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THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE 

IN BOOKS II-IV OF 

THE RING AND THE BOOK 

A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of 

the requirements for the degree of 

Master of Arts in English 

at Massey University 

James Randal Norgate 

1992 



Preface 

Chapter One 

Chapter Two 

Chapter Three 

Chapter Four 

Works Consulted 

CONTENTS 

The Personal Word and its 

Political Struggle 

Half-Rome's Struggle with 

the Cousin 

Other Half-Rome's 

Identification with Guido 

Tertium Quid's Denial of 

his Social Origins 

iii 

1 

22 

42 

62 

83 



iii 

PREFACE 

Established commentary on Robert Browning's dramatic monologue The 

Ring and the Book has largely been restricted to accounts of subjectivity. This 

study continues that long tradition by examining speakers' production of 

subjectivity, but extends the discussion to considering the political implications of 

the personal word. Theories of the Russian literary theorist and critic Mikhail 

Bakhtin are employed to observe individual speakers' constructions of selfhood. 

However, unlike the traditional monological model, Bakhtin's model of dialogism 

allows for further examination of the personal word when it inevitably encounters, 

and subsequently struggles politically with, social and institutional discourses. 

Hence, this study is distinct from the long tradition of monological criticism of 

The Ring and the Book in its examination of the personal word as political 

contest. 

I focus upon three books that have received relatively little direct critical 

attention in comparison to others within The Ring and the Book. Books II-IV, 

Half-Rome, Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid, often called the opening triad, 

differ from the others in the poem because the speakers act as social figures--both 

personal and representative of social views. These books also offer an advantage 

of being possibly the least critically trammelled of the twelve books that make up 

the poem. Furthermore, commentary which does attend to this triad almost 

invariably consigns these speakers to the role of chorus or supporting cast to the 

brighter 'stars' whose narratives follow. 

Whereas standard readings of the poem have tended to privilege one or 

more books as a location of truth, the dialogic model allows a re-examination of 

the poem as a progression of dramatic monologues without the need to privilege 

any particular speaker's word. As a modest first step in this enterprise, this thesis 

examines the opening triad for evidence of a struggle through language by the 

speakers, at both the personal and the political levels. Bakhtin would perhaps 

observe that this thesis, too, now joins the political struggle of language by 



iv 

becoming a prior utterance that could influence future critical commentary of The 

Ring and the Book. 

I am indebted to Warwick Slinn for his rigorous and provocative 

encouragement, to Michelle Dawson for acting as my interlocutor, and to my son 

Jacob for his support: 

A word in the mouth of a particular individual person is a product 

of the living interaction of social forces. 

V. N. Volosinov 



1 

CHAPTER ONE 

The Personal Word and its Political Struggle 

I 

The Ring and the Book1 consists of twelve separate poems spoken by ten 

narrators. Criticism has traditionally assumed the authority of the single, 

speaking (poetic) voice. For example, critics have usually described the first and 

final monologues as the voice of an over-arching narrator who functions as a 

surrounding frame for the ten remaining poems. Recent criticism still often 

follows this strong tradition by treating the speaker of Books I and XII as the 

voice of Robert Browning himself. J.J.Joyce writes: 

Books I and XII are a sort of "ring" of creative insight which 

encloses the other ten monologues. Browning's voice in these two 

books stands as authoritative in its pronouncements on the 

personalities, actions, and moral natures of the other nine speakers 

of the work. 2 

Dorothy Mermin goes further: 

Judgement is made easy: Browning tells us what to think of the 

characters before they say a word, and they are never allowed to 

mislead or confuse us. 3 

As recently as 1987 Paul Zietlow comments that, "for good reason, Browning is 

only half-playful in accusing the British public of liking him not (I.1379). "4 It 

is tempting and it has been traditionally acceptable to link the contents of a poem 

with the context of the poet's life, and then to draw significance from the 

comparison. On the other hand, in rejection of this approach, New Criticism 

eschewed recourse to biography of the poet, or to the social condition at the time 



2 

of the work's production. According to John Crowe Ransom, critics should 

recognize "the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake. "5 

This thesis does not subscribe to either of these extremes. Instead it 

investigates a theory of language which posits that all utterances--spoken or 

written, fictive or not--are inherently dialogical. Briefly, Mikhail Bakhtin's 

theory of dialogism suggests that a word--any word--responds to prior utterance, 

and that each word in turn anticipates further response. Therefore the meaning 

of 'reality'--including the meaning of the very people involved in creating 

meaning--becomes a dynamic process of struggle. A word contests previous, 

present and possible future attempts at imbuing it with meaning, while 

simultaneously proposing its own 'truth'. This continual struggle is always 

carried out on the site of language, and at both the personal and political levels. 

Bakhtin's theory enables Browning's The Ring and the Book to be considered 

dialogically in relation to the poet himself, or in relation to any other relative 

factor, be it literary, social, or historical. This thesis uses the dialogic model, 

first, to observe how a selection of speakers construct their own selfhood through 

language, and secondly, to examine how those speakers employ the personal word 

to engage other discourses in political contest for ideological and hegemonic 

supremacy. 

II 

The dialogic model and the monologic model differ markedly in the 

authority each invests in the single, speaking voice. For example, traditional 

criticism has tended to privilege the author's and narrator's position when 

attempting to locate meaning or 'truth' within a text. Behind or within dramatic 

monologues an 'essential' meaning has traditionally been sought. By contrast, the 

dialogic model--in a manner similiar to post-structuralist models of criticism-­

locates meaning within the process of language itself. Rather than identifying an 

authoritative voice through which an essential meaning may be sought, dialogic 

criticism focuses instead upon the political activity of language through which 

narrators and even authors construct themselves, and through which meaning is 

generated. 



3 

Traditional criticism has generally been dismissive of the role of the 

auditor in dramatic monologues. In The Poetry of Experience, Robert 

Langbaum's seminal text on the dramatic monologue form, he writes: 

.. .it makes so little difference, as long as the speaker's attention is 

directed outward, whether the dramatic monologue has or has not 

an ostensible auditor; for ultimately the speaker speaks to 

understand something about himself.6 

A dialogic model on the other hand posits the auditor in a dramatic monologue 

as real, not ostensible, and as always present. However, there is no requirement 

for the auditor to be physically present at the narration, and she may even be 

notional. A redefinition will therefore be necessary, later in this chapter, of what 

a 'real' auditor is within a dialogic model. 

