin again from scratch. The pope begins by concluding: “The

case is over, judgment at an end, / and all things done now and irrevocable” (X,

207-08). And in the very next book, Guido ends by invalidating his beginning in

an effort to begin again:

Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while

Out of the world of words I had to say?

Not one word! All was folly: I laughed and mocked! (XI, 2415-17)

One of these characters is at a loss about how proceed, the other about how to

conclude. Paradoxically, it is the one most certain of himself and the rightness and

irrevocability of his judgments, the pope, who struggles most to conclude. While it

is the one racked with the greatest uncertainty about his identity and his fate,

Guido, who struggles to evade his beginning and start anew. For the pope, the

attempt to nail down an ultimate judgment is easier than it is to seek the same end

in history. For given his certainty over Guido’s guilt, why does he hesitate nearly

2,000 lines before finally “chink[ing] the hand-bell” (X, 234) that promises to

convey him to his death? After all, he has been appointed to represent God, just as

the earth “out of all the multitude / of peopled worlds” was chosen for “stage and

scene of [His] transcendent act” (X, 1335-36, 1338). He is an elected official

chosen to represent God by nature of the inscrutable logic of history. Nevertheless,

he doubts whether action can have any efficacy. The pope’s attempt here is mainly

to attribute a larger purpose to his decision to shock Guido into repentance than is

warranted by the empirical evidence. He builds his interpretation of the murder

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case from a perusal of the facts, but he needs a metaphysical backdrop in order to

give his actions a sense of purpose. The whole enterprise is solipsistic to the extent

that he wants to feel like his intervention on behalf of Guido is not belated; that the

last act still has efficacy in a larger scheme of redemption, and that in the last act is

“summed the first and all” (X, 342). His eschatology merely helps him to confirm

the magnitude and importance of his own actions.

The pope’s interpretation of history correlates to what M. H. Abrams refers

to as “historical prospectivism,” which is epitomized by Browning’s Rabbi Ben

Ezra in his formulation, “the best is yet to be” (“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” line 2). In fact,

Abrams seems to be channeling Browning’s character in his definition of the term

as “the certainty that. . . the best is inevitably about to be, in this life and this

world” (15). This historical optimism has its counterpart in the Hegelian dialectic,

which replaces the “figure of history as a great circle route back to the origin” with

the spiral that conceptualizes how “all process departs from an undifferentiated

unity into sequential self-divisions, to close in an organized unity which has a

much higher status than the original unity because it incorporates all the

intervening divisions and operations” (13). In response to modernity, the

perpetual wandering of the “peregrinatio vitae” gives way to the interminable

progress of the dialectic and the idea of an imminent end to history, rather than an

earth-shattering apocalypse. Accordingly, history no longer has a telos in the sense

of a cataclysmic end leading to a restored unity; its telos is ceaseless self-

perfection, ceaseless self-division and the formation of ever-higher unities.

Modernity also stirs up anxiety over the continuity between the past and the

present. The newfound sense of the past’s “otherness” from the present raises

anxiety over the status quo of historical knowledge and cultural continuity. This is

a concern that comes to the fore most visibly in the initial stages of the pope’s

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deliberations. The pope’s optimism concerning the future is more typical of the

nineteenth-century than his attitude toward the past. This 17th

century pope begins

his monologue by perusing a history of the popes of Rome like the biblical king

Ahasuerus strictly for the purpose of instruction, trusting that what took place in

the past (as the pope explains, the case he investigates took place “eight hundred

years exact before the year / [he] was made pope” [X, 24-25]) will help him

prepare for what will come in the future. Formosus, the subject of the pope’s

inquiry, preceded Stephen XII as pope. In an attempt to eradicate the past, Stephen

exhumes Formosus’ body, condemns his actions as “uncanonic” and has his body

thrown into the Tiber (X, 70). This initiates a chain of inquiries into the reign of

Formosus; each succeeding pope in the chain revises the previous pope’s

judgement, as the body of Formosus is repeatedly exhumed, in order to

accommodate each pontiff’s effort to assert his difference from the past. The

pope’s own interpretation of the past is not wholly solipsistic in this passage. He is

not merely seeking consolation from the past in the face of the incoherence of the

present. At this stage, he is simply trying to figure out how to proceed with his

monologue. Indeed, this is the only portion of his monologue in which he has not

yet made up his mind. But it’s difficult to see how he could draw “example, [and]

rule of life” from the case of Formosus (X, 21). This trial of “a dead man by a live

man” (X, 30), this travesty of fertility myths, in which the corpse of a dead pope is

cyclically buried and re-exhumed, conveys the sterility of a culture which

reproduces the past as the “other” of the present in a perpetual endgame, an

endlessly recurring trial of the past in the name of the present. Rather than offer

guidance for the future, the case only serves to demonstrate the impossible

deadlock of a present that can only advance in opposition to the past. As Sharrock

points out, “the historical record [in the pope’s speech] seems to spell out chaos,

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not continuity” (99). The anecdote does far more than indicate the fallibility of the

pope’s judgment. His reliance on history to point the way forward overlooks the

way the past is reinvented in order to create the present. Historical prospectivism

blinds him to the fact that his past is a fiction.

