Dramatic Monologue (Routledge Revivals)

Alan Sinfield

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415837668
• eBook ISBN: 9781135040550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1977, this book looks at the versatile literary form of dramatic monologue. Although it is often associated with Browning and other poets writing between 1830 and 1930, the concept has been employed by diverse poets of multiple periods such as Ovid, Chaucer, Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. In this study, Alan Sinfield demonstrates and analyses the range and adaptability of the form through detailed examples. He shows that the technique maintains a shifting and uncertain balance between the voices of the poet and of his created speaker; when extended, as in Maud, Amours de Voyage, The Ring and the Book, and The Wasteland, the use of dramatic monologue raises questions of personality and perception.

In the second part of the text, the author discusses the origins of Victorian and Modernist dramatic monologue in the dramatic complaint and the Ovidian verse epistle of earlier periods, offering a new interpretation of the value of dramatic monologue to Browning and Tennyson. Through his writing, Alan Sinfield successfully highlights the eternal vibrance of the form.

1
Two poems by Browning

An anonymous reviewer of Browning's volume Men and Women (1855) wondered:

Why one who can pour out his thoughts, fancies, stores of learning, and emotions, with an eloquence and direct sincerity such as this, should, so often as Mr Browning has here done, prefer to rhyme the pleadings of a casuist, or the arguments of a critic, of the ponderous discoursings of some obselete schoolman why he should turn away from themes in which every one can answer to his sympathies, and from modes of the lyre which find their echoes wherever hearts and ears know aught of music is an enigma no less painful than perplexing, the unriddling of which is possibly reserved for no contemporary.

(Browning, The Critical Heritage, p. 157)

The reviewer had in mind poems like 'My Last Duchess', 'The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed's Church', 'Andrea del Sarto', 'Fra Lippo Lippi' and 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', where there is a first-person speaker who is not the poet. He is set in a specific situation on a particular occasion; he alone speaks, but partly in response to a silent auditor.

'Fra Lippo Lippi' begins thus:

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face,
Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!
What, it's past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley's end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar.

It is a tense moment because the watch are supposed to arrest monks found out of their cloisters at night, but they are impressed when Lippi says he is a painter in the household of Cosimo de' Medici, He chatters on exuberantly about how he was tempted by a jovial carnival party to clamber from his window, but sensing some disapproval explains that he was drawn by poverty into the monastery as a child. His talent as a painter made him appreciated but he is no saint; indeed, it is the faces and bodies of people in their marvellous variety which delight him, though the Prior tells him 'to paint the souls of men'. But God made the world:

- For what? do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair town's face, yonder river's line,
The mountain round it and the sky above,
Much more the figures of man, woman, child,
These are the frame to? What's it all about?
To be passed o'er, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course, you say.

By his painting, he declares, he may 'Interpret God to all of you!' Yet he goes too far in his enthusiasm and independence from church orthodoxy and has once more to draw back:

- That is - you'll not mistake an idle word
Spoke in a huff by a poor monk, God wot,
Tasting the air this spicy night which turns
The unaccustomed head like Chianti wine!
Oh, the church knows! don't misreport me, now!

To regain his audience he describes a picture he proposes to paint of God amidst the blessed:

up shall come
Out of a corner when you least expect,
As one by a dark stair into a great light,
Music and talking, who but Lippo! I! -
Mazed, motionless and moon-struck - I'm the man!

- and he will be welcomed into heaven by 'a sweet angelic slip of a thing'. The poem ends when Lippi shakes hands and scuttles back to his room.

I have begun with a bemused critic of Browning and 'Fra Lippo Lippi' because Browning is the most celebrated writer of dramatic monologues and this is one of his most celebrated poems, and because perplexity and discouragement is still sometimes the main critical response. In a book such as this it would no doubt be helpful to start with a definition of the form, but there is no generally agreed approach. Two main alternatives appear: to start from 'Fra Lippo Lippi' and Browning's other famous poems and construct a genre which will hold just those few instances; and to postulate a wide category within which Browning's poems are special cases. Most criticism has done the former, and that is the policy we will pursue in the present chapter.