The model also contests Langbaum's notions of the autonomy and 

essentialism of a speaker: 

Not only does the speaker direct his address outward as in dialogue 

but the style of address gives the effect of a closed circuit, with the 

speaker directing his address outwards in order that it may return 

with a meaning he was not aware of when sending it forth. I say 

a closed circuit because the utterance seems to be directed only 

obliquely at the ostensible auditor, and seems never to reach its 

ultimate goal with him. Nor does the essential interchange take 

place with the auditor; for even where the auditor's remarks are 

implied, the speaker never learns anything from them and they do 

not change the meaning of the utterance. If the speaker represents 

one voice of a dialogue, then his other self is the essential second 

voice in that it sends back his own voice with a difference. (Poetry 

of Experience 191) 

Langbaum's monologic model assumes that the speaker is autonomous: the 

"essential interchange" takes place with an "essential second voice" which is "his 



4 

other self". Dialogism challenges the notion that there is an essential self. 

Rather, it posits that the self is in a constant process of construction, via 

language, through the other (the auditor). In a sense Langbaum does allow for 

this process--he simply regards it as a closed, circular process. Provided one 

remains within the boundaries of Langbaum' s assumed subjectivity, his process 

remains valid, but it completely ignores the role of language, which is the basis 

of the dialogic model. Langbaum regards the other (the "essential second voice") 

as a mirror which leads back to the self--it is an image produced by the self, 

which is an idealist model. Elsewhere, he elaborates on this "closed circuit" 

paradigm: 

... the speaker directs his address outward in order to address 

himself, and makes an objective discovery in order to discover 

himself. No matter how dramatic the dramatic monologue is, no 

matter how far outward it moves, its development is lyrical in that 

the speaker does not develop outwards towards an external ideal, 

he does not change moral direction as a result of the 

circumstances; he rather makes the circumstances a part of himself 

as he develops inwards towards an intenser manifestation of his 

own nature. (200) 

Langbaum' s position is 'essentialist' in that he subscribes to the long-standing 

Western philosophical belief in a fixed centre or essence to the self, whose 

discovery, according to the monologic model, the dramatic monologue facilitates. 

This essence is a transcendent truth, the search for which has become the prime 

objective of many critics and readers of dramatic monologues. 

claims: 

In applying this monologic model to The Ring and the Book, Langbaum 

All the established institutions for distinguishing right from wrong­

the law, the Church, the authority of parents and husbands-all have 

been either entirely wrong, or if partly right have still missed the 

main point, Pompilia's absolute goodness and Guido's badness." 

(113) 



5 

These 'essential' values--right and wrong, good and bad--are those of the 

individual self, including Langbaum's. He marginalizes the political truths within 

society through his model's failure to recognize that self and society are relative. 

An individual can locate personal 'truth' through and relative to the ideological 

discourse of external structures of society. The dialogic model returns politics to 

the arena of critical discussion, and examines the personal word in its political 

contest with the external discourses of society. 

Recently critics have begun questioning the monologic model in various 

ways. For example, E. W.Slinn illustrates how attempts by so much established 

commentary to separate truth from falsehood involved or produced a separation 

of truth (transcendence) from language (medium). 7 He contrasts this with a post­

structuralist approach which locates truth, not as a product, but "as process, truth 

in the making, and in that process truth is both subverted by language and 

produced by it" (Discourse of Self 123). He explains that the poem's multiplicity 

results in "only a series of texts which provide the contexts for each other's 

function and meaning. " Rather than language revealing a hidden truth or 

meaning, "the poem presents truth and language as interdependent, as conceptual 

themes interwoven through dialectical process." Slinn includes the poet/speaker 

of Books I and XII of The Ring and the Book in this process, whom he 

distinguishes from "the biological referent Robert Browning". Slinn argues that 

the two books are not frames that sit outside the piece itself; rather, the 

poet/speaker, as with the other speakers, is "the produced subject of the language 

and contents" of his own speeches (128 and 204, n18). His challenge to the 

monological model underscores meaning as language process, and also reinforces 

the loss of singular authority in this process. 8 Similarly, A.Potkay observes that 

criticism of The Ring and the Book "with few exceptions, unites in assigning an 

infallible centre of authority to the poem." He notes of the twelve books that "no 

one interpretation . . . can claim absolute validity or transparent truth. "9 This 

thesis, too, treats truth as a subordinate issue, not as unimportant to the poem, but 

as secondary to the process of language through which the speakers construct their 

realities and 'truths'. 

Dialogism, as a theory of individual process, applies equally to fictive as 



6 

well as non-fictive discourse. For this reason application of dialogism to speakers 

within the frame of a book of dramatic monologues is not a special case, but is 

normative. The speakers within The Ring and the Book must define, present 

and re-present themselves, vis-a-vis other individuals and politically within 

society, through language. The process for each of them and for each of us is the 

same, and differs only in time and space. The dramatic monologues can thus be 

read and studied as complex dialogues. I restrict discussion in this study to three 

speakers within The Ring and the Book--Book II (Half-Rome), Book III (Other 

Half-Rome), and Book IV (Tertium Quid). Each speaker is examined, first, in 

terms of his construction of subjectivity through his personal word. However, as 

their names suggest, each speaker is also the sign for ideological forces of Roman 

society within The Ring and the Book. Dialogism posits that the personal word 

enters into political contest with other ideological discourses as individuals define 

their selves through the language of external social structures. Half-Rome, Other 

Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid usefully illustrate the personal word struggling for 

ideological supremacy against and through hegemonic discourses. The more overt 

political roles of these three narratives reveal how individual discourses overlap 

with the wider social and institutional discourses. 