The idea that the present occupies a privileged position in relation to the

past, offering a truer perspective because more stable, allows the pope to sustain

what Roland Barthes calls the “referential illusion,” a term he uses to designate

“the process whereby the historian absents him/herself from the discourse to create

the impression of realism through direct access to the referent” (Munslow 64). In

his narration, the pope omits any trace of himself or how his account of the past is

contingent on a shifting present. His judgments seem to derive from the process of

history itself, rather than from his own interested ego. The pope’s omniscience

seems impervious to the contingency of the present. It maintains a monopoly over

the past. Guido’s revisionism offers an implicit critique of the referential illusion.

If the pope presents his judgments as irrevocable determinations of the historical

process, Guido revises his judgments in order to demonstrate how the past is

contingent upon the present. In his first monologue he depicts the murder as a

success, — (“I am myself and whole now” [V, 1707]) — an act of divine

vengeance predestined by god, — (“I did / God’s bidding and man’s duty” [V,

1702-03]) — a call he was reluctantly forced to answer — (“some song in the

ear…of the first conscience” [V, 1571-75]). In his second monologue, he murders

Pompilia according to his own designs, and successful execution of his plan is

thwarted by the “devil” of contingency:

Oh, why, why was it not ordained just so?

Why fell not things out so nor otherwise?

Ask that particular devil whose task it is

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To trip the all-but-at-perfection, — slur

The line o’the painter just where paint leaves off

And life begins, — puts ice into the ode

O’the poet while he cries ‘Next stanza — fire!’

Inscribes all human effort with one word,

Artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete!

Being incomplete, the act escaped success. (XI, 1551-60)

The “devil” of contingency personifies the state of lawlessness, in which the poet

and the painter are forced to perform, the less than perfect conditions in which the

artist-murderer attempts to actualize his abstract plan. This is the very “devil” of

history itself, which the historian attempts to expel in order to sustain the

referential illusion. The pope’s view of the past remains “incomplete,” though he

envisions his present as its telos. Another history will replace it making the very

same claims about its own present: but only by expelling every trace of its own

past. Guido’s account of the past is explicitly “incomplete.” Because

interpretations of events in the past are contingent on the ceaseless mutations of

the present, history must always be revising itself. His efforts to read the past

results in a palimpsest with visible signs of erasure leading back to all its past

versions. For this reason, The Ring and the Book cannot be read as a history or as a

realist novel. It declines to offer a stable version of the past. It must walk hand in

hand with the present, discarding demoded points-of view, dispersing the

referential illusion that was the bread and butter of nineteenth-century historians.

Prophecy no longer relies on the future for confirmation in Guido’s

monologue; it designates a momentary illumination, a rare glimpse of a new truth

yielded up by the obsolete detritus of the past. The present does not offer a stable

perspective of the past as it does in the pope’s monologue. Rather, its mutations

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striate the past and yield up new meaningful connections. Prophecy as

prognostication and prophesy as revision: Guido’s monologue pits these two

prophetic modes against each other. Scenes he witnessed in the past rearrange

themselves into premonitions pointing the way toward his doom. These anecdotes

make it clear that present circumstances are dictating the way he re-members the

past. Guido recalls his first encounter with the mannaia, a primitive version of the

guillotine, a weapon used by the aristocracy to maintain old privileges “doing

incidental good, ’twas hoped, / to the lesson lacking populace” (XI, 211-12). But

latent in the aristocratic festival of cruelty and death is the realization that in the

morning Guido will be killed by the very same machine:

There’s no such lovely month in Rome as May –

May’s crescent is no half-moon of red plank,

And came now tilting o’er the wave i’ the west

One greenish-golden sea, right ’twixt those bars

Of the engine – I began acquaintance with,

Understood, hated, hurried from before,

To have it out of sight and cleanse my soul. (XI, 250-56)

The imagery expresses a sense of dislocation, the lingering sickness one feels

when getting off a rocking boat. The “greenish-golden sea” appears in Rome, and

makes itself visible between the red uprights of the mannaia. Natural landmarks,

no longer capable of establishing a firm sense of place, have apocalyptic

connotations when it comes to time, the weaker light of the moon “tilting” in the

part of the horizon where the sun sets. The factual encounter with the mannaia is

filled with prophetic resonance. Its inclusion frames Guido’s Apocalypticism,

which is more nihilistic and less dialectic than the pope’s prospectivism.

Compared to the confident prognostications of the pope, however, they signal an

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awareness that our experience of the past is always mediated by our present

circumstances and, consequently, mutable.

