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THE RING AND THE BOOK: 

TEXTS, AND THE TEXTURE OF EXPERIENCE 

A thesis presented in partial fulfilment 

of the requirements for the degree of 

Master of Arts in English 

at Massey University 

Douglas Robinshaw Standring 

1984 

Thesis supervisor: E. Warwick Slinn 



ABSTRACT 

The following discussion of The Ring and the Book suggests that the 

primary concern of the poem is with language. 

Chapter One of the discussion attempts to lay a broad base for the 

relation of language to the poem. It takes the form of a prelude intro­

ducing the later chapters and suggests that the overriding concern with 

language includes the poem, itself, as a linguistic construct. A dis­

tinction is drawn between the language of ordinary discourse, which is 

the immediate subject of the poem, and the language of artistic dis­

course, which is the medium of the poem, but which in turn becomes the 

subject of consideration. 

The interpenetration of subject and medium, it is suggested, res­

ults from Browning's recognition that language is a temporal and ongoing 

process, and that, therefore, a prior, static truth cannot be conclus-

ively expressed in language. Rather, art may embrace the processional 

nature of ordinary discourse within the context of artistic discourse, 

in order to provide a structure of "the experience of experience". 

Chapter Two suggests that Browning's method of foregrounding the 

relationship between language and experience is one of a disruptive 

juxtaposition of texts. Such a method demonstrates how the style of 

representation conditions, and supplants, experience: how the medium 

supplants the subject. Book I, it is argued, becomes an implicit and 

explicit education in how to read The Ring and the Book, functioning as 

a paradigm for the later monologues. 

The discussion of Book I is central to this study; the method of 

the poem, and the concerns that method foregrounds, are established in 

Book I (a section of the poem that is rarely discussed in any detail). 

Primarily, the disruptive texts of Book I dramatise the aut,hor fragmen­

ting the "whole" story into stylistically conflicting representations; 

the fragmentation disrupts the conclusiveness implicit in any represen­

tation. The "story", or narrative, becomes displaced, and the poem 

becomes, rather, a cumulative ongoing texture of linguistic 

representations. 

ii 



Chapter Three considers the problem of climax in a disruptive play 

of texts. In Book X and Book XI, the language of ordinary discourse in 

the poem reaches what I would term a plateau of linguistic intensities: 

the Pope and Guido become the disruptively juxtaposed poles between 

which the other characters inhabit the world through language. 

Chapter Three provides a link between the discussion of Book I and 

the discussion of Book XII which concludes this study. 

Chapter Four argues that the plateau of linguistic intensities 

reached in Book X and Book XI is maintained in Book XII. Browning, 

firstly, includes in his poem the truth of the negative intensity of 

language: that it is the temporal medium by which experience dis­

sipates, even as that experience unfolds in language. The completing 

intensity of language in the poem, however, is the presence of the 

implied author in Book XII. The language of artistic discourse counters 

the limitations and fallibilities of the language of ordinary discourse, 

not by escaping, or being conclusively above, those limitations, but by 

embodying them in a true way. The artistic discourse therefore 

becomes a processional embodiment of truth, from which a conclusive 

truth may not be separated. 

iii 



In the central painting of a triptych, titled 

"Bordano el Manto Terrestre,11 were a number of frail 

girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold 

hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, 

embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the 

slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to 

fill the void: for all the other buildings and 

creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the 

earth were contained in this tapestry, and the 

tapestry was the world. 

The Crying of Lot f./.9. 

iv 



PREFACE 

William Carlos Williams has observed that "all criticism is an act 

of violence", and beyond the natural defensiveness of a poet in the face 

of the academic machinery which appropriates his work, Williams touches 

an essential truth about the nature of interpretation. It may well be 

argued that literary criticism reveals what a work of literature truly 

means, but the implicit singularity of such a belief is revealed by the 

conflicting critical texts which attach themselves to a particular poem, 

or novel, or play. 

What characterises a work of literature, in an artistic sense, is 

that it creates an intensity which invites critical "violence", which 

provokes analysis or thought, but which finally resists them. Even a 

perfect poem, if one can conclusively explain it, is a perfect tomb. 

The Ring and the Book deals with experience, but not in a singular 

way. Whatever else the poem may be about -- social or moral contexts, 

the ironies of Romantic subjectivism -- it is deeply concerned with 

nature of experience as an interpenetrative texture conditioned by 

language. The process of interpretative structuring becomes the sub­

ject and medium of the poem: the poet dramatises experience by dram­

atising himself, and series of monologuists, interpreting experience. 

Meaning is made potent in The Ring and the Book by being made 

intensely problematical, ambiguous, disclosed. Truth is endlessly par­

odied, re-formulated in the poem; it is constantly implied by the poet, 

but never conclusively stated. Browning concludes The Ring and the Book 

with a riddle about the nature of his own poem; he defers to truth and 

meaning, refers them back to the only place where they may authentically 

be found: within the texture of the poem itself. The literary critic 

becomes drawn into a parallel relation with the process of The Ring and 

the Book: becomes himself, or herself, a type of monologuist re­

interpreting re-interpretations. 

V 



Such a view does not mean, as some would suggest, that there is no 

meaning, or that no meaning can be posited. The whole force of the poem 

dramatises that the process of reconstructing meaning is as necessary, 

and inescapable, as it is ongoing and inconclusive. 

An important influence in my reading of The Ring and the Book has 

been Herbert F. Tucker Jr. 's Browning's Beginnings. Although Tucker 

does not actually discuss The Ring and the Book he provides a convincing 

example of the way in which current critical thinking may be applied to 

Browning's work, and he divines an essential thread in Browning's work 

which vividly corresponds to my own initial experience of The Ring and 

the Book: namely, that Browning is concerned with the opening out of 

possibility rather than with providing a static completion. 

I would like finally to acknowledge the open-minded encouragement 

and precise attention to detail of E. Warwick Slinn in the preparation 

of this thesis: 

Ah! j'en ai trop pris: -- Mais, cher Satan, je 

jous en conjure, une prunelle moins irritee! 

Une Saison En Enfer. 

vi 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

Preface V 

1. Language in The Ring and the Book -- A Prelude 

2. Book I: A Play of Texts 14-

3. A Serial Climax 59 

4-. Endings 78 

Bibliography 95 



CHAPTER ONE: LANGUAGE IN THE RING AND THE BOOK -- A PRELUDE. 

The structure of The Ring and the Book is unusual: the story of a 

rough, pennyless nobleman and his young bride told three times by the 

author in Book I of the poem, and then repeated through a succession of 

ten monologues. In Book XII the author reappears to demonstrate how the 

events he has so meticulously dramatised simply disappear into time. 

Each of the monologues functions as a conventional dramatic monologue: 

a speaker formulates experience according to his or her own viewpoint; 

the ironies inherent in language and in the process of formulation 

reveal to the reader more than the speaker intends -- the contours of a 

personality, the workings of consciousness, the force of unconscious 

desire. The speaker attempts to provide a conclusive view of exper­

ience, a view which springs from and seeks to validate the speaker's 

consciousness. Yet viewed from a different perspective the monologues 

contained in The Ring and the Book are not conventional, for they are 

neither single, nor self-contained. The monologues are a series, each 

monologue interpreting the same events from a different perspective and 

set in the linguistic style particular to each speaker. The effect of a 

series of versions dealing with the same events is that one version 

disrupts the conclusive view another seeks to provide, and is itself 

disrupted in the same way. The disruptive effect of a serial structure 

is more extreme than a single monologue allows: it is not only that the 

ironies of a speaker's language reveal more than the speaker intends, 

but that the single view is disrupted by a plural presentation and is 

thus revealed to be contingent, and complicated by an inherent insuf­

ficiency. Similarly, the presence of the author in the first and last 

Books of the poem represents a further distinction from the conventional 

dramatic monologue form. Rather than being an implied presence, the 

unspoken source of an ironic perspective on the speaker, the author 

himself enters the poem -- freely passing judgements on the mono­

loguists, providing his own versions of the events, and to disrupt the 

fictional surface of the poem even further, details how he wrote the 

poem, and involves the reader in an ongoing discussion on the nature and 

function of literary art. 

The argument contained in my discussion of The Ring and the Book 

grew out of the recognition of the disruptive and serial nature of the 



monologues, and of the author's own presence in Books I and XII comp­

licating the fictional world of the monologues. A large part of the 

discussion is devoted to Book I, both because it is rarely granted the 

importance accorded to the monologues, and because, as it is the 

2 

reader's first experience of the nature and concerns of the poem, Book I 

is of strategic importance. The essential premise of the examination of 

Book I is that, like the later monologues, Book I is a disruptive series 

of texts. For plainly, the monologues are texts -- versions of the same 

events told from different viewpoints and embodied in a style of lan­

guage peculiar to the consciousness of each speaker. Book I itself 

contains three separate versions of the story of Guido and Pompilia, 

each different in style and viewpoint, and beyond that Book I moves 

forward not through a smooth continuous narrative flow but through 

distinct changes in textual style, tone and concern. In this way Book I 

functions as an education in how to read The Ring and the Book: the 

reader is introduced to the method of the poem -- a disruptive play of 

texts -- and to the problems of language and viewpoint which that method 

foregrounds. Book I is educative in an explicit sense also, the author 

at certain points turning aside from the murder story to discuss the 

function of his poetic art and its relation to experience. 

Isobel Armstrong has said, "The structure of The Ring and the Book 

becomes meaningful if it is seen as a poem about itself. It is also a 

poem about its own language and an understanding of the form of the poem 

depends upon a grasp of Browning's attitude to language." 1 While 

Armstrong is here particularly concerned with the gradations and shifts 

of value words undergo from one monologue to the next, her essential 

point -- that The Ring and the Book is about itself, about its own 

language -- relates directly to my argument. In Book I the disruptive 

play of texts which foregrounds problems of language and viewpoint, and 

the discussions on the function of poetic art, prefigure the monologues. 

What becomes important is the way a text provides a context for exper­

ience, each text disrupting the other. We can attribute greater or 

lesser degrees of moral worth to each speaker, and indeed are required 

to do so, but none of the monologuists can escape the limitations of 

1Isobel Armstrong, "The Ring and the Book: 
in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, 
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 185. 