Some commentators dismiss Books II, III, and IV as mere sideshows to 

the main action that is to follow, rather than as the process of language through 

which later speakers are being 'written'. J.J.Joyce, for example, attempts to 

impose musical form upon Books II-XI to prove that organizational structure 

exists. In contrast to Slinn, Joyce begins by claiming that "monologues I and XII 

stand apart from the other books in that the monologist in both these poems is 

the persona, Robert Browning quite obviously a speaker whose function contrasts 

with the other voices of Books II-XI. 1110 Joyce writes: 

The Monologists of Books II, III, and IV ... and Books VII, IX, 

and X ... are outsiders, characters whose knowledge of the 

murders of the Comparini family is not first hand. They are 

apologists and interpreters, each in his own way a judge of events 

in which Guido, Caponsacchi, and Pompilia . . . have been the 

actors. Each of the speakers in the first and third triad,offers a 



verdict of some sort on the actions of the speakers of the central 

triad. (303) 

7 

Dialogism would suggest that Joyce is privileging essential "events" over society's 

ideological construction of them. The assumption is that the "actors" (in whose 

play is moot!) of his second "triad" are not affected in areas such as expectation, 

ideology, or language by the prior raging debate within Roman society. Further, 

Joyce implies that the subsequent third "triad" construct their narratives 

independently of the six previous semiotic constructions of reality. Dialogism 

contends that all twelve monologues are spoken by "actors" who in tum "judge", 

"interpret", and construct events through their personal and political use of 

language. 

Books II, III and IV of The Ring and the Book provide useful test cases 

for the dialogic model. Almost all earlier criticism of this opening traid has been 

from the perspective of traditional models, hence the opening triad provides ample 

scope for critical re-appraisal using a different model. Furthermore, even within 

established criticism, the three opening speakers have generally been marginalised 

as supporting cast to the subsequent 'main characters' whose narratives even today 

occupy most scholarly attention. Yet behind dialogism stands the political 

implications and ramifications of prior utterance upon present and future speakers. 

It is beyond the scope of this thesis to trace possible impact or influence from the 

opening triad upon subsequent narratives in The Ring and the Book, but in 

keeping with the dialogic model, the possibility of such political struggle through 

language remains implied. The opening triad will be examined as merely three 

voices within the personal and political process of a chain of dialogic utterances 

that extends back before, and also beyond the boundaries of The Ring and the 

Book. 

III 

Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas can be traced back to his early immersion in the 

Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, but he was not to embrace the Marburg 



8 

philosophy nor Kantianism wholeheartedly .11 Bakhtin begins by accepting that 

there is an 'unbridgeable' gap between mind and world. Much of his life's work, 

especially in dialogism, focuses upon that gap. He neither dismisses the world 

in favour of only the mind, as did Hermann Cohen, leading exponent of the 

Marburg School. Nor does he consign the Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself) concept 

to the realm of the eternally unknowable. For Bakhtin, the very capacity to have 

knowledge is based upon a process of dialogue; and, by definition, dialogue 

requires the existence of an other. However, the other always resides on the 

opposite side of the gap to the self. 

Bakhtin's major premise is that "the organising centre of any utterance, of 

any experience, is not within but outside - in the social milieu surrounding the 

individual being. "12 This apparent denial of the subject is based on Bakhtin's 

belief that we can never see or know ourselves. Even to look at ourselves in a 

mirror is to look out from the mind, across a spatial gap at an object located in 

the outside world. We can see and know only of the other; only through the 

other's point of view can we gain some measure of apperception. This lack of 

knowledge about the self includes even our birth and death, and our physical 

presence at a given moment: 

My temporal and spatial boundaries are not given for me, but the 

other is entirely given. I enter into the spatial world, but the other 

has always resided in it. 13 

Everything that pertains to the individual's concept of self, beginning with gender 

and name, enters the consciousness through others, in their emotional and 

value-assigning tonality: 

I live in a world of others' words. And my entire life is an 

orientation in this world, a reaction to others' words (an infinitely 

diverse reaction), beginning with my assimilation of them (in the 

process of initial mastery of speech) and ending with assimilation 

of the wealth of human culture (expressed in the word or in other 

semiotic materials). 14 



9 

To express oneself is not merely a means to make oneself an object for another, 

but also for oneself (what Bakhtin calls "the actualizing of consciousness"). This 

rebuts any suggestion that the self is a copy or re-presentation of an other. 

Bakhtin's paradigm of self and other has a further component--language 

itself. He writes: 

There are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that 

can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, 

shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual 

consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of 

normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the 

world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a 

tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a 

generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of 

the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged 

life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual 

overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in 

the word. 15 

For the individual consciousness, language lies on the borderline (or in the gap) 

between one's self and the other. Bakhtin's dialogism by definition requires that 

at all times there must be an other if the process of apperception is to occur. But 

the other has no greater transcendental control of her utterances than has the self. 

Michael Holquist argues that the western humanist tradition of a close bond being 

felt between the sense I have of myself as a unique being and the being of my 

language ("/ own meaning"), has an opposite in what he defines as the 

deconstructionist view ("No one owns meaning"). He argues that dialogism holds 

a third position ("We own meaning ... or ... if we do not own it, we may at least 

rent meaning") .16 Neither Holquist nor Bakhtin is suggesting that the we who 

own or rent the meaning are an accumulation; rather, their emphasis is upon the 

process. Dialogism's emphasis is upon the dynamic interaction between self and 

other, with the word as the ground of contention, the point of struggle, the 

mediation that is the battle. 



10 

The individual consciousness is neither an autonomous locus of meaning 

and identity, nor is it a passive receptacle capable of being "filled up" with the 

meaning and identity bestowed by langue. The individual consciousness is not 

even a hapless victim of colonisation by some hegemonic ideology of others: there 

always remains the privilege of psychosis. Individual consciousness gains a 

conception of its self through the perception of the other, but only via a shared 

reality conveyed through the dynamic of dialogic utterance. Utterance organises 

experience. It gives experience of the other--and through the other, the self--the 

form and specificity of direction necessary for an individual to function as such. 