In the early hours before the sun rises on the day of his execution, Guido

successfully predicts the outcome of the next papal election. This provides an

instance of the second mode of prophecy. This is the mode that predominates in

the pope’s monologue. For the pope the future promises closure. For Guido it

remains an abstraction. Prognostication, for Guido, is less the sign of divine

authority, than it is mathematical and purely arbitrary. Its culmination is

characteristically anti-climactic, coming long after the point at which Guido’s

struggle could have been resolved, having absolutely no effect on Guido and

probably evident only to those who frequent reference books, study the footnotes

of critical editions, or specialize in the papal politics of the 18th

century. By relying

on the future for self-confirmation, prognostication projects a vision of the past

that remains static and incontestable.

The attitude toward historical time exemplified by Guido and the pope can

be further illustrated by the tropes they use to make sense of the passage of time.

For Guido history is a horizontal network of paths merging at various junctures to

form cross-roads (XI, 954, 959). For the pope, history is a vertical network of

stumbling-blocks and stepping-stones (X, 412). By viewing his past as a flux,

Guido recognizes only a series of suspensions, junctures where things could have

gone either way, contingencies where none were expected. By viewing the past as

a frozen block of time cut off from the present, the pope conceives of history as a

means to a higher end – a “vale of soul-making” not unlike the one that Keats

describes (Greenblatt 951), imprinting divine intelligences with individual

identities – so that the hardships, the “stumbling-blocks” of human history become

the “stepping stones” to a higher unity. But the pope’s vision of the past proves

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incapable of making new meaning of the past; it can only reinforce the barriers

between a fictional past and a present that uses it to legitimize itself.

If, in the words of Browning to his audience, the pope’s monologue offers

“the all but end, the ultimate / judgment save yours” (I, 1220-21), why does

Guido’s monologue stand poised between the pope’s judgment and the point

where the narrative leaves off and leaves us free to judge? Over and against the

pope’s prospectivism, in which prophecy is only capable of moving in a unilateral

sense, Guido’s revisionism has the ability to point to more than one origin. Just as

Guido’s impending execution leads him to revise his reading of the mannaia, the

apocalyptic mood of Guido’s mannaia-visions invokes the French guillotine the

symbol of what would later become the Terror. His revision of the past,

particularly his reading of the mannaia, invokes the alien past of another future.

Guido’s revisions remind us of the affinity different versions of the past share at

the same time as they indicate the shifting ground upon which those projections

into the past are based.

In its ability to resonate beyond both the confines of Guido’s past and the

historical present of The Ring and the Book, the mannaia also directs our attention

to the past of its author. Just as Guido’s monologue suspends the ultimate

judgment of the reader, The Ring and the Book takes place in a pensive age, on the

cusp of the 18th

century between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. History,

like the speakers of these two monologues, seems to be grasping for a way to

begin or end. Rather than accomplish a new beginning or reach a revelatory

ending, the monologists call attention to the force of the referential illusion, the

way it separates the past from the present, and the speaker that stands at either end

of the narrative, the fictionalized author, Robert Browning in propia persona.

Browning’s comments in the paratext of Book 1 are misleading if one thinks of the

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“ultimate judgment” in terms of Guido specifically or any of the other characters

on trial. The judgment that the end of The Ring and the Book inches us towards,

the judgment whose finality is in sight but whose end we can never quite reach,

concerns all the authors of histories, Browning included. The suspensions of the

linear progression of the plot, of moral resolutions, and of history itself, bring the

narrative closer to the present, by unraveling the illusion of an unmediated past.

The Polar Logic of (the Reading) Process

The nineteenth century view of historical time assigns a motive and a

direction to history, whether as decline or progress. The shape of history is no

longer thought of as being dictated by the laws of chance, or by the secret whims

of providence, but by the inscrutable logic of necessity, of final ends working

through the bypaths of their own intricacies. Abrams notes that one of the chief

characteristics of apocalyptic thinking in the nineteenth century is the “polar logic

of process” (12). Blake’s mythologies in which “the tension between contraries”

helps to explain the forces of creation, and the Hegelian dialectic in which “the

driving force of all process. . . is the compulsion within any element to pose, or

else to pass over into its opposite, or contrary, or antithesis” are offered as

instances of the “polar logic of process” at work in the apocalyptic imagination

around the turn of the century (12). Another aspect of this polar logic carries over

to the reading process. The “polar logic of process” as Abrams terms it can help us

define a distinctively apocalyptic attitude towards language. This attitude, which is

evinced throughout the pope’s monologue, traces the fall of language back to a

mythical Babel, and views the defiled medium of history as one which slackens

the ties between sign and referent, positing an end of time in which sign and

referent are joined in a felicitous new unity, the scene of naming depicted in The

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Apocalypse. Guido’s view of language as a differential play problematizes the

notion that his confession presents a true revelation, even as the evidence suggests

his responsivity to the pope’s providential intervention is fundamental to the

poem’s sense of an ending.