The Uses of Prolixity," 
ed. Isobel Armstrong 



3 

their own single viewpoint, or of the disruptive effects of other and 

contradictory viewpoints. Yet The Ring and the Book is itself a context 

provided for experience, is itself language, and more than that 

consciously refers to itself in Book I and Book XII as being so. 

Browning himself makes apparently contradictory comments about language. 

In Book I he asks, "How else know we save by worth of word?" (I, 837) 

and in Book XII at almost exactly the same place he announces: "This 

lesson, that our human speech is naught,/Our human testimony false, our 

fame/ And human estimation words and wind" (XII, 834-6).2 By balancing 

these two opposed propositions at the same point in the first and last 

Books, Books in which the author enters the poem and which circumscribe 

the world of the monologues, Browning stresses the importance of lan­

guage, and his own perception of language as a paradoxical medium. The 

paradox resides in the distinction between language as it is used in 

ordinary discourse, and the aesthetic use of language. 

Language as it is used in ordinary discourse is shown in The Ring 

and the Book to be irrevocably flawed and insufficient: the language of 

"our human speech" cannot preserve experience against time, it is, in 

fact, the medium through which experience dissipates in time to nothing­

ness: "What was once seen, grows what is now described,/The talked of, 

told about, a tinge the less/In every transmission" (XII, 14-16). Nor 

is language, in the context of social usage, capable of bridging the gap 

which separates one consciousness from another; one person cannot effec­

tively communicate to another a truth about experience, for a truth told 

becomes merely opinion, and opinion is merely disbelieved: 

2 

Say this as silverly as tongue can troll -

The anger of the man may be endured, 

The shrug, the disappointed eyes of him 

Are not so bad to bear - but here's the plague 

That all this trouble comes of telling truth, 

Which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, 

Seems to be just the thing it would supplant, 

Nor recognizable by whom it left - (XII, 845-52). 

Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick 
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971). All subsequent references 
to the poem refer to this edition. 



4-

But worse than disbelief is the way in which language alters in its 

transmission from one consciousness to another, the speaker's words 

reappropriated by the auditor, placed in a new context which alters the 

original meaning, "Nor recognizable by whom it left - 11 (XII, 852). 

The monologues, which explore the relationship between the self and 

the necessarily verbal conception of experience, dramatise how language 

in the context of ordinary discourse is entombed within the single 

consciousness. Indeed, the form of juxtaposed monologues objectifies 

the enclosure of language within the single consciousness to an extreme 

degree: each monologue appearing to be a hermetically sealed verbal 

environment. The monologues, however, only appear to be 'hermetically 

sealed': E. Warwick Slinn argues that intersubjectivity is an issue in 

the poem and that the juxtaposition of monologues reveals the ironies of 

intersubjectivity, "The experience of intersubjectivity in this method 

is a relationship therefore not between minds, but between one mind and 

its conception of another.') Such an intersubjective experience is both 

fictive (since it is imagined), and substantively true (in the sense 

that it does, in fact, occur), but nonetheless may take place only 

within the speaker's consciousness: the speaker uses other people as 

characters in his, or her, own version of experience; a version which 

attempts to be self-enclosed, and to validate the self. 

Browning argues in The Ring and the Book, however, that the aes­

thetic, or artistic, use of language counteracts the fallibilities of 

language as it is used in ordinary discourse. As the resuscitating poet 

he reclaims, in all its variety and complexity, a paradigmatic human 

experience lost in time, and provides it with the permanent and self­

sufficient aesthetic form of art: "Completes the incomplete and saves 

the thing" (I, 734-). Rather than tell a truth, or draw a moral con­

clusion, Browning liberates language from the necessity to provide a 

conclusive viewpoint by dramatising individual speakers dramatising the 

world. For the crucial correlative of the fact that language, in ordin­

ary discourse, is entrapped within the individual consciousness is that 

language becomes the medium by which the self attempts to provide a 

conclusive view of experience, attempts to weave the threads of 

3 E. Warwick Slinn, Browning and the Fictions of Identity 
(Totawa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982), p. 112. 



existence into a single pattern; Browning weaves a pattern of the 

weavers weaving and so erodes the conclusive viewpoint, replacing it 

with the variegated and ironic potentialities inherent in the way men 

and women live in the world by conceiving of the world in language. 

5 

Language, the process of representation, becomes the content of The 

Ring and the Book as it is the medium of the poem. What separates 

language as it is used in ordinary discourse from the artistic use of 

language is that the one becomes inevitably the medium for providing a 

conclusive representation of meaning; while the other represents the 

ongoing creation of meaning: thus the form of the poem is a series of 

differentiated repetitions, a series of beginnings recreating meaning 

anew, and continually extending the texture of meaning provided by the 

poem. Browning sums up his art thus: "Art may tell a truth/Obliquely, 

do the thing shaU breed the thought1
' (XII, 855-6). Isobel Armstrong 

talks of Browning's desire to provide the experience of truth~ a felt 

understanding rather than a notional or abstract understanding: "Do the 
LL 

thing shall breed the thought 11 
;. Thus the notional, abstract facts in 

Book I become for the reader a lived experience through the monologues. 

But we can modify this argument even further in relation to language as 

content in the poem: Browning 1s versions of the facts in Book I are 

each subject also to the ironies of single viewpoint, and are disrupted 

by their juxtaposition against each other. Each version attempts to 

formulate experience whole, but provides singleness; whole experience is 

supplanted by the singularity of the linguistic style in which it is 

formulated. Thus the bare historical version of the facts (I, 780-823) 

supplants experience making of it simply a piece of history. The mono­

loguists repeat this process with greater or lesser degrees of moral 

worth and insight, and indeed, part of the impulse of the poem is to 

show how well, or how badly, men and women may live within the innate 

fallibilities of language and consciousness. But beyond that the truth 

The Ring and the Book obliquely tells, and allows the reader to exper­

ience, is that meaning is temporal, ongoing, textured, and that only art 

may represent meaning without conclusiveness, yet, paradoxically, pres­

erve it in a self-sufficient form. 

4 
Armstrong, p. 180. 



In 11Sordello11 Browning explores the relationship of the poet to 

language, and the parallel with The Ring and the Book is instructive. 

At first Sordello attempts to write a conclusive poetry. a poetry which 

will define experience by providing a single, whole view: 11 till a 
' I \ 5 rude/ Armour was hammered out11 lII, 576-7;. He makes the mistake of 

beiieving meaning and the representation of meaning to be static fixed 

absolutes, but, as Herbert Tucker has observed, 11His experiment is 
6 condemned by the temporal nature of language. 11 The temporal 

processionality of language deconstructs the 11armour 11 of Sordello s 

representation: 

5 

Piece after piece that armour broke away, 

Because perceptions whole, like that he sought 

To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought 

As language: thought may take perception's place 

But hardly co-exist in any case, 

Being its mere presentiment-of the whole 

By parts, the simultaneous and the sole 

By the successive and the many. Lacks 

The crowd perception? painfully it tacks 

Thought to thought, which Sordello, needing such, 

Has rent perception into: it1 s to clutch 

And reconstruct-his off ice to diffuse, 

Destroy. 

(II, 588-600) 

Robert Browning, "Sordello," reprint<'.in Robert Brownings 

6 

Poetry, ed. James F Loucks (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1979), 
pp. 12-17. 

6 Herbert F, Tucker Jr., Browning's Beginnings: The Art of 
Disclosure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 94. 
Tucker argues that Browning I s art is disclosural -- a series of revisions 
moving perpetually towards a potential meaning:- Although he does not 
discuss The Ring and the Book, Tucker's idea of disclosure applies 
equally well to that poem. It is my argument however that the dis­
closural nature of The Ring and the Book stems directly from the 
disruptive and continually extending interplay of texts. 



7 

For Browning language is thought, an ongoing process occurring in time, 

and is therefore antithetical to the expression of a static, complete 

perception of experience. Rather, language can only approach "the sole" 

by a process of fragmentation -- the representation of the perpetual 

movement toward completeness through the incompleteness of "the succes­

sive and the many." The "office" of the poet, which Sordello cannot 

accept, is to be in tune with the essential nature of language: "to 

diffuse,/Destroy. 11 The process of "diffusion" becomes paradoxically the 

means by which the poet may truthfully represent experience, and provide 

experience with aesthetic form. But Browning draws a distinction also 

between the poet's use of language, and the use of language in ordinary 

discourse: as opposed to the diffusive office of the poet, "the crowd" 

necessarily, in the functional (and fallible) business of living, 

"clutch and reconstruct" experience through conceptualising it: 

"painfully it tacks/Thought to thought." 

The sense of a poetics suggested by the passage from "Sordello" -­

"the whole/By parts", "the successive and the many", "diffuse" -- bears 

a striking correspondence with the methodology of The Ring and the Book. 

The activity of "the crowd" -- "clutching," "reconstructing" experience 

to provide meaning -- prefigures that of the monologuists in The Ring 

and the Book, and indeed, of Browning's monologuists generally. 

Browning's concept of the diffusive role of the poet, and of the 

"destruction" of conclusive wholes as the authentic means to represent 

experience, explains the way he defers, in his art, to the imperfect 

discourse of ordinary men and women; the representation of experience in 

language becomes not only the means, but the content of his art. We 

return again to Browning's scepticism about "human speech", and to his 

counter-balancing awareness that language used within an artistic con­

text escapes its own imperfections: provides a form which resists time, 

even as it embodies the temporal creation of meaning; escapes the def­

initive enclosure of the single context, by dramatising the many; 

provides the processional experience of truth, rather than tells a 

definitive truth. 

In his use, through the monologue form, of imperfect "human speech" 

as the medium of his art Browning has obvious novelistic, as well as 

dramatic, elements: he in fact foregoes one of the major advantages 



poetry possesses in abstracting itself from ordinary discourse -- a 

purified aesthetic and rhetorical language. This is what Santayana 

means by Browning's "barbarism", that "he had not attained, in studying 

the beauty of things, that detachment of the phenomenon, that love of 

form for its own sake, which is the secret of contemplative satisfac­

tion.'/ For Santayana Browning's poetry stays embroiled in the debased 

facts and language of "realistic" existence without constructing above 

that "Uproar in the echo" (I, 834) a formally pure, complete, and abs­

tract aesthetic object. But what Santayana does not see is that 

Browning is concerned with language in the world, in the mouths of men 

and women, and that such a language, debased or flawed as it is, can 

when placed in an artistic context dramatise the pure poetic truth of 

8 

how man functions in the world: "For how else know we save by worth of 

word?" 