The word "interlocutor" is favoured in this study to describe the person 

being addressed. It is "one who takes part in a dialogue, conversation, or 

discussion" .17 The term auditor ("a hearer, listener; one of an audience") 

suggests a passive response to the speaker, while a dialogue requires an active 

addressee. Bakhtin defines passive response as that which has no effect whatever 

upon the utterance. Examples of this are rare: even an ancient ritualistic prayer 

(provided it can still be linguistically comprehended) is dialogic. The prayer 

would originally have been uttered to provoke a response among votaries, and 

may still trigger reactive utterances many centuries later. The speaker's need for 

an active participant as interlocutor is crucial to dialogism. This interlocutor need 

not be physically present, and may even be notional. It is this concept that 

prompted Holquist to insist that the plural we rent the meaning of language. In 

an interview Bakhtin explains: 

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person 

who understands to be located outside the object of his or her 

creative understanding--in time, in space, in culture. For one 

cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a 

whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior 

can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are 

located outside us in space and because they are others. 18 

The question this raises is who 'understands' --the speaker or the interlocutor? 

Since neither stands outside the dialogue, it follows that neither fully understands. 



11 

According to Bakhtin, each listener can understand the speaker, but cannot 

understand her self when she speaks. Both parties of the dialogue are structured 

by the process; hence mutual understanding must always reside somewhere 

between them. Bakhtin is aware that this approach is contrary to the received 

romantic notion of language and speech: 

Language is regarded from the speaker's standpoint as if there 

were only one speaker who does not have any necessary relation 

to other participants in speech communication. If the role of the 

other is taken into account at all, it is the role of a listener, who 

understands the speaker only passively. 19 

Bakhtin argues that terms such as "listener" and "understander", when used 

merely as partners of the "speaker", are fictions "which produce a completely 

distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech 

communication." He rails against the "unified flow" graphic-schematic depictions 

of the speaker and listener in speech communication.20 

The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the 

meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes 

an active responsive attitude towards it. He either agrees or 

disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, 

prepares for its execution, and so on .... Any understanding is 

imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or 

another: the listener becomes the speaker. (Speech Genres 68) 

Of course, Bakhtin allows for "responsive understanding with a delayed reaction 

[since] sooner or later what is heard and actively understood will find its response 

in the subsequent speech or behaviour of the listener" (69). For example, 

Half-Rome, Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid each orientate their 

communication precisely towards such an actively responsive understanding, since 

each expects "response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth" 

(Speech Genres 69). In Other Half-Rome's case, the notional Guido of the 

concluding few lines is the internalised other of the speaker himself. 



12 

Bakhtin takes dialogue to its conclusion by casting the speaker in the role 

of respondent to some degree. She is not, he argues, the first speaker "who 

disturbs the eternal silence of the universe". Her role as respondent presupposes 

not only the existence of the language system she is using, but also the existence 

of preceding utterances--both by her and by others--with which her own utterances 

contend, build upon, or at least presume to be known to the interlocutor. Thus 

any utterance becomes a link in a complex network of utterances. 

In looking at language, Bakhtin maintains that it is only during the process 

of creating an utterance that a word becomes a "spark of expression" (Speech 

Genres 86). That expression exists neither in the system of language nor in the 

objective reality surrounding us. It is only in the act of utterance--"the contact 

between language meaning and the concrete reality"--then, that expression (self) 

is constituted. 

Thus, emotion, evaluation, and expression are foreign to the word 

of language and are born only in the process of its live usage in a 

concrete utterance. The meaning of a word in itself (unrelated to 

actual reality) is ... out of the range of emotion .... [Words] acquire 

their expressive colouring only in the utterance, and this colouring 

is independent of their meaning taken individually and abstractly. 

(Speech Genres 87) 

Further, Bakhtin argues that when we construct an utterance, instead of taking 

words from the language in their dictionary form, we usually take them from 

other utterances. Thus we take words from parole rather than from langue. 

Therefore, according to Bakhtin, a word exists for a speaker in three ways. First, 

it is a neutral (dictionary) word in the language which belongs to nobody in 

which, according to Holquist, no one owns the meaning of the word. Secondly, 

the word exists as an other's word, belonging to another person and filled with 

echoes of the other's utterance. Thirdly, the word exists for a speaker as her own 

word, for, since she is dealing with it in a particular situation, with a particular 

speech plan, it becomes associated (but not imbued) with her "spark of 

expression". In the latter two cases the word appears to be expressive, but this 



13 

expression does not adhere to the word itself. It is only within the utterance that 

there is expression. From this, Bakhtin concludes that: 

... all our utterances (including creative works), [are] filled with 

others' words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of 

'our-own-ness', varying degrees of awareness and detachment. 

These words of others carry with them their own expression, their 

own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and 

re-accentuate. (Speech Genres 89) 

The expressiveness of words--including 'our-own-ness'--does not issue directly 

from the language system (langue), but is rather an echo of another's individual 

expression, which makes the word representative of another's whole utterance 

from a particular evaluative or ideological position. In the case of Other 

Half-Rome, for instance, Count Guido does not have to be physically present to 

be the interlocutor; the speaker already contends with the interlocutor's evaluative 

position and hence is already engaging in a dialogue. Before Other Half-Rome 

spoke, utterance existed. 

Utterance already exists with regard to the contents of each of Books II, 

III, and IV. The murders have already been subjected to societal and cultural 

assessment. Indeed, in ideological terms they had already been assessed before 

they occurred, or society would not have had the language with which to discuss 

them. Therefore, in this sense any utterance is a political re-assessment, as 

Bakhtin notes: 

The speaker is not the biblical Adam, dealing only with virgin and 

still unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time. (Speech 

Genres 93) 

Half-Rome's opening line, "What, you, Sir, come too?" (II.1), is part of a greater 

dialogue. Half-Rome's speech is a rejoinder in a larger utterance of twelve books 

about the Roman murders. Thus from a reader's point of view, the "come to 

what" query implicit in Book II is part of a dialogue that began in Book I. Were 



14 

we to take Book II in isolation, the same argument holds, except that we readers 

would not yet understand to what Half-Rome was referring. The past participle 

"come" implies an auxiliary "have" which has been deleted. Coupled with the 

adverb "too", this question assumes prior knowledge. Both Half-Rome and his 

interlocutor have arrived at the Lorenzo Church as a result of prior common 

knowledge. Half-Rome's rejoinder is in response to a prior utterance that they 

both share. Half-Rome's sentence is an anaphoric reference to received knowledge 

prior to the dialogue between him and his interlocutor. Bakhtin would claim that 

it must be anaphoric, or the two could not communicate; indeed, it must always 

be anaphoric because all utterances have dialogic undertones, even if only at the 

level of langue. 

