A dramatic monologue
is dramatic discourse usually employing the following elements: a fiction
speaker, an implied audience, a symbolic setting, dramatic gestures, and
emphasis on speaker’s subjectivity.
Dramatic monologues provide interesting snapshots of the speakers and
their personalities.
Robert
Browning is often considered the master of the form of the dramatic monologue –
if not the first to “inaugurate [the
first] to perfect this poetic form.” In Browning’s dramatic monologues the
speakers lay bare his inner thoughts and feelings –that is why they are
regarded as the soul studies. Browning admits: “the soul is the stage; moods and thoughts are characters.” He
emphasizes: “My stress lay on the incidents in
the development of a soul: little else is worth study.”
Well-known for his expertise of dramatic monologue, Browning made a special feature of it in his work. The dramatic monologue verse form allowed Browning to explore and probe the minds of specific characters. This particular format allowed Browning to maintain a great distance between himself and his creations: by channeling the voice of a character, Browning could expose evil without actually being evil himself. His characters served as personae that let him adopt different traits and tell stories.
Browning’s terrific monologues worked as a tool to examine issues of the day that may not have been examined otherwise, particularly domestic abuse and religious hypocrisy. Browning has popularized dramatic monologue influencing Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and many other British poets of the next generations.
The typical speaker of a Browning monologue is aggressive, often threatening, nearly always superior intellectually or socially to the listener, a typically eloquent rhetorician who has complete control over what he speaks and which is capable of lying. The speaker is often attempting to use his words to alter radically his listener’ perception.
One of the best illustrations of Browning’s psychological analysis can be seen in the depiction of the Duke in My Last Duchess. The combination of villain and aesthete in the Duke creates an especially strong tension, and Browning exploits the combination to the fullest. The crafty duke wants to overwhelm emissary by his meandering insinuation as well as overpowering intimidation.
As a chronicler of “events and incidents in the development of
soul” Robert Browning often allows his speaker to reveal or condemn his own
behavior. The Duke is authoritarian and expected absolute obedience from his
Duchess. Daunted by his wife’s freedom of spirit, he complains that she “was too easily impressed” by anyone and
did not appreciate his “gift of nine
hundred years old name”. As she did not reserve the singularity of her “earnest glance” solely for him, the Duke was embarrassed by her flirtious nature. When her behavior escalated, “[he] gave commands; /Then all smiles
stopped together.” Although the Duke was unable to control
the duchess when she was alive, after her death he is in complete control of
her as he puts it: “… none puts by the
curtain I have drawn for you but I”, revealing that how he values the most
beautiful things he can control. On their descent he points to a bronze bust of
Neptune taming a horse–again signifying his controlling nature.
“Porphyria’s Lover” is another shocking example of domestic violence. The young Porphyria, venturing all the social and physical barriers, comes to her deranged lover and makes herself ready for him. The lover, swelled with pride and happiness, decides to capture and eternalize that moment: “I found/A thing to do, and all her hair/In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around/And strangled her.” He justifies his murder by claiming that she felt no pain – “No pain felt she/I am quite sure she felt no pain” – and that she now is happy – “Her head, which droops upon it still/The smiling rosy little head/ So glad it has its utmost will.”
The dramatic monologue “The
Bishop orders his Tomb” is another well accomplished work, notable both for
its command of voice and its sharp psychological portrait of the dying bishop.
The bishop has obviously broken almost every rule of conduct imposed by the
Church on the clergy; yet he deludes himself that he has earned the right to a
magnificent tomb in a choice spot in the church. The bishop admits to his own vanity quoting
the Bible in the very first line of the poem: “Vanity, saith the preacher vanity”, yet it is the least of his
sins. He has fathered children out of wedlock: “Nephews – sons mine…ah, God, I know not!, covets what others have:
“Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my
care;/ Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South/He graced his carrion
with, God curse the same!”
The bishop has rejected the scriptural teachings of God and
instead embraces his own notion or Paradise, He notes how a magnificent tomb
will equate him with “the airy dome
where live/The angels.”
As he continues to describe the magnificence of his
tomb, he notices that his sons are whispering to each other and comes to
realisation that they are plotting against him by replacing his precious Lapis Lazuli with ordinary travertine.
He pleads them to at least decorate his tomb in jasper and choose an epitaph
worthy of his legacy. He tries to evoke their conscience by saying that, “A ye hope/To revel down my villas while I
grasp/Bricked over with beggars mouldy travertine/Which Gandolf from his
tomb-top chuckles at”
When he realises that his sons will work dishonourably
against him, he falls to accusing them of ingratitude He resorts to threats as
the monologue concludes: “All lapis, all,
sons! Else I give the Pope/My villas!”
E. T. Young observes: “The
poem is penetrating study of soul dissection and the emotions which welter in
the bishop’s mind.”
Another beautiful illustration of interior monologue is the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”, in
which a splenetic monk grumbles against his fellow monk. It begins with the
speaker trying to articulate the sounds of his “heart’s abhorrence” for a fellow friar. Presenting himself as the
model of righteousness, the speaker condemns Friar Lawrence for his immorality;
but we soon recognize that the faults he assigns to Lawrence are in fact his
own. Perhaps most importantly, the speaker describes a bargain he would make
with Satan to hurt Lawrence, which reveals the malevolence and hypocrisy on his
part.
On the whole, it can be safely said that Browning uses his
dramatic monologue in the most peculiar and exemplary fashion to yield an
unfamiliar and unheard of art product that was to glorify his legacy for
generations to come.