From the beginning, the pope’s view of Guido is unapologetically

eschatological. Guido’s “habitual creed” is to present a dissembling image of

himself to the world (X, 520). The challenge for the pope is how to separate

Guido’s true nature from his false representations. Guido is “an ambiguous fish,”

he carries his shell like “a coat of proof, / mailed like a man at arms” (X, 485, 480-

81). Outside the shell he is a “slug,” a “puny starveling,” a “naked blotch” (X, 496,

482, 499)–in short, something nameless, shapeless, difficult to pin down, and

somewhat sinister. The pope rejects the outer semblance, the shell of the

ambiguous fish, and condemns that which evades his ability to classify and to

name. The pope rejects Guido’s shell, as the false image he projects to the world.

But he cannot judge the ambiguous fish that remains after the shell is gone. He

rejects Guido’s shell only to replace it with another referent.

The pope replaces the shell with a logical deduction: Guido’s essential

character, the naked blotch that haunts the shell, is given solid form in Guido’s

“last deliberate act” (X, 521):

as last,

So, very sum and substance of the soul

Of him that planned and leaves one perfect piece,

The sin brought under jurisdiction now,

Even the marriage of the man: this act

I sever from his life as sample, show

For Guido’s self. . . (X, 521-27)

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The last act in a temporal sequence determines the score, so to speak, of the

interplay of ambiguities the pope locates in Guido’s nature. His reading is bound

not just to the notion of a telos, but also to the identity of that telos with a last act:

“for in the last is summed the first and all” (X, 342). The process of interpretation

is sealed up; its meaning is encompassed by a final product. By privileging the

final act in a temporal sequence, the pope is able to eliminate ambiguity. He

replicates the strategy of readers Browning was defending against with his method

of delayed publication, the strategy of jettisoning to the end of a lengthy work in

search of the key to the action.

The pope’s teleology is part of the same polar logic of process that informs

his theory of language; means, both good and bad, serve a common end. But the

pope does not view individuals as composites of these qualities; they fall neatly

into two categories. Guido is on the “edge o’ the precipice” (X, 857), which gives

way to the “flint and fire beneath” (X, 859). His sin is his “craft.” The pope uses

the word “craft” to denote a method of plotting that employs means for

undesignated ends, “for ends so other than man’s end” (X, 571), and he also uses it

to denote a masking, or dissembling. By maintaining a false representation of

himself, Guido takes advantage of the slackness between sign and referent; always

stretching language to its extreme he demonstrates his ability to empty words of

their meaning. As a synonym for plotting, Guido’s “craft” turns the church into a

means for advancement and it uses marriage as a means to make a profit. The pope

associates this designation of “craft” with historical decline: mankind has gotten

“too familiar with the light” of faith, and people no longer use the institutions for

their intended purposes but to serve their own interests (X, 1793).

The pope posits a future state in which the distortions of language will be

overcome, and individuals in each of his categories will be judged. Time and again

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he envisions a beyond and speaks in the name of a god who echoes his judgments.

The pope does not fear god’s judgment. The pope speaks as if he were already

dead: he “stand[s] already in God’s face” and at “God’s judgment-bar” (X, 339,

347). It’s easy to lose track of who is speaking, god or the pope. The pope explains

that once man is weaned from language, we may know there “simply,

instantaneously, as here / after long time and amid many lies, / whatever we dare

think we know indeed” (X, 377-79). There we may experience an unmediated

version of what we already know, “That I am I, as He is He” (X, 380). Our

identities are fluid in the medium of language, the first person singular merges

with the third person and we can never figure out who is saying what. The pope

divides himself into voices—the voice of the pope, the voice of god, the voice of

Guido—unsettling the notion of a sovereign ego that stands accountable. The

pope’s “judgment-bar” reinforces the boundaries of the ego in order to intensify

the bond between sign and referent. For the pope, a firm sense of the bounded self

is necessary in order for history to have a moral meaning. Difference is

demoniacal. The dissolution of identity, or the soul, is synonymous with divine

retribution. If he fails to repent, Guido will enter that “sad obscure sequestered

state / where God unmakes but to remake the soul / He else first made in vain;

which must not be” (X, 2129-31).

Historical decline imposes upon the pope’s teleology but the pope’s

prospectivism casts historical decline as a mirage, a false semblance generated by

the polar process that leads inevitably to the formation of a new heaven and a new

earth. The pope’s prognostications rely on a polarization of the present and the

past, day and night, light and darkness. The dawn has superseded the pagan night;

“noon is now / we have got too familiar with the light” (X, 1792-93). The pope

predicts that the “enlightenment” will renew the old faith by bringing back the

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“doubt discarded” (X, 1854). The darkness merely adds to the luster of an

apocalyptic light, which will seal the deal:

time indeed

A bolt from heaven should cleave roof and clear place,

Transfix and show the world, suspiring flame,

The main offender, scar and brand the rest

Hurrying, each miscreant to his hole. . . (X, 994-98)

The revelation of the “main offender” by a cleaving “bolt from heaven” represents

the final unveiling, a summation of the signifying process and the progress of

history, the prelude to a new felicitous unity of sign and referent that abolishes

difference. The summation of the pope’s monologue leaves room for a reversal, a

change of heart in Guido in the same apocalyptic terms. The pope recalls an

evening in Naples when “night’s black was burst through by a blaze. . . so may the

truth be flashed out by one blow, / and Guido see, one instant, and be saved” (X,

2121, 2126-27).