In terms of the future, Half-Rome speaks in anticipation of an active 

response from the interlocutor. That response may be only an active responsive 

understanding, but nevertheless the interlocutor's activity will affect Half-Rome's 

narrative. Half-Rome serves notice in his first line that he has purpose in mind 

by parenthetically noting, "Just the man I'd meet". Although we do not know this 

till later, he veils a warning to his interlocutor shortly after when he refers to 

Honoris causd as the reason for Violante's horrific wounds. Within a few lines 

of the beginning of Half-Rome's narrative, we have evidence that it refers 

backwards (Half-Rome intends actively reassessing and reinterpreting knowledge 

that both he and his interlocutor share) and it refers forwards (Half-Rome has 

persuasive designs over his interlocutor). 

Other Half-Rome's interlocutor is, as we shall see in Chapter Three, 

marginalized to the point of near-invisibility. Even if we accept his physical 

presence, his role in Book III conforms to that of Other Half-Rome's internalised 

other. The interlocutor may be seen in the guise of the like-minded public of 

Other Half-Rome; Book III, therefore, assumes its identity as--simplistically--the 

voice of those who side with Pompilia. An argument against a dialogic reading 

of Book III would suggest that Other Half-Rome's speech is simply a monologue 

to confirm the speaker's thoughts and attitudes. Presumably, this entails Other 

Half-Rome talking to himself. But is this not tantamount to a dialogue between 

aspects of himself? Within his self he is divisible into speaker and interlocutor--



15 

self and other. Furthermore, if attitudes are to be confirmed, they necessarily had 

to exist prior to the process of confirmation. Therefore they may be traced back 

to prior utterance. If the prior utterance was by Other Half-Rome himself at 

some earlier point, then a dialogue still exists between the present speaker and an 

earlier self. The Pope, for example, adopts this last dialogic process in Book X. 

Alternatively, if Other Half-Rome is using the speech of Book III not to 

confirm existing attitudes but to persuade himself, then the utterance becomes per 

sea dialogue between contending voices within. Each "self" would then represent 

differing discourses drawn from within society, or from different temporal selves 

within his consciousness, and each would speak in that voice. In either of these 

apparently non-dialogic arguments, Other Half-Rome's utterance of Book III 

involves an internal debate whose conflict requires the existence of prior utterance 

and of competing selves. The voices of those in Book III who side with Pompilia 

against Guido, and whose utterances we detect as undertones to that of Other 

Half-Rome, may then be defined dialogically as the hegemonic inner sociality of 

the speaker. 

IV 

The dialogic model suggests that the most obvious struggle taking place 

at any given time in The Rin~ and the Book is at the level of the individual. This 

chapter argues that Half-Rome, Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid engage in 

elaborate dialogues with interlocutors who are either present, or are notional, but 

are nonetheless equally 'real' in terms of dialogic effect. The dialogues are not 

of choice; they are necessary for consciousness to occur within each individual. 

Thus far I have argued that the other is necessary for the self to construct 

a personal identity. To test this model, we need to ponder the consequences of 

a speaker who is not able to conduct a dialogue. Suppose a speaker were unable 

to locate an interlocutor on the literal level. Would it be likely (or even possible) 



16 

that she would also not be able to conjure up a notional partner capable of acting 

as interlocutor? 

D.K.Danow, following Bakhtin, observes that a restriction of dialogic 

interaction "bears a certain tragic potential, borne out repeatedly in the linked 

realms of the personal and political, where violence as a response--verbal or 

otherwise--represents the negative correlative of dialogue. "21 Presumably, the 

frustrated and violent response of Guido represents the failure of an inner voice 

to engage in dialogue. Violence would then become his only means of 

communication. Bakhtin believes that it is an essential characteristic of the word 

(and human beings) to communicate: 

[It is] the nature of the word, which always wants to be heard, 

always seeks responsive understanding, and does not stop at 

immediate understanding but presses on further and further 

(indefinitely). 22 

This requirement to be heard is never more obvious than at the conclusion of 

Book XI, when "the word ... fears the third party [here, the Pope] and seeks only 

temporary recognition (responsive understanding of limited depth) from immediate 

addressees 11 (Speech Genres 127). But instead, Guido receives no response, and 

is driven to despair. He searches for any word "out of the world of words" 

(XI.2416) that will engage his interlocutors in dialogue, but without success. 

Bakhtin believes that an individual must be heard in order to exist. "To be means 

to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, 

unrecognized, unremembered. "23 Guido's babble becomes monologic as he 

desperately seeks recognition through others: 

I am yours, 

I am the Granduke's - no, I am the Pope's! 

Abate, - Cardinal, - Christ, - Maria, - God, ... 

(XI.2422-24) 

A dialogic reading suggests that it is at the ellipsis in line 2424 that Guido is 



17 

destroyed as a self. Bakhtin wrote that "for the word (and consequently, for a 

human being) there is nothing more terrible than a lack of response" (Speech 

Genres 127). The irony of Guido's concluding line--"Pompilia, will you let them 

murder me?" (XI.2425)--is, in fact, the establishment of dialogic relations 

between Guido and Pompilia, which is necessary for Guido's consciousness and 

identity. It is not relevant that the physical woman Pompilia is dead. In the 

absence of any response from the others to whom he directs his utterances, Guido 

constructs an internalised Pompilia who will respond as an other to his self. Even 

the signified God is no longer available to him as an other, presumably because 

of ideological restrictions placed upon Guido by a hegemonic inner sociality. His 

constructed Pompilia becomes active ("let"), and he has become dependent upon 

her. He defines his dependence through her. Guido has reconstructed himself 

through dialogic interaction with Pompilia. 

We have observed the failure of the word to be heard, and the lengths an 

individual will go to receive recognition. Bakhtin was adamant on this point: 

A single person, remaining alone with himself, cannot make ends 

meet even in the deepest and most intimate sphere of his own 

spiritual life, he cannot manage without another consciousness. 