To return to the form of The Ring and the Book: the poem is a 

context comprised of contexts, a text made up of a disruptive play of 

texts which, text added to text, continually extend the texture of 

meaning provided by the poem. Rather than move forward through a 

continuous narrative, and single narrative style, the reader jumps 

between disruptively juxtaposed, and differentiated, styles of language. 

The pluralistic and disruptive presentation prevents the reader from 

locating the definitive meaning of the poem in any single viewpoint. To 

talk, as I have, about the "diffusive" and "destructive" office of the 

poet, disruptive texts, the way the poem fractures conclusiveness and 

continually extends possibility and meaning, raises the important 

question of where the poem culminates climatically. Where does the poem 

reach its point of utmost intensification? How does the poem end? 

Again, we must consider the implications of the structure of the 

poem. In Browning's earlier dramatic monologues the relationship bet­

ween a single consciousness, and the conception of self and experience 

was explored. The emphasis of a poem like Andrea Del Sarto is on the 

character of the speaker; a character revealed by the ironies of the 

7 George Santayana, "The Poetry of Barbarism, 11 reprint/in Robert 
Browning's Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks (New York: W.W. Norton & 
Company, 1979), p. 489. 



speaker's conceptions. In the new and larger structure of The Ring and 

the Book the emphasis shifts: the reader is still required to evaluate 

and judge each speaker, but the single consciousness is complicated by 

9 

its presence amidst a series of versions produced by other conscious­

nesses. And complicated further by the presence of the author in the 

poem -- who is concerned, explicitly and implicitly, with the represen­

tation of experience in language. The poem therefore becomes about the 

potentialities of language -- in relation to character and viewpoint, to 

consciousness, to art, and to the nature of language itself. 

We may extend the context of the poem further still, in order to 

return to the core concern with language. In The Ring and the Book 

Browning no longer deals solely with the single consciousness, rather he 

represents men and women in the world, what sociologists call the social 

nature of reality. In one sense the world of The Ring and the Book is 

one of limitation and constriction: religion, the law, political power, 

class, social ethics, prescribed role -- all filter through in the 

monologues as limitations imposed on the individual from without. But 

as the sociologist Peter Berger argues, 11each social situation is sus­

tained by the fabric of meanings that are brought into it by the several 

participants." Berger goes on to talk of "the paradox of social exis­

tence: that society defines us, but is in turn defined by us. 118 The 

limitations imposed by the social structure are real, but not absolute: 

the individual defines himself, or herself, interactively with the 

social structure, and so contributes to the ongoing nature of that 

structure. Browning invalidates the idea that society possesses an 

absolute prescriptive power by giving the idea to Guido: Guido seeks to 

abstain himself from guilt by abstaining from the responsibility (and 

possibility) of personally determined action, arguing instead that he 

merely fulfilled a role predetermined by society. 

Language permeates the relationship between self and society, as it 

does the relationship between self and experience. Language is both the 

medium of the received culture which binds the monologuists, and the 

medium by which each monologuist seeks to construct an individual and 

8 Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology (1963; rpt. 
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), pp. 146, 149. 



self-validating context. As Roger Fowler, when discussing language and 

culture, puts it: 

A culture is one set of people's particular organiz­

ation of the chaos of physical universals. The 

organization is made largely (not wholly) through 

language, and in this sense language is culture. 

Whatever "reality" is, we do not think directly in 

terms of it, but in terms supplied by language. 9 

10 

Similarly, the collective pool of images by which a society morally 

defines itself are determined, given: in The Ring and the Book, for 

example, there are myths of Perseus and Andromeda, and of the Fall. Yet 

the individual, through the conceptual means of language, may reinter-

pret the moral paradigm provided by a myth, may place the myth in a new 

and personally conceived linguistic context generated by desire and 

need. Thus, the potential cuckold Half-Rome argues for the authority of 

husbands, and makes Violante a scheming Eve (II, 253-6). The romantic 

Other Half-Rome idealises Pompilia, bedecking her with flower imagery, 

and images her as an innocent Eve lured by a satanic Guido (III, 234-6). 

The world of The Ring and the Book becomes an intricate texture of 

language: of the given and predetermined, and of the perpetually recon­

ceived. If consciousness provides the ability to conceive, then lan-

guage provides the means; as they enable possibility, consciousness and 

language impose also limitations: the limitations of their inherent 

fallibility. For Browning the task becomes to represent the interpenet­

ration of human limitation and human possibility, an interaction that 

occurs through, and is conditioned by, language. We return back then, 

circuitously perhaps, but back nonetheless, to the questions of climax 

and of ending. If we accept that The Ring and the Book is about lan­

guage, then the barrier between form and content dissolves. In Chapter 

Three I will argue more closely, with reference to specific critical 

problems, the point I will introduce here: that the climax of a serial 

9 Roger Fowler, "The Structure of Criticism and the Languages of 
Poetry: An Approach through Language," in Contemporary Criticism, ed. 
Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), 
p. 189. 



structure which deliberately disrupts conclusiveness will necessarily be 

ongoing; that the concern of The Ring and the Book with language, and 

the relation of language to human limitation and possibility, means that 

climax will involve an intensification of the problems and poten­

tialities associated with language. 

11 

To locate the emphasis of the poem in character, or judgement, 

means choosing either the Pope or Guido's second speech as the climax; 

either choice results in Book XII being relegated to the status of an 

anti-climactic appendage. Rather, the poem reaches in Book X and Book 

XI a plateau of intensity in relation to language. The Pope, and a 

Guido with his rhetorical camouflage rent and clawed, become the twin 

poles between which the other speakers inhabit the world through lan­

guage. The Pope creates a linguistic context in which he confronts the 

limitations of humankind, knowledge, and language, and defines the 

nature, and necessity, of responsibility within those limitations. 

Guido's speech erupts into the intensity of pure amorality -- a verbal­

isation of the biological drive to exist, shorn of moral and emotional 

capability. 

In Chapter Four I will conclude my discussion by suggesting that 

the plateau of intensity in relation to language, which the poem reaches 

in Books X and XI, continues in Book XII. In Book XII Browning fulfills 

most obviously the role of the "destructive" poet: he literally des­

troys the world he recreated in the monologues, dramatising how exper­

ience dissipates, llmelts" (XII, 16) in time, and through language, to 

nothingness. By representing the loss of experience as a condition of 

the temporal nature of language, Browning objectifies a constant under­

lying tension in the poem: "live fact deadened down,/Talked over, 

bruited abroad, whispered away" (I, 834-5). 

Experience is always absent, marginal, subject to deferral by 

language, as Derrida puts it 10. The poet 1s own versions in Book I and, 

more particularly, the monologues, dramatise how what has occurred 

becomes supplanted by its conception in language. Derrida's position is 

10 
Jonathon Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & 

Kegan Paul, 1975). In Chapter 7 Culler provides a useful introduction 
to Derrida's theories. 



essentially a reformulation of certain basic precepts of traditional 

literary criticism. Introductory University courses on the phenomen­

ology of language generally begin with the first principle that there is 

a gap between symbol and referent; as Derrida would say -- the symbol 

defers to the referent. But to say, as I have, that experience is 

ongoing, textured, perpetually deferred raises a problem in regard to 

the loss of experience: for if experience is temporal and ongoing, how 

can it be lost? 

The form of The Ring and the Book again provides the answer: 

a form which both embodies the temporal nature of language in relation 

to experience, and which, the poet asserts, provides an aesthetic shape 

which resists temporality. The position the poem adopts in relation to 

experience, and indeed to truth, is not absolute: the reader is never 

presented with the actuality of the story of Guido and Pompilia, or with 

the truth of that story, rather the reader approaches the actuality 

through a texture of versions, of deferrals. The poet's versions in 

Book I, despite the internal ironies and disputive effects of those 

versions, establish broad moral sympathies which are not contradicted by 

the rest of the poem: that Pompilia is a victim, Guido a victimiser, 

and the Pope right to choose, and right in his choice. Similarly, the 

experience which the poem dramatises and preserves is of individual 

viewpoints cohering around an absent event: the fatal wounding of 

Pompilia by Guido. Browning thus dramatises the temporal activity of 

language in action -- the reformulation of experience by the mono­

loguists -- and enables the reader to discern (though not absolutely) 

through the texture of reformulations the nature and character of 

previous experience. 

For Browning the experience which is "lost" is the experience he 

resuscitates: the coherence of individual viewpoints defining them-

12 

selves, the parameters of their world, and unconsciously -- a paradig­

matic representation of human experience. Thus, what might be termed a 

negative intensity is maintained in Book XII in relation to Browning's 

thematic exploration of human experience as it is conditioned by and 

formulated through language: a loss located in the essential deferral 

of experience by language, but extended out to the extreme of his-

torical process. 



I will complete the discussion of Book XII, and of the poem, by 

suggesting that The Ring and the Book ends not with loss, or for that 

matter, with limitation, fallibility or the reformulation of experience, 

but with the tension of these elements balanced against the potentiality 

of language embodied in artistic discourse: a linguistic discourse 

which "may tell a truth/Obliquely" (XII, 859-600). 

I have titled the first chapter of my discussion "Prelude" and it 

functions somewhat like the first paragraph of The Ring and the Book, 

being, as it is, more than an introduction, a completed ring of sorts, 

but at the threshhold still. The purpose of the chapter has been to lay 

13 

a wide base for the later chapters in regard to the poem's overriding 

concern with language as medium, and as content. The distinction I have 

drawn between language as it is used in ordinary discourse, and language 

as it is used in artistic discourse, is primarily functional rather than 

ideological. It may perfectly well be argued that such an opposition is 

no longer necessary -- that all language is language. Though this does 

not seem to me what Browning, at least, intends. 

The following chapters are intended to support with close textual 

analysis the issues approached from a wider perspective in Chapter One. 



CHAPTER TWO: BOOK I -- A PLAY OF TEXTS. 