The pope’s apocalyptism can hardly conceal his solipsism. Unlike the pope,

Guido recognizes that it is easier to gain mastery over the other at the “judgment-

seat” than it is in real life – Pompilia alive offers a greater threat to Guido, than if

she were at the “judgment-seat / where [he] could twist her soul as erst her flesh, /

and turn her truth into a lie” (XI, 1681-3). Guido recognizes the idea of an

absolute ground for judgment is an unstable fiction that can be used to manipulate

the truth. As Adam Potkay explains, Guido rejects the idea of absolute perspective

that grounds our judgments. Instead of omitting an entire history of overlapping

interpretations he “embraces and exploits the fact that our interested and imprecise

interpretations of each other are all we can know” (150). Guido sees that the origin

of difference in our interpretations of the past can be partially traced back to

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differences of class, race, and gender; in short, factors that determine position in a

hierarchy. His interpretation of history conforms to his aristocratic outlook. In his

reading of history and his analysis of historical change Guido is embittered,

caustic, ironic; history reads like a cosmic satire. Individuals negotiate between

their private interests and the interests of the groups they serve. Systems of

morality are arbitrary, part of a group’s way of dealing with internal and external

threats. Notions of good and bad are the result of whatever group happens to

dominate at the time. For Guido, those who believe they are doing good are

merely serving the interests of their group, while those who are branded evil are

done so according to historically specific communal standards, not timeless laws.

The hiatus of judgment in this monologue entices the reader as a metaphor

entices one to wander before arriving at the copula. Guido’s approach to making

meaning threatens to displace the pope’s polarization of sign and referent. Guido

overturns the pope’s distrust of language and embraces the use of metaphor. The

enlargement of Guido’s sense of finitude inspires him to imagine his own end, and

as his metaphors for the self that imagines its own end become more abstract we

become witnesses to the elemental forces behind creation. These are not the

abstract forces of good and evil. They are not the captives of a polar process. Lisa

O’Connor shows us how Guido rejects the metaphorical system of the Church,

which attempts to define him in terms of good and evil, and constructs a self

through metaphor. One of the most common metaphors used to demonize Guido is

the one which compares him to a wolf. The pope refers to Guido as a wolf who

feasts on the lamb-like child of the Comparini (X, 558). But Guido makes it much

harder to collapse the wolf-metaphor into a sign-referent dyad. He introduces a

sheep into the wolf-metaphor and playing with associations between the wolf and

the sheep, challenges our ability to tell them apart. At the beginning of Guido’s

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conceit the pope is a shepherd and Guido is a “sheep [the pope] calls a wolf” (XI,

405). Guido then accuses the pope of being a thief, while identifying himself as a

wolf (XI, 434-35). Finally, Guido permits the pope to remove his “sheepskin-

garb,” but implores him to leave his teeth free (XI, 444). The wolf and the sheep

represent different aspects of Guido. One is playful while the other is submissive.

Unlike the pope’s metaphor of the ambiguous fish with the detachable shell, the

sheep and the wolf cannot be reduced to parts of a single organism. Unlike the

shell in the part-whole relation, the sheep in the predator-prey relation cannot be

subsumed in a larger unity. Guido’s variation on the wolf-metaphor upsets the

pope’s polarization of sign and referent. O’Connor also notes that “by making

himself a wolf and retaining the image of sheep-thief for the pope, [Guido]

removes any moral dichotomy between the Church and himself. In terms of the

traditional Christian metaphor, both he and the Church must now be seen as

morally reprehensible, destructive and anti-social” (143). Like language, morality

becomes the product of a differential play of elemental social forces.

Guido is not concerned with the end so much as he is concerned with the

idea of finitude. While the pope’s monologue was apocalyptic because it sought

ways to foreground its “last act” as its telos, the imagery of Guido’s monologue is

“apocalyptic” in a different sense: he is drawn to the violent side of nature and

becoming. His metaphors register the endless series of changes from a sheep to a

wolf, from viscous fire to “stone and ore” (XI, 2066), from “a foothold in the sea”

to a wave (XI, 2295). Death is a violence that unleashes itself like the crest of a

wave or the eruption of a volcano. Guido is left “with something changeless at the

heart of me. . . some nucleus that’s myself” (XI, 2392-93). This is not the

“essential self” posited against a false semblance but the fluid substance of reality

freed from the snare of all the “accretions” that add up to make an individual

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personality. It is neither the rock the wave beats against or the sea but the sea and

the rock together in a ceaseless process of becoming. These elemental forces can

never be subordinated in a single process. The metaphors pile up on each other

without ever coming to term.

