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p O e T R Y
U n i t
The dramatic monologue
T
ECHNICAL
FEATURES
A dramatic monologue is a fairly long poem in which only one character
speaks about himself/herself or something important that has happened to him/her. The
features of the dramatic monologue can be summarised as follows:
•
it is recited by a
first-person speaker
, usually a historical figure;
•
it is set in a
precise
historical and geographical
background
;
•
there is a
silent listener
who is essential to the dramatic or theatrical quality of the piece;
his/her presence can be inferred from clues in the speaker’s words;
•
it centres on a
crucial point
or problem in the speaker’s life; by talking about it he/she
reveals himself/herself;
•
the
language
is
colloquial
and the rhythm as abrupt as that of real live speech;
•
irregular or
unusual syntax
and punctuation are used.
The Ducal
Palace in Ferrara,
engraving (1829).
A
CTOR AND
STORY
The best use of this form was by the Victorian poet
Robert Browning
(1812-89) who took the subjects of many of his dramatic monologues from Italian medieval
and Renaissance history. Running counter to the typical Romantic mode of self-expression
in first-person lyrics, in his poems “the story is told by some actor in it, not by the poet
himself”, as he himself said. This ‘actor’ is a single character faced with an ethical
problem.
In My Last Duchess the ‘actor’ of the monologue is
an imaginary Duke from the Italian
Renaissance
, possibly Alfonso II of Este. The Duke tells about his late wife, whose murder
was ordered by the Duke himself because her innocence and her good manners to
everybody seemed to him an insult to his social rank.
Here,
As in many other monologues by Browning, the speaker is a man who is powerful but
unhappy in his private life, though he refuses to admit it. He gives his considerations of
his wife’s character: she failed to live up to her duties as the wife of an aristocrat of such
lineage as himself and was inclined to give her favours to people of all social conditions.
The more he speaks, however, the more it is clear he still loves his dead wife.
A
STUDY OF
PERSONALITY
The
rhetoric of the poem
is masterly. Ironically, everything the Duke says
reveals his own character and emphasizes what a difficult husband he was and will be. The
picture preserves an ideal image of the Duchess: her portrait has the same importance to the
Duke now as the living person had in life, except that now she is under his complete control.
Browning succeeds in portraying the
Duke’s perverse cruelty
by telling the story from his
perspective but at the same time underlying the
Duchess’ purity and simplicity
.
The character’s moral faults emerge from the situation so that the judgment is left to the reader
of the monologue.
B
ROWNING
’
S MODERNITY
In speaking their minds, Browning’s characters reveal their personalities
through
unexpected mental associations
. In this sense, Browning’s monologues present a
very modern awareness of the way the human mind works. Browning’s originality lies in his
technical innovations. His
unconventional use of language
, syntax and metre; his conviction that
personality is not a single aspect, but is rather a multiplicity of selves, often incoherently mixed;
all these were to exert a very great influence on early 20th-century modernist poetry. Browning
was also a master of picturesque yet realistic description; few English poets have succeeded so
well in rendering live speech, exuberant characters, sounds and colours.
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