Critical response has tended either to minimise the importance of 

Book I in The Ring and the Book, or to attack the chapter as unnecessary 

and misplaced. Richard Altick and James Loucks typify a common approach 

when they assert, "Book I •.• is wholly introductory, and in the main, 

needs little discussion." 1 Robert Langbaum goes further, suggesting that 

Book I, along with Book XII, upsets the relativistic portrayal of truth 

which Langbaum perceives to be the "peculiar genius11 of the poem. 2 

It is the purpose of the following discussion to demonstrate not 

only how Book I is more than merely an introduction to the monologues, 

but to show also how Book I may be stylistically integrated with the 

monologues, and further, how this stylistic aspect relates to and enacts 

the theme of language. 

The primary fact we must observe is that Book I is not a single 

narrative encased in a unified literary style, but is rather a succession 

of styles differentiated by tone, viewpoint, concern, and by the par­

ticular mode of discourse used to embody these elements. Mary Rose 

Sullivan and Donald Hair are among the few critics to have given 

detailed explication of the stylistic variation in Book I. Sullivan 

argues that the trial summary (I, 132-4-57), the poet's imaginative 

recreation of the events (I, 4-58-678), and the dramatic introduction to 

the cast of characters (I, 838-1329) represent Browning's dramatisation 

of the poetic process: the poet finds his raw material, imaginatively 

fuses himself with it, and finally withdraws his own personality as a 

prelude to presenting the self-sufficient work of art -- the "ring" of 
3 the monologues. Hair focuses on generic distinctions, beginning with 

Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, Browning's Roman Murder 
Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 38. 

2 

Norton & 

3 

(Toronto: 

Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (New York: W.W. 
Company, 1957), p. 135. 

Mary Rose Sullivan, Browning's Voices in The Ring and the Book 
University of Toronto Press, 1969), Chapter One. 



the imaginative recreation, which he designates as a lyric form (the 

application of the poet's own moral and artistic insight); there follows 

the historical summary of the facts (I, 780-823) which Hair regards as 

an example of narrative (the facts presented simply as facts); and 

finally the introduction to the characters which Hair generically terms 

drama (each character interprets the story according to his or her own 

approach to life). 4- Hair goes on to suggest that these three generic 

categories -- lyric, narrative and drama -- once defined by the poet in 

Book I, are combined in the monologues. 

15 

Neither Sullivan nor Hair recognises, however, the disruptive effect 

of one stylistically differentiated text upon another, or indeed, the 

assumptions implicit in any given text: that a text supplants exper­

ience by reformulating it as language, thereby attempting to provide a 

conclusive representation of experience. The following analysis of Book 

I will contend that the succession of linguistic styles which Browning 

employs, introduces the reader to the literary procedure of The Ring and 

the Book: a procedure which we may term "the disruptive juxtaposition 

of texts, and the ongoing extension of context." The later monologues 

are plainly a series of conflicting texts reformulating a common sub­

ject; each text seeks to provide a conclusive representation, and each 

is disrupted and qualified by the presence of other texts. The disrup­

tive process reveals the nature of each particular text, and of the 

qualities (or not) of the consciousness which produces the text. Con­

clusiveness is therefore eroded by the action of one text upon another, 

and what becomes important is the nature of language itself. Each new 

text in the series extends the context of The Ring and the Book, adds a 

new pattern to the texture of the poem: what the texture represents is 

the ongoing activity of representation: the potentialities, fallibil-

ities, and paradoxical essence of language within which each text may be 

judged. Language, as the medium of conception,)s paradoxical because it 

is not absolute, being as it is a fictive linguistic approximation of 

phenomenological experience, and yet is necessarily the means by which 

men and women seek to conclusively represent the world. It seems log­

ical that we should approach the various linguistic styles Browning 

4 Donald S. Hair, Browning's Experiments with Genre (Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 124-127. 



employs in Book I, in the same way we approach the later monologues: 

as a conflicting series of representations. 

I. BEGINNINGS 

16 

Book I introduces the reader to the events and characters contained 

in the story of Guido and Pompilia, but if this were all Browning 

intended to do then he may well have made Book I a good deal shorter and 

clearer than he does. If, as I have suggested, we should treat the 

various stylistically differentiated sections of Book I in the same way 

we treat the monologues, then it becomes necessary to ask what effects 

the imposition of a moral framework, the points of dramatic emphasis, 

and the choice of style have on the raw material of the story. And to 

ask further, what effect repeated representations of the same events 

have upon each other. 

Both Sullivan and Hair recognise that Browning tells stylistically 

different versions of the story in Book I, and plainly, these versions 

are texts which seek to provide a linguistic context for particular 

events -- to provide a representation. Neither critic realises, how­

ever, that stylistic differentiation and juxtaposition is the constantly 

applied strategy of Book I, and that the strategy undermines from the 

first, conventional notions of narrative development; because Book I is 

largely comprised of repeated versions, it becomes not a beginning, but 

a series of beginnings. 

Let us consider, firstly, the opening two paragraphs of Book I: 

the first introduces the ring figure; the second -- the book. There is 

a superficial continuity between the paragraphs: each opens with a 

question: "Do you see this Ring?" (I, 1); "Do you see this square old 

yellow Book, I toss" (I, 33). A sense of immediacy is established, that 

the poet is dramatised as a speaker addressing an auditor, or auditors. 

He responds to implied comment, "What of it?" (I, 31 ), and he makes 

conversational asides, "Great in the scenic backgrounds-(name and 

fame/None of you know, nor does he fare the worse:)" (I, 70-1). Beneath 

the apparent similarity, however, each paragraph is distinctly different 

in tone, and in style, so much so that it is more appropriate to regard 

them as juxtaposed texts, rather than a single stylistic progression. 



17 

The first text (I, 1-31) is highly metaphoric, "Virgin as oval 

tawny pendent tear/At beehive-edge when ripened combs o'erflow" (I, 12-

13), striking a lush tone of aesthetic appreciation for the ring and, 

the process by which the ring is made. 

Despite the lyric tone, "Oh, there's repristination!" (I, 23), and 

the form of direct address, the verse still maintains a type of 

impersonal abstraction: the presence of the poet remains largely 

implied, the text focussed on its subject, the ring. A serious note, 

also, inflects the lyric voice, signifying the poet's concern to not 

only describe beauty, but to clearly communicate the process of ring­

making: 

That trick is, the artificer melts up wax 

With honey, so to speak; he mingles gold 

With gold's alloy, and, duly tempering both, 

Effects a manageable mass 

(I, 18-21) 

Rather than directly introducing the reader to the events of the 

story, the poet momentarily holds the reader back, asking him, or her, 

to consider a beautiful ring. The text, in fact, functions as a lyrical 

prelude to Book I: it is a lyric poem about a ring. The first line 

confronts the reader with the object, "Do you see this Ring?", but the 

poet's chief concern through the rest of the text is with the process of 

making embodied in the object: the fashioning of gold and alloy into a 

shape which is "self-sufficient now" (I, 26). 

In its form, subject and metaphoric style, this first text is 

segregated from what immediately follows in the poem: the text becomes 

a self-contained poem about the giving of form to raw materials. The 

implicit sense that the poet, too, is an "artificer" (I, 18), a "crafts-

man" (I, 8) making a ring, will be made explicit through the rest of 

Book I, but the crucial idea is here introduced: "prime nature" (raw 

fact), with an added artistry (the poetic imagination), will be made 

into the "ring" ( the self-sufficient form of art). 

The effect of the text, holding the reader back to consider the 

abstract process of giving form to raw material, is to signal the 



concern of The Ring and the Book with itself -- as art. Browning 

points to this in the concluding lines of the text: 

Prime nature with an added artistry-

No carat lost, and you have gained a ring. 

What of it? 1T is a figure, a symbol, say; 

A thing's sign: now for the thing signified. 

(I, 29-33) 

The "thing signified" is the form of The Ring and the Book: how and 

why it was made, and what it brings forth to us, the readers; yet the 

giving of artificial, or representational, form to raw fact is also the 

subject of the poem. 

18 

The focus on the provision of form, will become as the poem prog­

resses, a problem of language: for it is Browning's method to dramatise 

a series of speakers reformulating experience in a way both related to, 

and directly opposed to the poet's. The correspondence between the 

activity of the poet, and that of the later monologuists, lies in the 

fact that both use language to interpret experience, to provide exper­

ience with form. What most immediately separates the poet from the 

monologuists, is that he uses an aesthetic language to provide perman­

ence; but the essence of the separation lies deeper: it is the lesson 

from which Sordello recoiled: the poet is in tune with the temporal, 

"diffusive" nature of language and therefore does not seek conclusive­

ness. The poet does not present his own conclusive view of the story of 

Guido and Pomp ilia, rather he defers to the reconstructions of "the 

crowd", fragments experience into the texts manufactured by the many, 

and so escapes the limitations of the single consciousness. 

If the first text of The Ring and the Book signifies the constant 

preoccupation of the poem with itself, and with the provision of form, 

then it also points the reader to the complex mode of attention the poem 

requires. To consider the "ring", and the making of the ring, suggests 

the necessity for the reader to participate in the poem, and yet to be 

aware of the way in which the poem enacts itself. The reader is not 

invited to surrender to the poem, but is required to at once be involved 

in the fiction, and to recognise the use the poet makes of language, and 

of how this is related to, yet distinct from, the use the later mono-



loguists make of language. Thus the abstract, static quality of the 

first text, holding the reader back from narrative involvement. 

The second paragraph of Book I (I, 33-83) changes to a new style, 

tone, and subject and is in effect a new text juxtaposed against the 

first. From the lyrical metaphoric language of the first text, the poet 

makes a jarring switch to a prosaic, robust, conversational voice. A 

comparison between sections from each text makes clear the contrast: 

Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn, 

After a dropping April; found alive 

Spark-like 'mid unearthed slope-side figtree-roots 

That roof old tombs at Chiusi: soft, you see, 

Yet crisp as jewel-cutting. 

Examine it yourselves! I found this book, 

Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just, 

(Mark the predestination!) when a Hand 

Always above my shoulder, pushed me once, 

(I, f./.-8) 

One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm, 

Across a square in Florence, crammed with booths, 

Buzzing and blaze, noontide and market-time; 

(I, 38-f./.f./.) 

As the first text held the reader back to consider an aesthetic object, 

at the doorstep, as it were, of a banquet to which he, or she, has been 

invited, the second text opens the door and plunges the reader into the 

factual impedimentia of a defined setting: an old market square in 

Florence. 