The end of Guido’s monologue reinforces our sense of the liminality of his

speech. Guido’s “cry of salvation” is a continuation of his construction of a self

through metaphor rather than the fulfillment of a telos. While the pope’s reflection

on final ends compliments the sense of finality with which he finally dispatches

the letter that will either save or sink Guido, Guido’s verbal play reinforces the

anticlimax of the last-ditch reversal that marks off his monologue. Guido fumbles

around in his mode of address as the guards come to take him away. His train of

thought is forced to respond to changes in his immediate surroundings. As we read

his final lines we feel as if the end may be suspended again indefinitely. Guido

cannot quite settle on an object of address:

Don’t open! Hold me from them! I am yours

I am the Granduke’s –no, I am the Popes!

Abate, —Cardinal, —Christ, —Maria, —God,…

Pompilia, will you let them murder me? (XI, 2422-25)

On one hand this fumbling makes it seem as if Guido has awakened out of some

realm of inexistence, finally forced to face key existential facts. It’s as if he has

momentarily jolted into an awareness of his interlocutors. On the other hand, the

point his befuddled address leaves off is arbitrary. The names merely help him

recognize his surroundings. Guido is merely back to the place where he began his

monologue. Startled out of himself he must begin again a long process of

redefinition. The structure of language is a metaphor within a metaphor. The

accretions pile up until the thread can no longer support itself. It splits. The objects

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of address collapse into another metaphor like the crest of a giant wave. The sense

of awakening is very prominent in this scene, and it helps to reinforce the sense of

suspended animation in Guido’s monologue. Guido’s end is the anti-climax of

awakening.

In the view of Langbaum, Guido’s request fulfills the desire for apocalyptic

revelation that asserts itself throughout the pope’s monologue.3 Though the

revelatory moment is too belated to establish a sense of closure, there is no reason

we should cast aside the possibility that Browning was aiming for such an effect.

The trouble from the beginning was how he could justify digging around the

stubble and debris of a sordid murder-case without affording some kind of

compensatory telos for his audience. Even the historical evidence backs up this

interpretation. Allingham records Browning advertising the remainder of the poem

after making a gift of the second volume:

still talk of The Ring and the Book: ‘a builder will tell you

sometimes of a house, “there’s twice as much work underground as

above,” and so it is with my poem. Guido’s not escaping better, man

won’t give him post-horses; the Pope, as Providence; Guido has time

for confession, etc.’ (195)

Browning wanted to give his readers a reason to reach the end, and a

compensation for getting there, but he wanted them to go through the process

themselves.

But he was still revising the end up to the end. Herein lies the uncanniness

of a literary ending. There is rarely a trace of all the endings of a work that were

revised or second-guessed or merely left out. The letters to Wedgwood show that

3 See Langbaum’s defense of this position in “Is Guido Saved?”.

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he had at least one other ending in mind. So why does Browning leave off with

Guido’s monologue? Guido offers an anticlimactic culmination of the pope’s

telos, and any addition beyond that point would have been in excess of this

configuration. But are there any other possible reasons for using Guido here?

I grant that the ending invites an eschatological reading of the poem, but

my argument is that this does not mitigate everything that came before the end, the

two thousand lines or so before Guido finally concedes that everything up to that

point was a lie. The revelation fails to convince because it is overwhelmed by the

context, the context not only of Guido’s revisionary testimony, but also of the

perspectivism inherent in the poem’s method of interrogating the past.

Furthermore, Guido’s deconstruction of the pope’s polar logic helps us see the

extent to which our histories are fictions constructed out of the available facts and

contingent on the circumstances of the present. Our perspective of language,

whether we view it as an open-system or as a closed-system, informs the way we

approach the past. Guido’s reprisal of the polar process of reading democratizes

the experience of reading history by providing an alternative to the referential

illusion and opening up possibilities for re-visionary thinking.

The strategy of translating the eschatological concerns of the Victorian long

poem into an investigation of the practice of reading and rewriting history shows

how thoroughly Browning was able to turn that convention on its head. He never

felt comfortable in the prophetic mode, unless prophecy could be redefined, not as

looking toward the prospective end of time, but as redirecting our gaze to the

artifacts of a bygone past.

CHAPTER 5: BROWNING AND THE CITY

It’s difficult to think of Robert Browning as an apocalyptic poet, whether

we associate the “apocalyptic” with an unveiling or with the end of the world, and

in this sense he is distinct from most of his contemporaries.1 Although his genre of

choice, the dramatic monologue, manages to replicate the Johannine Apocalypse,

if not surpass it, in its proliferation of voices, possible destinations and ironies of

translation, Browning is not apocalyptic in any of the above senses. Browning,

unlike his contemporaries, views history as a plenum of voices and possible

destinations rather than a void. As an apocalyptic poet, he is quite alone in

celebrating the city and in converting it to a formal equivalent of his poem.