If we are to define dramatic monologue as 'poems like "Fra Lippo Lippi"' then we may add to the properties already remarked - a first-person speaker not the poet, a time and place, an auditor - revelation of character, colloquial language and some dramatic interaction between speaker and auditor. It may then seem that dramatic monologue is a truncated play. If the principal elements of drama are, as Aristotle said, plot and character, then dramatic monologue has very little plot and only one real character. Hence we may conclude that it is a substitute for playwriting for those who have little skill with plot; or, more generously, that it is a kind of drama specially suited to those whose main interest is in character.

'Fra Lippo Lippi' is plainly designed at least in part to display character. The first-person presentation focuses attention upon Lippi, who is made to reveal himself directly through his own speech. The poet does not intervene explicitly to direct our judgment; we experience the richness of human life almost with the impact of a personal encounter. Notice also that the situation and auditor Browning provides place Lippi upon the defensive: his words are influenced by an external pressure so that we see two sides of him, as it were, interacting. Lippi as he thinks of himself and as he is obliged to justify himself in his society are both aspects of the man and each is in part a compromise with the other. We may add to our list of properties, therefore, the notions that the poet does not take a direct role and that the revelation of character is to some extent unwitting. We understand more about the speaker than he intends to reveal to his auditor and than the poet actually states.

We may take another instance, 'My Last Duchess'. Browning's speaker in this poem is an Italian Renaissance duke; he displays a picture of his 'last Duchess'. She seems to have been a charmingly unaffected lady, gracious to rich and poor alike, but the Duke was not satisfied:

She thanked men, - good; but thanked
Somehow ... I know not how ... as if she ranked
My gift of a nine hundred years old name
With anybody's gift.

He adds the sinister comment,

This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.

The implication is that if he did not kill her he contributed, perhaps by his unpleasantness, to her death. It is at this point that we realize that he is speaking to the envoy of the count whose daughter is to be his next wife:

The Count your Master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object.

(Notice the ambiguity of 'object'.) And finally, as they descend the stairs, he points out a statue of Neptune 'Taming a sea-horse... Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me'.

The Duke is obviously a far less appealing figure than Lippi. His egotism demands that he be the focus of all attention. He is happiest with the Duchess when she is trapped in a painting - and even then no one else is normally allowed to look at it - like the statue of Neptune which was made 'for me'. Again the speaker reveals more about himself than he imagines. He says of the Duchess,

My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace - all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least.

The evocative natural imagery allows the reader to infer the pleasant nature of the Duchess. It is communicated through the Duke's words, but he is quite unable to appreciate it.

We also ask ourselves why the Duke tells all this to the envoy. Will it not deter the next match? Critics disagree: some think the Duke is so self-possessed that he doesn't care what anyone thinks, some that he intends a warning to the next duchess. I see him as less in control. He seems to believe that his egotism manifests his great nobility: he asks, 'Who'd stoop to blame/This sort of trifling?' But he does stoop, he is so petty-minded that he cannot stand it when his wife smiles at a servant. I would argue that his meditation runs on further than he had intended. He is still obsessed with the remarkable girl he failed to dominate, and impelled to justify to himself and others his ruthless response.

The possibility of such varying interpretations of the Duke's words, and the fact that in any event he is hardly attractive, illustrate more fully than 'Fra Lippo Lippi' the effects of the poet's withdrawal from explicit comment on his creations.

One consequence of the poet's reticence is that we are obliged to give consideration to attitudes which in other circumstances we would find repellent. The first-person mode of the poem means that we have no way of understanding what is happening without passing through the Duke's perception of it and thus, temporarily at least, sharing his approach. It is difficult for the reader or audience in a play or novel to resist altogether the point of view of the character through whose perceptions an action is mediated or whose mind is most fully revealed. That is why we feel with Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth. In dramatic monologue this effect reaches its strongest form. To comprehend even the simplest factors of time and place we must look through the speaker's eyes and enter his mind, and this requires an exercise of sympathy which influences our attitude to him. 'Look at it this way', we say when trying to persuade someone, and that is the strategy of dramatic monologue.

In his book The Poetry of Experience (ch. 2) Robert Langbaum stresses the sympathetic draw of the first person and contends further that it inhibits the reader's judgment of the speaker. This has not been generally accepted, for most commentators find that although we must initially involve ourselves with the Duke, this does not prevent us ultimately from disapproving of him. It may well be that the more we understand him the less we like him.