19 

The difference between the two texts is accentuated by the humerous 

tone which colours the poet's speech as he describes the market-place: 

"Master, the imaginative Sienese/Great in the scenic backgrounds-name 

and fame/None ofyou know, nor does he fare the worse" (I, 69-71). He 

can even portray himself with a melodramatic flourish: "(Mark the pre­

destination!) when a Hand,/ Always above my shoulder, pushed me once" (I, 

f./.0-1 ). The tone of the first text was serious, considered, and signaled 



the importance the poet attached to the ring symbol: a symbol which 

represented the perfected form of the art he will create. 

In the second text, the poet enters the poem as a dramatised 

speaker. The humour, conversational tone, and direct first person 

references, "I toss", "I found", "I picked", signify that the speaker's 

personality now functions as a dramatic presence. 

The poet refers to himself only once in the first text, and then 

only in a secondary sense: 11
( Craftsmen instruct me)/ (I, 9). His 

concern is initially with the abstract and impersonal consideration of a 

self-sufficient aesthetic object, and the process by which it is made, 

and the poet therefore effaces his own personality. 

In the second text, the poet moves to initiate the creation of his 

own ring, the first step of which, mirrored in the chaotic flux of the 

market-place and rough style of verse, is active, involved, un-formed: 

the discovery of the crude ore of fact with which he will mix his own 

imagination. 

It is important to realise, however, that the speaker is not the 

poet, but is rather a feigned persona, a dramatised monologuist who we 

must regard in the same manner we regard the later monologuists. Wallis 

David Shaw argues that "Book I opens with a narrator who is dramatised 

in his own right as a simple-mind nominalist. Incapable of rational 

selection, he can describe only the surface objects and values of the 

Old Yellow Book.115 

The touches of comic melodrama, "(mark the predestination!)", 

undermine the speaker, and, as Shaw suggests, his uncritical listing of 

facts and objects in the second paragraph, and in the later trial com­

mentary, lacks insight and formal control. Shaw is quite wrong, though, 

in his assertion that Book I begins in this manner: his observations 

cannot be applied to the first text which, different in style and sub­

ject, highly focused, and comparatively free of a dramatised narrator, 

is the first beginning of The Ring and the Book. 

5 Wallis David Shaw, The Dialectical Temper (Cornell University 
Press, Ithaca, New York, 1968), p. 240. 

20 



The first two paragraphs, or texts, of Book I do not therefore 

constitute a smooth stylistic progression: they are two clearly differ­

entiated texts juxtaposed against each other in the same manner which 

will govern the rest of the poem. The effect of such a juxtaposition, 

21 

the sudden movement from one text to another, is both disruptive and 

extends the wider context of poem in a way which gives the accretion of 

linguistic texture (text added to text) precedence over narrative 

progression. 

The disruptive effect results primarily from the way in which the 

reader must switch from one text (and style of language, viewpoint, 

tone, and subject) to another, rather than surrender to the fiction 

to confidently and uncritically progress through the unfolding of a 

single narrative. It is, of course, rather early in the poem to talk 

too stridently of "the effect on the reader", but I believe we can 

observe even in these first two, and relatively minor, texts the 

fundamental aspects of Browning's method. 

What becomes important is the necessity for the reader to evaluate 

texts against each other, as well as continuing to read on. The eval­

uation of texts required, or enforced, by such a method becomes an 

evaluation of language: each text being conditioned by its own lin­

guistic style. The constant shifting between styles of language will, 

in the course of the poem, foreground the way in which language 

functions: how language is irrevocably involved in the way men and 

women conceive of the world to themselves, and tell of it to others. 

The more impersonal tone, the self-contained form and focused 

subject of the first text, signify that the poet presents the ring 

symbol in an unproblematic way. These elements, in conjunction with the 

considered metaphoric style free of the undermining ironies of the 

speaker's personality, suggest that the poet regards the ring figure as 

important, as well as unproblematic. In a sense the lyrical quality of 

the ring section, the way it simply presents an abstract symbol, sets it 

against the constant subjective involvement and personal construction of 

versions which inform most of the poem. 



The second text introduces the reader to the highly problematic 

concerns of The Ring and the Book: the relation of language to fact, 

truth, and experience. The poet's impersonation of a rumbustuous 

Victorian empiricist seeking truth in fact, and the linguistic style 

which this persona is embodied in, clashes with the first text; is, in 

effect, disrupted by it. 

If the first two texts are different stylistically, then it becomes 

obvious also that Robert Browning, the implied author, will act out in 

Book I different dramatised personas. In the first text Browning acts 

the impersonal, contemplative poet; in the second, Shaw's Victorian 

nominalist. The question of linguistic style is inseparable from 

viewpoint: a particular viewpoint produces a particular style, a lin­

guistic deferral of experience, and the style itself becomes experience. 

22 

We can see also how the method of juxtaposed texts extends the 

context (the content and parameters) of the poem despite minimal nar­

rative progression. The Ring and the Book begins in the first paragraph 

with its own ending: the ring symbol which represents the self­

sufficient form of aesthetic completion. The context of the poem is 

therefore extended from the first to include the completion of the poem, 

and to include the form and aesthetic process of the poem as subject. 

Against completion, the second text places the literal beginning of 

the poem: the poet-speaker's discovery of the Old Yellow Book amidst 

the broken wares of the market-place. Completeness -- the "self­

sufficient" ring, is placed against incompleteness -- the lost book with 

its "crumpled vellum covers" (I, 35): ending against beginning. 

But the second text extends the context of the poem beyond simply 

beginning: the poet-speaker includes within his literary fiction how, 

and where, he found the raw materials for that fiction: "I found this 

book,/Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just" (I, 38-9). The poem 

is thus extended into the mileu of Browning's Victorian readers, unset­

tling the relation between fact and fiction. Rather than being a self­

enclosed historical drama providing the illusion of reality, The Ring 

and the Book insists from the first that it is a fiction written by 

Robert Browning. 



23 

One is reminded of the Eighteenth Century novelists -- Swift in 

Gulliver's Travels for example -- who preface their works with realistic 

factual information on the origins of the story. Their method is sim­

ilar to Browning's here, though in purpose exactly opposed. Such novel­

ists use the device to increase the illusion of reality, that the story 

is real; the fiction attempts to present itself as fact. Browning, 

however, freely admits to being a Victorian poet who has found an old 

book, and who will make a fiction from the contents of that book; the 

fiction acknowledges itself to be a fiction. 

Such a device risks undermining the reader's involvement in the 

later monologues. The reader cannot enjoy the illusion that what he, or 

she, reads is "real" -- unauthored. Nor is it only the bad reader, who 

wishes to mistake art for life, who may be affected by this. The dis­

taste for the authorial presence breaking the fictional surface of the 

monologues, lies at the root of criticisms voiced by even such a sophis­

ticated critic as Robert Langbaum. 6 

But Browning extends the context of the poem in this way because 

the subject of the poem is not exclusively the monologues, but is also 

the poem itself. Browning fractures the illusion of realism in order to 

redefine how his art may be real: through Book I, and through Book XII, 

he explains and dramatises how his fiction is based in fact, and repres­

ents the giving of form, and therefore significance, to experience lost 

in time. By acknowledging the fiction, he ironically seeks to prove 

that his art is neither the escape from experience (into fancy) nor the 

illusion of actual experience, but is experience re-created, the self­

acknowledged, and fictive, semblance of experience by which form and 

significance may be provided. 

from a thematic perspective, the two texts are again disruptively 

juxtaposed against each other: if the first text introduces the theme 

of the aesthetic process completed and perfected, the second introduces 

opposed themes of time and loss, "'Mongest odds and ends of ravage," (I, 

53). One text adds new elements to another, each disrupts the other. 

The first text, for example: may symbolise completion but that completion 

is not conclusive: what is inconclusive is revealed by the presence of 

6 Langbaum, Poetry of Ex. p. 135. 



24 

the second text. Herbert Tucker, though not talking of The Ring and the 

Book, points us toward where the disruptive effect lies: "The imper­

ative of expectation demands that the present always be found wanting. 

If there is to be something to look forward to -- and for Browning there 

must be at all costs -- then there must be something missing now.',7 

What is missing from the first text is the living, turbulent life, and 

temporal ongoing creation of meaning which the poem will dramatise, and 

which is first introduced against the static abstract symbolism of the 

first text, by the poet-speaker enthusiastically discovering his raw 

materials. 

Although it is about completion, and provides the overriding symbol 

for the poem, the first text is incomplete: a form without content. 

Its lyrical poetry must be infused with vigorous and complex experience, 

the symbol made actuality: "A thing's sign: now for the thing 

signified" (I, 32). 

The disruption, in each text, of conclusiveness, of finality, by 

whatever internal ironies it contains, and by the action of one text 

upon another, impels a progression in the poem. The progression is not 

of a narrative type so much as the expectation conjured by by the 

incompleteness of a particular text, an incompleteness revealed by the 

action of other texts upon it. What we can see dramatised in miniature 

in the first two texts of Book I, and what the analysis of those texts 

has attempted to demonstrate, is that the juxtaposition of incomplete 

texts acts in a cumulative way: impelling an extension of the wider 

context of the poem, and a deepening of the texture of the poem, through 

one insufficiency added to another. 

II. THE FIRST VERSION 

The analysis of the first two texts of Book I demonstrated how each 

text was stylistically differentiated, one juxtaposed against the other 

in a disruptive way. The disruptive process operates on a larger scale 

between the texts which constitute the three narrative versions of Book 

I and the poet's introduction to the monologuists. 

7 Tucker, Browning's Beginnings. p. 5 



25 

It was a relatively straightforward process to designate the first 

two paragraphs of Book I as texts, and indeed, the intention was to 

focus on a small scale example of texts in order to explore the various 

elements inherent in disruptive textual juxtaposition. The process is, 

at certain times, more extreme or obvious than at others. A text does 

not exclusively correspond, for example, to a single paragraph, though 

often it may well do so. To talk of a text in The Ring and the Book is 

to talk of a body of language set in a particular style and told from a 

particular viewpoint, which is at variance with the styles of discourse 

surrounding it. The poet's commentary on the trial records is a ram­

bling exposition running through several paragraphs, but which nonethe­

less constitutes a stylistic entity -- a text. 