Christina Rossetti’s fin de siècle musings in “Babylon the Great” (1892) can serve

here as a representative example of the conventional apocalyptic attitude toward

the city. I quote from the last lines of the poem, which is a sonnet. Note the

interiority of address, as the speaker models the voice of conscience, or the

disembodied voice of the angel commanding Lot not to look back at the city in

flames, characteristic of the lyric:

Gaze not upon her, lest thou be as she

When at the far end of her long desire

Her scarlet vest and gold and gem and pearl

And she amid her pomp are set on fire. (Roe 181)

Apocalyptic poets have never been fond of cities. Rossetti’s speaker adopts the

high ground here, invoking the biblical Apocalypse in which Babylon is

personified as a harlot and is destroyed along with the earth and the vast majority

of its inhabitants. In the tradition that proceeds from the Romantics the country is

1 In describing Browning as an apocalyptic poet I am, of course, alluding to Derrida’s definition

of the apocalyptic, as outlined in the first chapter of this thesis.

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the metaphorical equivalent of the high ground. Even the New Jerusalem

resembles the insularity of a small country town more than it does the pluralism of

the big city. The mistrust of city life; the emphasis on purges and epidemics; the

fear of the popular and the populous—these approaches to the city were

institutionalized by the Romantics, and they continue to lie at the root of modern

day millennialism from the racialism of the early twentieth century to the

environmentalism of the twenty-first. Rossetti is part of a long line of nineteenth-

century poets who draw heavily on apocalyptic imagery in their depictions of the

city. William Blake concludes with a “harlot’s cry” in “London,” while

Wordsworth paints the perils of the city in his tableau of the “Parliament of

Monsters” in the The Prelude. For the most part, Victorian poets, like their

Romantic predecessors, replicate the same single-minded hostility towards the city

as John of Patmos, the author of Apocalypse, notable for his depiction of a scarlet

Babylon drinking the blood of martyrs from a golden chalice, while seated on a

beast with seven heads and ten horns.

The perspective of the city Rossetti imposes on us in “Babylon the Great”

is just as much a function of the lyric persona she elects for her speaker, than it is

of a definable attempt to represent the city; the description, is not of a city at all,

but it is implied that the addressee who ignores her command not to look back, and

the harlot who is set on fire, share the same fate. The city itself is a metonym for

the world that turns its back on the message of the prophet, here the lyric poet; the

city is a function of the dominance of the speaker over the addressee. If we turn

now to Wordsworth’s Prelude in the earlier part of the century we see a similar

mode of address being adopted. The only difference is that this time, the role of

the speaker is more overtly didactic. The interiority of address is evident in the use

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of the pronoun “us”, which indicates that the speaker includes himself among

those he addresses:

For once the Muse’s help will we implore,

And she shall lodge us, wafted on her wings,

Above the press and danger of the Crowd,

Upon some Showman’s platform. . . (Wordsworth 484)

The muse is noticeably inaudible, serving only to hoist us along with the poet in a

position where we can view “the wide area. . . alive / with heads” occupied by the

crowd below us, “with those that stretch the neck, and strain the eyes, / And crack

the voice in rivalship” (Wordsworth 485). In contrast to the crowd, our line of

sight is unobstructed, and the voice we hear is clear and unencumbered. Here we

are privileged, along with the speaker to the earthly equivalent of a transcendent

perspective, a moral high ground that compliments the speaker’s ability to pierce

the spectacle, to see “the parts / as parts, but with a feeling of the whole” (VII,

712-13). The mode of address Wordsworth chooses does not allow him to pause

and consider whether the reader might rather prefer the limited perspective of

those in the crowd below us, whether, paradoxically, we might have more freedom

as readers if the speaker were to acknowledge the provisory nature of his

perspective, perceiving that there is no high ground that does not already

presuppose another finite perspective a little higher and little further on down the

road from our own. The lyric poet’s inability to adopt a position from below

makes the city into yet another figure for his alienation from the crowd and his

rejection of limited, historicized angles of vision. Authority is less a function of

the poem’s negotiation between finite points of view, than of the sincerity of the

author’s vision.

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Browning found many ways to overcome the polarization of nature and art

which led the Romantics to retreat from the city and the prospect of a popular

audience, and The Ring and the Book comes into its own as a long poem that

manages to break out of the apocalyptic denigration of the city and celebrate it by

raising it to a formal equivalent for his poem. His appropriation of the city is

apocalyptic in the sense that we can never be sure who speaks for whom, whether

the city speaks for Browning or Browning for the city. The idea that Browning

speaks through a monologist, in a historicized situation, only serves to amplify the

bewilderingly apocalyptic connotations of his city, a city that is both literal and

metaphorical. His monologists in The Ring and the Book, nine of them in all,

constitute a city of dissonant voices, a city dispersed geographically, situated

tangentially on the “round from Rome to Rome” (I, 526). Our notion of the

identity of Browning is in a sense a result and a compilation of all these voices he

creates; he speaks through the city and the city speaks through him, the city that

“rounds his ring” (I, 1389). He is at once a cartographer, feeling his way about the

monuments and landmarks that populate his city, and an archive, an amanuensis of

the first-person testimony of each inhabitant that crowds his teeming brain.