One person can never find complete fullness in himself alone. 

(Dostoevsky 177) 

Half-Rome, Other Half-Rome and Tertium Quid are no less affected by 

their process of construction of self through the other. None of the three faces 

the possibility of the gallows. Yet in dialogic terms, failure by them to be heard 

still represents a kind of death. Each attempts to constitute himself through 

language as an identity, and must contend with opposing voices and ideologies. 

If we read Books II, III, and IV in this manner, we see the texts not as reflections 

of the speakers' fixed characters, but as the process itself of character creation. 

Slinn argues that in reading monologues, we are required "to shift our focus, not 

to read language as an expression of a speaker's character, as a representation of 

belief, but to follow the processes by which a 'character' . . . is constituted in 

language. "24 



18 

This process of creation and presentation of self requires another, and the 

interlocutors of Books II, III, and IV fulfil this dialogic role for the speaker. "To 

be means to be for another and through the other, for oneself. A person has no 

internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary; looking 

inside himself he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another" 

(Dostoevsky 287). 

V 

Chapters Two, Three and Four each examine how the speakers of Books 

II, III, and IV attempt to construct themselves on a personal level vis-a-vis their 

interlocutors and through the personal word. However, taken within the context 

of The Ring and the Book, Half-Rome, Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid 

compete for ideological supremacy. As their names suggest, they represent 

societal forces that are in constant hegemonic friction. Unless physical violence 

erupts, the battle is fought out at the site of language. Yet even when physical 

violence occurs--such as with the murder of the Comparini--comprehension, 

reaction and interpretation of the physical events can be made only through 

language. Living in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Bakhtin made the 

same observation when he wrote that the "sign becomes an arena of the class 

struggle. "25 

The struggle for ideological dominance in Books II, III, and IV provides 

society with more than just a later received version of events. Subsequent 

speakers are in the process of being constructed through language. They will, in 

their turn, respond through language that has already been ideologically loaded, 

and they will speak as people who already have meaning. Hence, when Pompilia 

later speaks in Book VII, it is not as a tabula rasa. She has not literally heard 

Books II, III, and IV, but her speech contests politically the discourses of external 

structures which are ideologically opposed to hers. Pompilia is not a "blank 

page"26 on which she writes her own 'truth'. Her personal word struggles 

politically through the medium of language which is already ideologically loaded, 

to establish her own version of reality relative to the anticipated ideological 



19 

positions of Half-Rome, Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid. Therefore each 

chapter concludes by examining the personal word of the speakers for evidence 

of political struggle. 

This study is distinctive in its examination of the political implications of 

the personal word. Established commentary on The Ring and the Book has 

generally been restricted to accounts of subjectivity. Dialogism provides a 

necessary and useful model with which to examine the individual's construction 

of selfhood. However, unlike the monological model, dialogism also allows the 

political element to be introduced. Examination of political struggle for meaning 

through language can be extended indefinitely. Critics may choose to include 

social, historical, biographical, and even academic politics against and through 

which the speakers of The Ring and the Book must struggle in their language. 

However, this more modest study restricts itself to the opening triad of speakers, 

and purports to highlight only a few major skirmishes in the politics of language. 

The word itself, according to Bakhtin, 

is neutral with respect to any specific ideological function. It can 

carry out ideological functions of any kind .... The reality of the 

word, as is true of any sign, resides between individuals .... 

(Marxism 14) 

Hence, truth belongs to the realm of dialogue, and becomes itself contextual. On 

this basis we turn from truth to the language itself, and to the individuals who as 

signs themselves struggle for personal, ideological and political identity and 

supremacy in the arena of language. 

Notes 

1. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (London: Penguin, 1971). All 
subsequent quotations from the poem in this thesis are taken from, or conform to, 
the Penguin Classics edition, reprinted 1990. 



20 

2. J .J .Joyce, "Music's Ternary Form as Organizing Principle for Monologues 
II-XI of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book," Victorian Poetry 18 (1981): 
302. 

3. D.Mermin, The Audience in the Poem (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 
1983) 64. 

4. P.Zietlow, "The Ascending Concerns of The Ring and the Book: Reality, 
Moral Vision, and Salvation," Studies in Philology 84. 2 (1987): 202. 

5. M.H.Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Holt, Rinehard 
and Winston, 1981) 117. 

6. R.Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (New York: Norton, 1957) 190-
91. 

7. E. W.Slinn, The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (London: 
MacMillan, 1991) . 

8. It is beyond the scope of this thesis, but dialogism would have no difficulty 
responding to arguments relating to the authority or otherwise of Browning's 
(singular) voice in The Ring and the Book. Briefly, the argument would run that 
he was defining himself as a Victorian poet in anticipation of reaction from his 
"British public", and through the language of the times. Further, he was 
responding to the many different voices contained in the Old Yellow Book written 
in Italy about 170 years earlier. Within each of the masks that he donned to write 
each persona would be discerned the myriad of voices--social, literary, critical, 
historical--that makes up each dialogue between Browning and us. Bakhtin' s 
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, which deals in great detail with the author­
listener-hero dynamic in the novel, suggests a parallelism between literary 
character and real-life individual. Each must author her self in response to the 
authoring word of the social milieu, through the temporal and spatial context of 
language, and in anticipation of future utterance. The argument becomes circular: 
Browning as speaker becomes no more, no less a different and independent 
character in each of the 12 books, than if we begin with the premise that each 
speaker is an individual on whose conversation we eavesdrop. In other words, the 
lives of both Browning and the speakers in The Ring and the Book are texts 
responding in similar ways to language. 

9. A.Potkay, "The Problem of Identity and the Grounds for Judgement in The 
Ring and the Book, " Victorian Poetry 25 ( 1987): 143, 148. 

10. "Music's Ternary Form ... ," 301-2. 