The trial text is the first of the series of narrative versions 

contained in The Ring and the Book. It is cast in the form of a 

summary: a form which implicitly assumes an objective point of view, 

and an unproblematic status: the purpose of any summary is to present 

an overview of important information, as, in fact, the trial text does, 

and the underlying assumption is, therefore, that the subject of the 

summary (or the key elements of the subject) has been effectively 

explained. Thus, the poet-speaker's assertion: 11S0, in this book lay 

absolute truth,/Fanciless fact, the documents indeed" (I, 143-t+). Yet 

although a summary purports to represent "truth" through "fanciless 

fact", it is still itself language: a linguistic context provided for 

events, and only one of many possible contexts. 

Throughout the trial summary (I, 132-363) the poet-speaker contin­

ues to adopt the persona introduced in the second paragraph of Book I: 

his manner is loquacious, conversational, and he "values the Old yellow 

Book, the source of the story he will relate, merely for its 'gold' of 
fact. 118 . 

Such a mode of address places the speaker on a familiar level with 

his Victorian audience, inviting them to consider his position as their 

own. The speaker's apparent interest and belief in "factn corresponds 

to the empiricist tone of the age. The speaker repeatedly insists that 

he quotes from a written historical document, "Here in the book and 

8 Shaw, Dialectical Temper. p. 240. 



26 

nowise out of it" (I, 154), thereby reinforcing the illusion of absolute 

objective evidence, and of the objectivity of the speaker himself as he 

summarises that evidence. In The Ring and the Book, however, there is no 

evidence without interpretation, and no objectivity outside of inter­

pretation. 

In a sense, the trial text lures the reader with illusion of its 

complete and explanatory view: that the completeness is illusory, and 

that Browning lures the unwary reader who is too ready to attribute 

truth to documented fact, is revealed both by the action of other texts 

upon the summary, and by the internal ironies of the summary form. 

As the trial text introduces the reader to the events of the story, 

it introduces the reader also to the way in which fact is transmuted 

into a text by the act of conception, and the consequent necessity to 

understand the relationship between the nature of a given text and the 

form (and meaning) it attempts to provide for experience. 

Let us consider, firstly, how the trial text is subject to the 

internal ironies of its own presentation. The speaker's constant asser­

tions that he quotes from written fact reinforce, as I have said, both 

his own apparent objectivity, and the illusion of objective evidence. 

His linking of "truth" to "fanciless fact" reinforces the assumptions of 

the summary form: that it concisely and unproblematically presents the 

key facts by which truth may be known. But the speaker functions iron­

ically: rather than simply presenting the facts of the case, he adopts 

the position of a partial spectator, freely passing judgement and dom­

inating the summary with his own personality. He makes a pun on the 

rhetorical "noise" of Bottini's written plea: "no noisy work at all," 

(I, 175). Archangelis is broadly parodied: "An outbreak as of wonder 

at the world,/ A fury-fit of outraged innocence" (I, 181-2). The reac-

tion of the Roman public to the trial is painted with disparaging humour: 

That was a firebrand at each fox's tail 

Unleashed in a cornfield: soon spread flare enough, 

As hurtled thither and there heaped themselves 

From earth's four corners, all authority 

And precedent for putting wives to death, 

Or letting wives live, sinful as they seem. 

(I, 215-20) 



27 

The immediate effect of the speaker's parodic commentary is to 

undermine the legal process as a mechanism for discerning truth (in that 

objective truth is what a trial claims to establish), a point the 

speaker makes directly, asserting "Thus wrangled, brangled, jangled they 

a month" (I, 241 ). In this immediate sense, the speaker discredits the 

relation between trial (a public symbol of objectified closure) and 

truth. Truth is therefore disclosed: made open to the possibilities of 

ongoing reformulation enacted by the poem. 

Yet the speaker in turn completes his own summary. The longwinded 

convolutions of the trial are brought to a close by the judgement of the 

Pope: that Guido is guilty. That the speaker is in sympathy with this 

judgement is made plain by his description of the Pope· "Innocent by 

name/ And by nature too" (I, 300-1 ), "this great good old Pope" (I, 326). 

The summary has presented the facts: murder, legal wrangling and 

hypocrisy, and ends by vindicating the final judgement of a good Pope. 

The story, or the first version of it, has been told. 

The deeper ironical effect of the speaker's role however is to 

undermine the summary text itself. The speaker's sympathies, dislikes, 

and parodic comments subvert the objective assumptions implicit in the 

summary by revealing the presence of he -- who -- writes -- the text. 

While the text began by inviting the reader to find truth in fact it 

becomes increasingly revealed as a version: one particular way of 

formulating the story of Guido and Pompilia; the fact becomes inevitably 

coloured by the opinions of the speaker. 

Browning intends that the careful reader will recognise that fact 

provides not truth but the basis for individual viewpoint. That the 

speaker's opinion of the trial and of the various characters is not 

substantively contradicted by the rest of the poem, is not the important 

issue. Such an argument can be made for all of the versions in Book I, 

yet each is insufficient: if they were not the poem could end with Book I. 

It is interesting to note that Donald Hair does not include the 

trial summary in his generic classification of Book I. While it may be 

argued that the trial text is not an example of literary genre in a 

strict sense, it does stand as the first version of the story, and is 

undeniably a linguistic genre: the form of a summary. Hair recognises 



28 

the immediate effect of the summary: that it reveals the apparent facts 

to be in reality the opinion of the lawyers and the Roman public: 

"Pages of proof this way, and that way proof ... " (I, 239). 
9 

But he 

does not recognise that the summary form itself becomes conditioned by 

the opinions of the speaker, is in effect another level of opinion 

transposed onto the first. Thus Hair misses the crucial point of the 

speaker's status as a dramatised monologuist, and therefore of the 

function of the text: the text lures the reader with the unproblematic 

view of the dramatised speaker: his static opinion of the public and 

legal opinion which poses as fact. 

The undermining irony, which reveals the summary text to be a 

version, crystallises when the speaker pompously proclaims "But human 

promise, oh, how short of shine!/How topple down the piles of hope we 

rear!/How history proves ... nay, read Herodotus!" (I, 295-7). The 

overblown rhetoric foregrounds the speaker as a parodic role assumed by 

the author. The speaker acts out one possible response to the documents: 

to draw from them a moral lesson: "How topple down the piles of hope we 

rear!" All that such an act achieves however is to close the events of 

the story in the static and self-validating conclusiveness of a moral 

dictum. 

Browning is concerned with opening out history, this particular 

history, in order to make truth live and unfold itself in a temporal 

way. Hence the disruptive effect of the speaker's portentious injunc­

tion: "How history proves •.. " invites the conclusive lesson which 

will complete the statement, but the presentation is broken, "nay, read 

Herodotus!" The context of the summary is thus extended outside of the 

poem to another version of history. The result is a disruption of the 

summary which, by its very nature, attempts to present a closed and 

unproblematic view: the break in presentation allows the play of other 

possibilities to seep in. What history, or fact as history, proves is 

nothing but that history is a human conception, a version, or a play of 

many versions. 

The insufficiency of the historical documents, and of the speaker's 

presentation of them, can be approached also in a retrospective way. 

9 Hair, Browning's Experiments with Genre. p. 119 



The speaker for example supports the Pope's judgement and quotes it 

directly from the documents "with his own particular chirograph" (I, 

29 

346). The judgement in this form appears to be a blunt dictate 

delivered with little evidence of deliberation: "Cut off his head 

tomorrow by this time,/Hang up his four mates, two on either hand,/ And 

end one business the more!" (I, 341-3). The judgement is curt, brutal, 

qualities reflected in the met~~; such is the written fact summarised 
f a 

without embellishment by the speaker. But as the context of the rest of 

the poem unfolds, particularly the Pope's own monologue, which becomes a 

morally complex and agonising meditation, we can see how much the 

summary fails to embody. 

The disruption of the summary from within by the poet's use of a 

parodic persona and the subsequent ironies resulting from the speaker's 

position, are compounded when the summary is juxtaposed against other 

texts. The second version, an imaginative dramatisation of the story, 

clearly opposes a new viewpoint and style of linguistic representation 

against the summary text. Before we consider the second version, how­

ever, we should consider the text which links the summary to the 

imaginative recreation. 

Immediately following the trial summary a new text is initiated (I, 

364-456) in which the implied author enters the poem as an active and 

involved presence. The text is comprised of three paragraphs which form 

a stylistic unity clearly different in style, viewpoint, tone and focus 

from the summary which precedes it, and the second version which follows it. 

As we have seen the summary form manifested certain assumptions: 

that it unproblematically and objectively presented the historical 

documents, and represented a conclusive view of those documents: that 

there was a great deal of legal hypocrisy and public opinion rightly 

stilled by the correct judgement of a good Pope. We have also seen how 

such assumptions were undermined by the poet's use of a parodic persona 

as speaker. If the broad emphasis of the speaker's opinion was not 

undermined by Browning, the superficiality of the speaker's viewpoint, 

and, crucially, the form of his opinion was undermined. Browning 

therefore tempted, in the trial summary, the unwary reader with an 

unproblematic conclusiveness, even as he undermined the summary from 

within. 



30 

In the text which immediately follows the trial summary the persona 

of the enthusiastic empiricist is supplanted by the voice of the implied 

author, who addresses the reader with a series of questions. The 

questions fragment the whole view of the summary by introducing new 

possibilities, possibilities excluded or denied by the summary, or more 

correctly, outside the scope of, the linguistic form of a summary, and 

beyond the perspective of the dramatised speaker. 

The immediate consequence of the authorial voice entering the poem 

at this point, is to cause a shift from the retrospective mode of the 

trial text, to a present tense address to the reader. The author begins 

to dismantle the assumptions parodically set up in the previous text, 

posing against the assured posture and certain facts of the trial sum­

mary a rapid fire succession of disruptive questions: "What has hither-

to come of it?" (I, 367), "Was this truth of force?" (I, 372), "Who were 

he and she,/Husband and wife, what manner of mankind," (I, 379-80). In 

one sense, the uncritical reader is thus made critically aware of 

reading, and is forcibly implicated in the problems, of giving linguis-

tic form to experience, which the poem raises. 