Contact with the city was, for Browning like Whitman, a palliative, and an

incitement to pass on information. The following passage, taken from the letter of

the Venetian visitor in Book XII, highlights Browning’s move from a Romantic

investment in first person lyricism to a post-Romantic emphasis on third person

observation, while it retains the secondhand attributes of recorded speech that

clearly demarcate it from the naratological conventions of historical realism.

Notice the stress placed on the “crowd” as a secondhand source of information:

Now did a car run over, kill a man,

Just opposite a pork-shop numbered Twelve:

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And bitter were the outcries of the mob

Against the Pope: for, but that he forbids

The Lottery, why, twelve were Tern Quatern!

Now did a beggar by Saint Agnes, lame

From his youth up, recover use of leg,

Through prayer of Guido as he glanced that way:

So that the crowd near crammed his hat with coin. (XII, 154-62)

The “now” that begins each of these sentences echoes the beginning of Swift’s

“Description of the Morning” (1709), a poem which offers an historical analogue

to Rome in the last decade of the seventeeth century. The Venetian visitor

approximates the irony of Swift’s town eclogue, as an accidental death is

translated by the mob into a potential source of revenue, and a beggar’s lameness

is exploited for a pittance. The main difference is that while Swift’s poem

maintains the reserve of civic mindedness and condescension, the Venetian

visitor’s address is a function of the excitement he receives from the crowd; his

description gives him a sense of satisfaction as if he were present in the crowd. Its

objectivity is not a function of its official detachment, but of its transparent

permeability, its ability to mix subject and object and merge with the crowd-as-

witness. In this passage, which is representative of Browning’s characteristic

approach, the city is not only a series of coordinating physical landmarks—the

“pork-shop numbered Twelve” and “Saint Agnes”—but also a proliferation of

voices which, while remaining attributes of a third person separate from the

speaker, interpenetrate with the speaker’s own.

Browning’s city is an odd assemblage, a mixed bag of speakers and

interlocutors of varying social status dispersed in physical locations that resemble

his historicized situations in their ability to effect the reception and ultimately

98 98

undermine the authority of the scripts they perform. Though most of the poem

takes place in Rome, Henry James specifically recalls the flea market where

Browning purchases the Old Yellow Book in Book I as he compares the

experience of reading the poem to finding his way around the “old Florence,” a

city illuminated by its “old-world litter heavy with a “strange weight” that is “at

once a caress and a menace” (401). James’s metaphor of Browning as a street

peddler highlights the role of performativity in Browning’s cityscape:

He takes his willful way with me, but I make it my own, picking

over and over as I have said like some lingering talking pedlar’s [sic]

client, his great unloosed pack; and thus it is that by the time I am

settled with Pompilia at Arezzo I have lived into all the conditions.

They press upon me close, those wonderful dreadful particulars of

the Italy of the eve of the eighteenth century – Browning himself

moving about darting hither and thither in them at his mighty ease. .

. I make to my hand, as this infatuated reader, my Italy of the eve of

the eighteenth century – a vast painted and gilded rococo shell

roofing over a scenic, an amazingly figured and furnished earth, but

shutting out almost the whole of our own dearly-bought, rudely-

recovered spiritual-sky. (402)

James’s analogy offers an illustration of “porosity,” a concept that Walter

Benjamin uses to express “the confrontation between a modern sensibility and a

premodern environment, to articulate what may be termed the ‘shock of the old’”

(Gilloch 34). Porosity describes “a lack of clear boundaries between phenomena, a

permeation of one thing by another, a merger of, for example, old and new, public

and private, sacred and profane” (Gilloch 25). While the city surpasses any book

in its capacity to present this permeation in space, the term offers an interesting

99 99

analogue to the apocalyptic as a proliferation and disorientation of addresses and

possible destinations. The key difference between this conception of the

apocalyptic and the one we are accustomed to, is that on the one hand, the reader

is lifted by the muse above the particulars, while on the other hand the particulars

crowd upon us and we are left to pick them over. Authority becomes the common

property of a poet who, like a street peddler, forms a moving archive of facts and

the reader who can afford to appropriate them.

By appropriating the city as a formal ideal, something to be celebrated

rather than demonized, Browning permits us to shift our focus from a temporal

apocalypse, an end of time, where the burden of history loosens and the quest for

eternity begins, to a porosity that spatializes time and history.

His poem strives to be a palimpsest and not a line lifted over the void. In

this thesis, I have shown how, by immersing his own persona in the poem’s city of

impersonators, he denies the privilege of a transcendent perspective, and cedes

responsibility for the meaning of the poem to the reader; how he questions the

ethics and politics of appropriating the voice and exploiting the death of departed

citizens of his makeshift polis; and how he challenges the presentism and

prospectivism of nineteenth-century historiography through a recursive and re-

visionary layering of monologues. Hopefully this enables us to see the poem as a

feature in the landscape of our modernity, a brightly populated city in the vicinity

of now.

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