Indeed, a second consequence of the poet's withdrawal from explicit judgment is that we are stimulated to infer his opinions obliquely from details of the presentation. We intuit Browning's attitude to the Duke from nuances like the imagery of sunset and a bough of cherries which suggest that the Duchess was a delightful person; from the remark about 'stooping' which invites us to consider whether the Duke is as exalted as he claims; and from the final mention of Neptune and the sea-horse which confirms the Duke's egocentricity (it was made 'for me'), his cruelty (the seahorse is analogous to the Duchess) and his inhumanity (in making the Duchess just one of his collection of objects). Yet we cannot be sure that we have the exclusive interpretation. Judgment is not blocked but is indirect and depends upon our individual reading. 'My Last Duchess' is continuously and radically ironic, for every line consists simultaneously of the Duke's statements and Browning's implications which we must work to realize in ourselves.

A definition of dramatic monologue constructed from these two poems, then, should include a first-person speaker who is not the poet and whose character is unwittingly revealed, an auditor whose influence is felt in the poem, a specific time and place, colloquial language, some sympathetic involvement with the speaker, and an ironic discrepancy between the speaker's view of himself and a larger judgment which the poet implies and the reader must develop.

2
A broader view

The definition reached at the end of the previous chapter has several disadvantages. It is cumbersome; it will serve for only a few poems; and it is not likely that a description of the properties of one or two poems, even though they may be superlative instances, will give us the perspective from which to analyse the essential qualities of the form. Moreover, the definition is undermined already by important differences of emphasis in the poems. Lippi is a naturally sympathetic figure and we enjoy making his acquaintance, whereas the Duke is selfish and cruel and attracts only the temporary involvement needed to understand the poem; he is far more ironically perceived. The roles of the auditors differ. The envoy in 'My Last Duchess' does not, like the watch, affect materially what the speaker says; rather, his mere presence makes us wonder that the Duke is prepared to speak thus before him. And 'Fra Lippo Lippi' is much the more colloquial and dramatic poem. If we bring into consideration other monologues by Browning, let alone Tennyson, the position becomes even less satisfactory.

Such a tight definition of the form helps to describe those two poems but affords little basis for a general understanding of the mode of such poems and their historical significance. In this chapter, therefore, I mean to take the opposite approach, starting from the broadest defintion of dramatic monologue as simply a poem in the first person spoken by, or almost entirely by, someone who is indicated not to be the poet. This is what Browning had in mind when he said that many of his poems 'are called "Dramatic" because the story is told by some actor in it, not by the poet himself' (The Athenaeum, January 1890). Such a broad approach will admit to consideration very many poems which do not satisfy all the criteria in the constricting definition but which, in my view, have a good deal in common with Browning's poems. I mean to look now at some of these examples and thus to open out the conception of what dramatic monologue, broadly defined, may achieve - though my full analysis is reserved for the next chapter. We will find that the use of a speaker other than the poet can produce a range of effects and that the specification developed in the previous chapter represents only one set of possibilities.

We may begin by insisting that the Victorians did not invent the dramatic monologue of unwitting character revelation by a first-person speaker without the poet's direct intervention. Rochester gives us an example in 'A Very Heroical Epistle from my Lord All-pride to Doll-Common' (1679; also called 'A very Heroical Epistle in Answer to Ophelia') - it will be appreciated that with the present broad definition the 'speaker' of dramatic monologue may as well be a writer. Rochester explained, 'Doll-Common being forsaken by my Lord-All Pride and having written him a most lamentable Letter, his Lordship sends her the following answer'. It begins,

Madam,
If your deceiv'd, it is not by my Cheat,
For all disguises, are below the Great
What Man, or Woman, upon Earth can say,
I ever us'd 'em well above a Day?
How is it then, that I inconstant am?
He changes not, who always is the same.

Lord All-Pride is as pleased with himself as Browning's Duke and means to impress his reader, but we are likel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Two poems by Browning
• 2 A broader view
• 3 Manners of speaking
• 4 Super-monologues
• 5 Before the Victorians
• 6 The Victorians
• 7 'So I assumed a double part'
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index