The first problem the text raises is the insufficiency of the 

historical documents; Browning likens the documents to Ademollo's prints 

(I, 369-72), like the book, historical artifacts lost in a cheap bazaar, 

lost that is, in time. "What this truth of force?/ Able to take its own 

part as truth should,/Sufficient, self-sustaining-" (I, 372-4) the poet 

asks. Plainly not, as he makes clear by offering to throw the book 

into the fireplace " ... and what the loss? 11 (I, 376). If the book is 

destroyed, so too is the crude "factual" life it contains; experience, 

for it is experience the book represents, is not "self-sustaining", it 

lacks an aesthetic shape to resist time. Against the static complete­

ness the summary attempted to enact, Browning introduces the disruptive 

element of time: thus the closed version based on the historical docu­

ments, which the speaker attempted to provide in the summary text, is 

rendered inconclusive by being placed in the context of temporal 

process. 

If "crude fact" is insufficient because it is subject to the 

dissipatory influence of time, it is insufficient also as a means of 

apprehending "truth of force": fact breeds opinion and is subject to 



31 

viewpoint (and all the aspects of consciousness viewpoint manifests) -­

both in how facts are presented, and how they are perceived. Browning 

makes the insufficiency clear when he directly undermines the summary, 

ironically playing with the disposition of those readers who would find 

truth in fact, truth in the single perspective of the documents or their 

summary: "You know the tale already: I may ask/Rather than think to 

tell you, more there of" (I, 377-8). 

Again, the assertive resume of fact provided by the summary is 

disrupted by its juxtaposition against questions; the answer becomes a 

question. Browning thus introduces new actors into the story, who bring 

with them new possibility: 

Ask you not merely who were he and she, 

Husband and wife, what manner of mankind, 

But how you hold concerning this and that 

Other yet-unnamed actor in the piece. 

The young frank handsome courtly Canon, now, 

The priest, declared lover of the wife, 

He who, no question, did elope with her, 

For certain bring the tragedy about, 

Guiseppe Caponsacchi;-his strange course 

I' the matter, was it right or wrong or both? 

(I, 380-88) 

"Right or wrong or both?": the question sounds a new note in Book I, 

prompting in a direct way what the parodic presentation of the summary 

had hinted at: the necessity for a complex and many-sided understanding 

of the story. 

Thus Browning actively reveals the trial summary to be a lure 

holding out an illusory truth in fact, and the speaker to be a dram­

atised and parodic persona. The present tense imperative of the poet's 

questions involves the reader in the first complexities of the story's 

interpretation: certainty is offered by the trial text, and then doubt 

revealed. 

The sense of The Ring and the Book as a poem about itself resur­

faces here, connecting back to the beginning of Book I. The poet 



presents one possible means of telling his story, and then deliberately 

erodes it in order to open the way for an ongoing recreation. The art 

questions and recreates its own status in relation to the form it 

provides for experience. 

32 

Browning breaks the presentation of the poem further when he again 

extends the context into the Victorian mileu, directly naming his read­

ership and slyly noting his unpopularity: "Well, British Public, ye who 

like me not,/(God love you!)" (I, 410). Mary Rose Sullivan reads Book I 

as a single monologue in which the poet talks to a group of auditors, 

and consequently contends that the address to the "British Pubic" char­

acterises those auditors: "His present audience is a representative 

segment of the contemporary reading public.119 

Such a view risks limiting the effect of the poem, and ignores also 

the effect of the text on the Victorian reader reading. The statement 

is generalised enough to allow the individual reader to escape its 

ironic censure, but nonetheless disrupts the fictional surface of the 

poem. Sullivan is looking for a continuity of address, a way of unify­

ing the disparate styles of Book I, and to view Book I as a single 

monologue is a legitimate means of achieving such a continuity. But the 

primary impulse behind Sullivan's view is to establish the presentation 

of Book I as realistic. To view Book I as wholly realistic, however, 

effaces the deliberate discontinuities of Browning's method: the dis­

ruptive intrusions of the poet, and the effects of juxtaposed and 

stylistically differentiated texts. 

Beyond the literal realism of a poet describing how he discovered 

certain raw materials and made of them a poem, Book I reflexively 

discusses itself as fiction, the poet assuming not one but several 

distinct personas in order to dramatise the relationship between 

language and experience. When the poet begins the second versionof the 

story, his own imaginative re-creation of the events, a new dramatised 

persona and style of language are utilised, and a new text seeks to 

establish its own conclusiveness. 

9 Sullivan, Browning's Voices. p. 5. 



33 

III: THE SECOND VERSION 

The second version of the story (I, 457-678) grows out of the 

insufficiency of the trial text: the dead and formless fact of the 

summary, "that inert stuff" (I, 469), must be reclaimed by the poet from 

time, resuscitated into a living drama. Thus the persona of the speaker 

alters from unthinking commentator to subjective storyteller. 

The beginning of the imaginative re-creation demonstrates the 

fluidity of voice Browning employs in Book I: for the first nineteen 

lines the voice of the implied author remains intact, as Browning ret­

urns to an abstract discussion of the poetic process, comparing the 

poet's task to that of a ring-maker: "Something of mine which, mixed up 

with the mass,/Made it bear hammer and be firm to file" (I, 462-3). He 

stands outside this process, and outside the facts of the old book, 

maintaining a clarity of intent. Diction, tone, and imagery are force-

ful and straightforward, the verse primarily concerned with clearly 

transmitting the poet's analogy: "From the book, yes; hence bit by bit 

I dug/The lingot truth that memorable day,/ Assayed and knew my piecemeal 

gain was gold" (I, 450-60). Following on from this, however, the rest 

of the second version begins to enact the fusing of the poet's "live 

soul" (I, 469) with "that inert stuff" contained in the old book. The 

subsequent movement of the text is from abstract discussion to subjec-

tive involvement: the abstract idea becomes dramatised actuality. 

A change of focus, voice and style of language occurs at line 476; 

the assertive, controlled authorial voice sliding into the dramatised 

persona of a subjective and emotive storyteller: "And from the reading, 

and that slab I leant/My elbow on, the while I read and read,/I turned 

to free myself and find the world" (I, 476-8). In turning from the 

book, the poet turns from the restraint of crude fact, freeing his 

imagination to re-create the story "live" and in "the world." In the 

same way he turns from abstract discussion to dramatisation -- of fact, 

and of himself. 

As the poet observes the Florentine scene beneath his balcony a 

lyrical, evocative style enters the verse: "When flame fell silently 

from cloud to cloud,/Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes" 

(I, 489-90). The line stress, which had been firm and deliberate to 



34 

convey the abstract argument, becomes freer to indicate the movement 

into poetic imagination: "Whence came the clear voice of the cloistered 

ones/Chanting a chant made for midsummer nights11 (I, 484-5). The direct 

imagery of the opening becomes transmuted into a lush descriptiveness: 

"One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned/The lamp-fly lured there, 

wanting the white flower" (I, 495-6). 

From the perspective of lyrical observation, the textual focus 

alters once more when the poet says "By the river, till I felt the 

Appenine" (I, 500). The crucial word is "felt": the poet has made 

the. leap from observing the world, to imagmmg a world, and any 

remaining connection between the implied author and the speaker's voice 

dissipates, as the poet begins to dramatise a fictive persona of himself 

re-creating the story. 

As the focus of the verse shifts from observing a physical setting 

to depicting an imagined setting, and the voice of the dramatised 

speaker establishes itself, the imaginative energy intensifies; poetic 

evocation gives way to a Gothic portentiousness: 

And there would lie Arezzo, the man's town, 

The woman's trap and cage and torture-place, 

Also the stage where the priest played his part, 

A spectacle for the angels,-ay, indeed, 

There lay Arezzo! (I, 

The melodramatic phrasing, the doom-laden exclamation mark, suggest a 

built-in irony which disrupts this new version of the story even as it 

unfolds. 

The second version thus seeks to establish itself as a text which 

provides a context of imaginatJ ve resuscitation for crude fact; the 

shift in tone and style at the beginning of the text indicates the 

movement from abstraction, to observation, to imaginative re-creation. 

But, as I have suggested, as the re-creation begins to fully enact 

itself a linguistic irony begins to complicate the text. 

As the speaker begins to provide a subjective form for the events 

of the story the rush of nightmarish imagery, "hill-foot bleak" (I, 



509), "Bloody splendour" (I, 511 ), "Cursewise" ( I , 512), suggests that 

he falls to utilising an artificial and received literary form -- a type 

35 

of Gothic Romance. The rhythm of the verse becomes a furious gallop 

across an imaginary landscape: "Farther then I fared,/Feeling my way on 

through the hot and dense" (I, 505-6). 

In his first imaginative flight the speaker simply races over the 

three settings in which the drama will take place, characterising each 

by a highly emotive description: Arezzo, "The woman's ••• torture­

place" (I, 502), Castelnuovo, "That squalid inn" (I, 513), and the final 

setting "Rome itself, the ghastly goal" (I, 518). But as Rome is also 

the starting point for the drama, the speaker has described a circle: 

"this round from Rome to Rome" (I, 526). He thus describes the outline 

of a ring, a first design as a prelude to the shaping process. As the 

speakers imagination becomes progressively caught up in the story, he 

returns to add substance to the outline, re-creating the events which 

took place within the ring: "The life in me abolished the death in 

things" (I, 520). 

At this point (I, 520) the presentation is disrupted as the voice 

of the implied author reasserts itself, reminding the reader that it was 

another, or ear lier, Robert Browning, an ear lier self re-created here, 

who first re-created the story as he stood on a Florentine terrace: "I 

saw with my own eyes/In Florence as I trod the terrace" (I, 523-4). The 

intrusion momentarily disrupts the flow of the text, preventing the 

reader from wholly surrendering to the Gothic recreation, from sinking 

into the tale in a passive way. Such an interruption in the narrative 

flow throws into relief the status of the re-creation as a version: 

Browning, or a dramatised re-creation of an earlier Robert Browning, 

gives life here to dead things, but an awareness must be maintained in 

regard to the nature of the life he gives. 

In the middle of one long sentence the textual focus again shifts 

(I, 527), the implied author again moves into the background as the re­

creation begins anew, fleshing out the described outline of the ring 

with relived events. 

Before we follow the text on its second round from "Rome to Rome" 

we should consider the implications of the second version thus far. The 



version seeks to establish its own particular context (for the events of 

the story) within Book I: of resuscitation. But rather than presenting 

a stylistic unity the version proceeds through a succession of textual 

"shifts" which foreground the language by which the text enacts itself. 

