Definition dramatic monologue trial#

The speakers of the monologues reveal as much about themselves as they do about the murder-which is the main purpose of a dramatic monologue: to reveal the character of the speaker. The verse novel is an experiment in dialectical writing, a story told through nine different filters (one character, the murderer Guido Franceschini, speaks two books), nine characters with their own preconceptions and circumstances which color their versions of the truth. The “Ring” of the title may refer to an actual ring or to the ring of stories which attempt to arrive at the truth of the murder case.

Definition dramatic monologue trial#

In the introductory Book I, Browning describes walking through a street market in Florence and purchasing what he called The Old Yellow Book, a compilation of documents pertaining to the trial from which he drew the story conveyed in The Ring and the Book. After their marriage and move to Florence, Italy, the most productive period of Browning’s life began with the publication of Men and Women in 1855.īrowning’s magnum opus The Ring and the Book is a verse novel consisting of twelve books, ten books presenting ten dramatic monologues recounting a sensational murder trial that took place in Italy in 1698. Or from Browning some “Pomegranate,” which, if cut deep down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.įeeling as if he’d found someone who understood his poetry, Browning began corresponding with Barrett and, through mutual friend John Kenyon, one of London’s literati, arranged to meet her. The negative critical reception much of Browning’s early work received may account for the exceptional notice he took of Elizabeth Barrett’s mention of him in her poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”: Although he did not invent the dramatic monologue form, he perfected it and used it so well that it has come to be closely associated with Browning. His next published long poem Sordello was ravaged by critics and popular writers of the time, such as Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle, and earned Browning a reputation for “obscurity” which persists to the present.īrowning’s attempts at writing plays did lead him to develop a form for which he is most well-known, the dramatic monologue, a poem spoken by a single speaker to a recognizable but silent audience at a critical moment in the speaker’s life.

Encouraged by an actor friend, William Macready, Browning attempted to write several plays, none of which was particularly successful on stage.

His early poems, such as Pauline and Paracelsus, attracted little attention.

His father collected a voluminous library, and, disliking school, Browning grew up largely self educated in his father’s library, both he and his sister Sarianna immersed in a household filled with music, art, and literature. Robert Browning was born in 1812, the son of a prosperous bank clerk and a nonconformist, musical mother.