11. Bakhtin' s education and philosophical background is well documented in 
his biography: K.Clark and M.Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, 
Massachusetts: Harvard U.P., 1984). As a result of the critical acclaim that the 
translation of Rabelais and His World received in the West in 1968, other works 
by Bakhtin--dating in some cases back to the 1920s--were 'discovered' and 
progressively translated. Ironically, only then did he become generally known 
throughout the USSR too. Works of disputed authorship by Volosinov and 



21 

Medvedev are generally now either jointly attributed, or cited under the others' 
names as noms de plume. One major treatise on Goethe, similar to those on 
Rabelais and Dostoevsky, has been irretrievably lost: Bakhtin evidently used the 
unpublished manuscript for cigarette papers during one particularly harsh period 
of Stalinist exile. My understanding is that apart from minor essays and working 
notes, the bulk of Bakhtin's work is now available in English. 

12. V.N.Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (New York: 
Seminar Press, 1973) 93. 

13. M.M.Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University 
of Texas Press, 1986) 147. 

14. Speech Genres 143. 

15. M.M.Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas 
Press, 1981) 293. 

16. M.Holquist, "The Politics of Representation," Allegory and 
Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: John Hopkins University 
Press, 1981) 163-4. 

17. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 
All subsequent definitions will be sourced in the text as SOED. 

18. M.M.Bakhtin, "Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial 
Staff" , Speech Genres 7. 

19. Speech Genres 67. 

20. Bakhtin's theories anticipate contemporary research which questions the 
basis for traditional sender-receiver models of communication. See for example, 
Denis McQuail Mass Communication Theory (London: Sage, 1987). 

21. D.K.Danow, The Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin (London: Macmillan, 1991) 
64. 

22. Speech Genres 127. 

23. M.M.Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis: U of 
Minnesota P, 1984) 287. 

24. E. W.Slinn, "Some Notes on Monologues as Speech Acts," Browning 
Society Notes 15.1 (1985): 8. 

25. Marxism 23. 

26. See Susan Gubar, '"The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female Creativity,' 
in Elizabeth Abel ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 
1982) 73-93. 



22 

CHAPl'ER TWO 

Half-Rome's Struggle with the Cousin 

I 

The title of Book II of The Ring and the Book announces that this 

narrative is not fully representative of Roman society. Half-Rome is a sign that 

acknowledges the necessity of a complementary other. The word "half" retains 

its oldest sense of "side" and of "one of two opposite, corresponding, or equal 

parts. "1 However, the book's title fails to indicate the terms on which a division 

is made. 

On a personal level the sign Half-Rome refers to a speaker, the narrator 

of Book II. A person is normally considered to be 'whole' within herself even 

if the story she narrates is incomplete or one 'sided'. However, if the sign refers 

to her as a being, rather than to her narrative, then the possibility of human 

incompleteness cannot be discounted, however paradoxical this may first appear. 

In this chapter, Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism will be applied to Half-Rome the 

speaker to test how autonomous or complete he is. The issue is salient to our 

reading of Half-Rome as a sign struggling for self identity, both personally and 

politically, through the process of language. 

The sense of "measurement of degree" adheres to the compound word of 

the signifier. Half-Rome is in the process of construction, "attaining only half­

way to completeness" (SOED). This has implications if Book II is read in the 

context of The Ring and the Book. The discoursesof future speakers (and of 

readers outside the boundary of the text) are being constructed, because Half­

Rome is imbuing language with significance through his utterance. The narrative 

of Book II is Half-Rome's struggle for completeness. 

On a political level, the sign suggests that its signified is not universal. 



23 

If the concept of a Half-Rome is to exist, there must also exist at least the 

possibility of an 'other' Half-Rome--one with a complementary, possibly 

competing, signified. Another task, therefore, is to examine Book II for evidence 

of differing or dissenting ideologies concealed within the discourse of a single 

speaker. This chapter will examine that struggle. 

II 

Bakhtin believes that all discourse is oriented towards a "responsive" 

understanding, that is, "every word is directed towards an answer and cannot 

escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates. "2 Half­

Rome's entire speech is constructed in this manner, beginning with his first 

pleased recognition of the interlocutor (II.1), through to his concluding advice to 

his interlocutor to warn his (the interlocutor's) cousin away from Half-Rome's 

wife (II .1545-7). Soon after they have viewed the bodies of the Comparini, Half­

Rome asks his interlocutor if he holds Guido "so prodigiously to blame" (II.189). 

We don't need the rejoinder to be explicit, because the next question encapsulates 

the response: "A certain cousin of yours had told you so?" Again, the 

interlocutor's rejoinder to that second question need not be explicit in the light 

of Half-Rome's further response: "Exactly! Here's a friend shall set you right." 

This passage (11.189-91) illustrates the dialogic nature of Half-Rome's dramatic 

monologue. Half-Rome's comments cannot be interpreted except in the 

knowledge of his interlocutor's rejoinders. The passage gives us access to the 

struggle that has been occurring in the preceding 190 lines of Book II. The 

manner in which Half-Rome elicits the cousin's opinion about Guido's guilt 

suggests that Half-Rome has been aware throughout of the cousin's influence upon 

the interlocutor. It becomes clear that his discourse thus far has been contending 

with the cousin's (and hence the interlocutor's) probable point of view, as Bakhtin 

explains: 

Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, [Half­

Rome's] word is at the same time determined by that which has not 

yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the 

answering word." (Dialogic Imagination 280) 



24 

Half-Rome's speech is political: it answers the prior word of the cousin, while at 

the same time it anticipates, and manoeuvres in order to dominate, the future 

responses of the interlocutor. 

We are therefore led to suspect that the cousin plays a central role in Half­

Rome's presentation of events, perhaps greater than that of the interlocutor 

himself. While Half-Rome continues to speak directly to the interlocutor, he is 

also 'speaking' to the cousin, and furthermore is responding to the prior utterance 

of the cousin. The cousin is the other through whom Half-Rome defines himself. 

However, it is not till almost halfway through Book II that Half-Rome openly 

reveals to his interlocutor that he is struggling with the cousin: 

... since there's more to come, 

More that will shake your confidence in things 

Your cousin tells you, -- may I be so bold? 

