1. Lecture 10 Dr Milena Škobo 2018/2019
ROBERT BROWNING ( )
Lecture 10
Dr Milena Škobo
2018/2019

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

3. 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

4. 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

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

6. “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

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

8. 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

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

10. 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

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

12. 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

13. 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 

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

15. 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

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

17. “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?

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