Within the terms of the argument previously outlined in this chapter, 

the second version broadly functions as a single text in terms of the 

single context it seeks to provide, but stylistically is differentiated 

within itself. Mary Rose Sullivan is perhaps the only critic to follow 

36 

the movement of the second version in a detailed sense, and she rightly 

observes that the text is " ..• an imaginative recreation of the events 

leading up to the trial", but when she goes on to assert that Browning 

is "the horrified onlooker to a crime which has left him profoundly 

affected and determined to communicate the intensity of his reaction to 

the audience", Sullivan misses an important part of Browning's pur-

pose.1 O In a work of art in which characters constantly utilise 

received forms of expression, myths, and moral structures, to interpret 

the world according to their own desire, all expression, all linguistic 

representation, takes on a problematic status. As Browning is here 

presenting another version of the story, it seems appropriate to once 

again approach the version in the same way we approach the versions of 

the monologues: to look for the ways in which the imposition of a moral 

framework, the points of dramatic emphasis, and the choice of language 

ironically subvert the closure any version seeks to impose on existence. 

As the speaker begins again to circle the ring of events, he slips 

easily into a new style of representation -- the rhetoric of Romance. 

The Comparini are characterised as flawed souls, "Two poor ignoble 

hearts" (I, 529), who nevertheless recognise the spiritual purity of 

Pomp ilia, and attempt to protect this purity by raising the girl to 

"What possible sphere of purer life than theirs/Should come in aid of 

whiteness hard to save" (I, 536-7). The Romance form provides a moral 

frame for the characters: Pompilia is thus the "pure" innocent and the 

Comparini flawed, yet goodhearted souls, who try only to raise their 

daughter above "The world's mud" (I, 533). 

The narrative sets up an effect of pathos in relation to the 

unsuspected evil of Guido, but to do this is simplifies the story, 

10 Sullivan, Browning's Voices. pp. 14, 8. 



37 

making the characters emblematic rather than human in any complex way, 

and therefore excludes all information that does not fit into the 

Romance form: Violante's double guilt, the economic and social 

considerations which lurk in the marriage pact, and the furious argument 

which erupts between Pietro and Violante over the secret marriage. 

We require, of course, a retrospective knowledge of the entire poem 

to recognise what the speaker here leaves out of his re-creation, but a 

disruptive effect takes place also in terms of the stylistic presen-

tation of the text; a disruptive influence which reveals the parodic 

intent of the implied author. The parodic element had suggested itself 

initially in the speaker's earlier doomy and Gothic tone, and resurfaces 

here, firstly, in the idealised language, "And lift it to whatever star 

should stoop" (I, 535), and is then reinforced by the way the speaker 

falls completely into the archaic diction of the Romance style: "As 

Guido Franceschini took away/Pompilia to be his for evermore,/While they 

sang 'Now let us depart in peace,/Having beheld thy glory, Guido's 

wife!"' (I, 540-43). 

Allied to the parodic effect, is the dislocation caused by the 

shifting stylistic focus. The second version begins to formulate itself 

not simply as a coherent parody of a single form, but rather as a 

parodic compendium of various styles. With the advent of Guido (I, 

544), the style abruptly shifts to conjure a visionary medieval land­

scape populated by figures more at home in Breughal, or Hieronymous 

Bosch: Guido is a "monster" (I, 551) aided by two "goblin creatures" 

(I, 548), and images of evil and malignancy pile up in the verse. 

The newly introduced characters are again simplistically person­

ified, though now in a ghoulish manner: Guido's relatives are "fox­

faced" (I, 549), "cat-clawed" (I, 550), "the satyr-family" (I, 570), and 

Guido himself is Satan, "Prince o' the Power of the Air" (I, 567). 

Superficially, the reader is presented with a macabre and hor­

rifying tale, but the parodically overblown rhetoric and reductive 

nature of the style again foreground the way that events are being 

transmuted by the linguistic style used, and by the perspective of the 

speaker who chooses the style. 



If Browning is presenting himself as a "horrified onlooker", as 

Sullivan suggests, then plainly the presentation is complicated by 

parody and by the shifts in textual style. The "horror" is exaggerated 

by the parodic mode and overbalances into melodrama. Browning re­

creates himself re-creating the story for the first time, as a subjec­

tive storyteller who paints verbal pictures of the Franceschini dancing 

about their captives in a ring (I, 573); the melodrama is, in part, 

comic, and intrudes even more forcefully when the hero of the tale, 

Caponsacchi, appears: 

Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced, 

The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God? 

The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash, 

Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew, 

As, in a glory of armour like Saint George, 

Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest 

38 

(I, 581-586) 

Again, from a retrospective standpoint the dramatised entry of 

Caponsacchi is incorrect in a factual sense, and by reducing characters 

to stereotypes excludes whole areas of complexity. But a knowledge of 

what follows in the poem is not needed to see how the text succumbs to 

its own excesses. The "cauldron" and "victim stripped", the cry for God 

and momentous arrival of the Knight replete with a "glory of armour" and 

the "cleaving" of clouds, is the apparatus of melodrama. The inevitable 

effect of providing a melodramatic context for horror is to make the 

horror comic. And comedy is the artist's means of subversion. 

The arrival of Caponsacchi signals a further disruption of the 

stylistic surface. The language takes on the style of medieval allegory 

-- the Good Knight saving the entrapped Lady-Fair. Caponsacchi is 

compared to "Saint George" and bears "away the lady in his arms" (I, 

587). Thus, the events become further transmuted by the style of rep­

resentation: the priest appears after the rhetorical plea "what of 

God?", and therefore becomes depicted as the righteous agent of God. 

Pompilia is characterised anew as the chivalric "lost Lady" (I, 590), 

after being the pure soul of the Romance section, and "sweet" victim of 

the lurid visionary scene at Arezzo. Each of Pompilia's ascribed roles 

coheres around a broadly similar dramatic emphasis, but each is imaged 



in accordance with the particular stylistic frame the narrator provides. 

But the expectations aroused by the new frame, that the lady is 

saved and all is well, are immediately interrupted by a different chain 

of events -- Pomp ilia is removed from the priest's care. As the 

alteration in events does not conform to the heroic resolution implicit 

in the Knightly Tale, the style of narrative must alter. 

The speaker responds by blurring the events at Castelnuovo in a 

type of generalised religious musing (I, 589-602). But the meditation 

is so vague and abstracted from the events, that it calls attention to 

itself as a subjective interpretation. The speaker's reasons for such 

39 

an evasion are connected to the events at Castelnuovo, where Caponsacchi 

and Pompilia are caught in an apparently compromising situation. To 

this point the speaker has re-created a version of the story which is 

broadly drawn, simplistic tale of Good (Pompilia and Caponsacchi) and 

Evil (Guido and his cohorts). He has unconsciously utilised a variety 

of received literary forms, each of which is inherently suited to dram­

atising such a dialectic. The events at Castelnuovo do not fit into the 

general context of Good and Evil the speaker has established, nor can 

they be 'im:or porated into the literary styles he has used: Caponsacchi 

and Pompilia are at their most suspect, at least to an observer who has 

not fully grasped the complexities of the whole action of the story, as 

the speaker plainly has not done at this stage. The enraged husband 

discovers his wife with her accused lover in a way-side inn; the 

"heroic" priest, according to his own later version of the story, is 

ineffectual, and it is Pompilia -- "sweet victim", "poor lady lost", who 

takes up the manly role and is prepared to fight Guido. From all 

aspects the Castelnuovo incident is problematic, and the speaker glosses 

over, or at least unconsciously evades the scene, in order to get back 

to the elemental drama of Good and Evil which has seized his imagin­

ation. He can only suggest in a rather vague way that the couple's 

flight is halted by "a dusk misf ea tu red messenger ,/No other angel of 

this life,/Whose care is lest men see too much at once" (I, 593-5). 

Castelnuovo safely by-passed, the speaker can return to the nar­

rative which possesses his emotional responses. The style of verse 

again alters (I, 603): the vague dwelling upon heaven is abolished, and 



the text reinstates dramatic action, '"Open to Caponsacchi!' Guido 

cried" (I, 622), and the vivid imagery sparked by the speaker's involve­

ment in the story "those blood-bright eyes,/ And black lips wrinkling 

o'er the flash of teeth" (I, 617-18). The awkward, lacklustre verse 

construction of the religious digression, "What we call, first, earth's 

roof and, last, heaven's floor,/Now grate o' the trap, then outlet of 

the cage" (I, 599-600), gives way to longer, freer, atmospheric lines 

that represent the speaker's reawakened imaginative involvement: "Ever 

and anon there £littered through the air/ A snow-flake, and a scanty 

couch of snow/Crusted the grass-walk and garden-mould" (I, 607-9). 

As the speaker takes up again the story, the parodic influence 

returns also, and the images of the solitary villa on a winter's eve (I, 

604-), and the "grave, silent, sinister" atmosphere (I, 610), suggest the 

Gothic horror story. There is a strange beauty in these lines, and an 

undeniable emotional force, yet the parodic element disrupts the stylis­

tic context the speaker provides for the events. The disruption is 

reinforced by the intrusions of the speaker into his tale: "All was 

grave, silent, sinister,-when, ha?" (I, 610), or, "And tongues that 

lolled-Oh God that madest man!" (I, 618). These intrusions are disrup­

tively comic melodrama and, at the same time, throw into relief the 

relations between the teller and his tale (and point to the relation 

between any teller and his, or her, tale): the desire of the speaker is 

deeply involved in, indeed, conditions the context he formulates. In an 

immediate sense the speaker's subjectivism is total, so possessed is he 

by the emotional, charged narrative that he enters his own tale as an 

outraged onlooker. 

The main narrative ends suddenly: "Close eyes!" (I, 627) says the 

speaker, unable to imagine the awful climax to his tale. The second 

version declines from this point, as the speaker recounts the aftermath 

of the murder: the capture of the criminals and the public debate upon 

their guilt. The emotional and parodic intensity become progressively 

muted, the speaker less involved. He adopts a more removed standpoint, 

voiced in a type of oratory which critically depicts the way lived 

events become sucked up in a general public discourse based on personal 

whim and opinion: 

4-0 



At prick and summons of the primal curse 

Which bids man love as well as make a lie. 

There prattled they, discoursed the right and wrong, 

41 

Turned wrong to right, proved wolves sheep and sheep wolves, 

So that you scare distinguish fell from fleece. 

(I, 642-648) 

So ends the second version: a long, elaborate text which