Lecture 10 Dr Milena Škobo 2018/2019 ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889) Lecture 10 Dr Milena Škobo 2018/2019

POPULARITY one of the most important poets of the Victorian period dramatic monologues The Ring and the Book - 1868-1869 “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” –included in Bells and Pomegranites No. III. — Dramatic Lyrics (1842)

BIOGRAPHY born on 7 May 1812 in Camberwell (London’s suburb) father- the son of a wealthy banker; a clerk in the Band of England; scholarly interests, unusual educational practices; sent to the West Indies to make his fortune; his artistic dreams were destroyed due to the family necessity mother – religious, of German-Scotch origin, love of music both parents –supportive of their son’s profession

EARLY CAREER search for an appropriate poetic form Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833) – Paracelsus (1835) alliance between Browning and the actor Macready resulted in two children poems: “The Cardinal and the Dog” -a short poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” – a narrative poem

“The Pied Piper” Dramatic Lyrics and Romances “My Last Duchess” “Porphyria’s Lover”

“How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix“ published in Bells and Pomegranates. No. VII.—Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (1845) printed separately included in children’s school texts

MARRIAGE Elizabeth Barret Browning In 1846 they secretly married Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning (“Pen”) Browning took particular responsibility for his son’s education

THE BROWNING SOCIETY dedicated to the study of the poet’s work and thought “The Cardinal and the Dog” Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World

CRITICAL EVALUATION T.S. Eliot Ezra Pound Period after the WWII

THE RENAISSANCE vs. VICTORIAN TIME a new realism - (“Fra Lippo Lippi”) traditional, more abstract and more didactic forms of art were losing favor the shifting views on art and morality in Browning’s time

THE RENAISSANCE vs. VICTORIAN TIME “The Bishop Orders His Tomb“ “My Last Duchess”

REDEFINITION OF THE AESTHETIC colloquialism inarticulate sounds (like “Grr”) rough meter disjunction between form and conflict between two moral contentions conflict between aesthetics and ethics as systems

WOMEN home - the repository of traditional values Women’s violent death = the death of society struggle between aesthetics and morals in Victorian art to preservation of a society that has already changed beyond recognition 

’MY LAST DUCHESS’ a dramatic monologue published in Dramatic Lyrics and Romances Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara rhyming pentameter lines enjambment

The Italian Renaissance the flowering of the aesthetic and the human and The flowering of the religious and the moral the temporal setting Woman - victim of a male desire to inscribe and fix female sexuality

“My Last Duchess” The desperate need to control and fix women’s sexuality Man’s exercise of power in the Renaissance

“My Last Duchess” reader is forced to become involved in the poem in order to understand it Which aspect of the poem dominates: the horror of the Duchess’s fate, or the beauty of the language and the powerful dramatic development?

Does art have a moral component, or is it merely an aesthetic exercise?