(II. 619-621) 

Bakhtin calls this type of utterance a "hybrid construction". He writes in The 

Dialogic Imagination that the hybrid construction belongs, 

... by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a 

single speaker, but ... actually contains mixed within it two 

utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two 'languages,' two 

semantic and axiological belief systems. (304) 

The first phrase in Half-Rome's statement (above) is the authoritative 

speech of another, making a statement of an objective and completely indisputable 

fact--that further events happened. The second clause commences within the 

frame of that previously objective style by reiterating the word "more". But a 

totally different axiological conceptual system lies behind the second use of the 

word. The second statement conceals a change from a quantitative to a qualitative 

value judgement. Half-Rome submerges his own direct authorial discourse into 

the objective voice of common knowledge, and then puts the two together against 

the prior word of the cousin. 



25 

The shift in style in the final phrase is one of appearances only, and is 

designed to obscure the previous concealment even further. Half-Rome's final 

direct discourse provides a marked subjective challenge, which contrasts with the 

previous 'common view' (and his own voice merged within that general opinion). 

The question ("may I be so bold?") requires a direct response from the 

interlocutor, but it is a loaded question. The cousin's version is posited as the 

antithesis of the 'real' story-of which there is more to come. The interlocutor has 

little option but to request more of Half-Rome's version of the story. 

Dialogically, an affirmative response has been neatly anticipated by Half-Rome's 

clever prior utterance. 

The passage also illustrates the way in which Half-Rome uses language in 

his struggle to define himself through the word of the cousin. Half-Rome has just 

previously asked the interlocutor, "Is this your view? 'Twas Guido's anyhow" 

(II.603). Half-Rome's struggle through the interlocutor with the cousin focuses 

on the word "anyhow". Guido and the cousin are posited as holding opposite 

personal ideologies. But Half-Rome has no direct access to them. At the literal 

level Guido is in prison and the interlocutor's cousin is . . . who knows? perhaps 

singing and playing his lute about Half-Rome's house! (Il.1545-6). But Half­

Rome does have direct access to their discourses. He re-presents the word of 

Guido, through his own discourse, and contends this with the word of the cousin, 

via the word of the interlocutor, but again through his own discourse. Hence, 

Half-Rome constructs his self in response to the cousin's prior utterance, and in 

anticipation of the cousin's and the interlocutor's future utterance. 

By the middle of Book II we are already far removed from Robert 

Langbaum's "closed circuit" paradigm regarding dramatic monologues, whereby 

"the utterance seems to be directed only obliquely at the ostensible auditor." 

Langbaum claims in The Poetry of Experience that "even where the auditor's 

remarks are implied, the speaker never learns anything from them and they do not 

change the meaning of the utterance. "3 This is in contrast with Half-Rome's 

attitude towards his interlocutor. 

By halfway through his narrative, Half-Rome not only has "the handsel" 



26 

of his interlocutor's ear (II.192) but now makes "so bold" (II.621) as to 

relexicalise the interpretation of events. He uses theatrical metaphor ("this makes 

the first act in the farce" II.622) whose irony is really a multi-voiced utterance. 

Half-Rome trivializes the brutal murders as a form of comedy which "commonly 

employs highly exaggerated or caricatured character types". 4 If the interlocutor 

is to understand the metaphor, he has to recognize at least the possibility of the 

connotations: that Guido, Pompilia, et al are type-cast characters passively 

working within the parameters of their given roles; that events are somehow 

authored beyond their control, and that the story leads to a conclusion. As 

storyteller (or playwright) Half-Rome has presented the first act in this comedy 

of errors, complete with the necessary interpretation for his version of a correct 

comprehension. Even were the interlocutor to disagree with Half-Rome's 

interpretation (and we see no evidence of this in Book II) he must now allow for 

the possibility of Half-Rome's world view, if only by contradistinction to another 

less-accommodating stance (such as the cousin's probable version). 

The ironic theatrical utterance also speaks with the voice of the Book I and 

XII narrator, who writes Half-Rome into a certain role within The Ring and the 

Book. This includes the naming of Half-Rome. Similarly, behind the narrator's 

voice may be heard Browning the poet, who in that line (II.622) ventriloquizes 

the language of theatre. And in the late twentieth century students write of the 

voices within that utterance, but accommodate them within the context of later 

utterances about Victorian poets, the post-Romantic subject, Bakhtin and 

dialogism, and so on. However, the process of attributing significance is not 

unilinear, beginning with Half-Rome and ending with whoever happens to be the 

latest reader. Bakhtin notes that, 

every literary discourse more or less sharply senses its own 

listener, reader, critic, and reflects in itself their anticipated 

objections, evaluations, points of view. "5 

This suggests that not only is the interlocutor involved in the 'dialogue' with Half­

Rome, but so are we--more than a century later. If this were not so, then Book 

II would indeed be a monologue--"speech that brooks no response"6--in the 



27 

negative sense of being closed and completed. Dialogism opposes the notion of 

closure. Half-Rome's construction of himself as an identity requires a continual 

dialogue with the interlocutor's cousin on the basis of prior utterance, and with 

any possible present or future 'listener'. I as writer of this thesis, and you as 

reader, have also assumed 'roles' in the 'act' which Half-Rome has theatrically 

re-presented. Paradoxically, to disagree with my arguments is to privilege and 

enter into a dialogue with prior voices: perhaps with critics such as Langbaum and 

Dorothy Mermin7 (who themselves anticipated a range of responses while 

constructing their positions); or perhaps directly with Half-Rome himself. 

The other aspect of Langbaum's claim, that the 'implied' auditor's remarks 

"do not change the meaning of the utterance" is also contestable. However, I 

shall not revisit arguments by others against Langbaum 's idealist belief in a fixed 

meaning, his privileging of transcendent 'truth' in The Ring and the Book.8 

Langbaum perceives discourse in The Ring and the Book as monologic--fixed and 

complete. Bakhtin sees any discourse as "directed both towards the referential 

object of speech ... and towards another's discourse, towards someone else's 

speech" (Dostoevsky 185). Bakhtin writes that, 

... every statement about the object is constructed in such a way 

that, apart from its referential meaning, a polemical blow is struck 

at the other's discourse on the same theme, at the other's statement 

about the same object. A word, directed towards its referential 

object, clashes with another's word within the very object itself. 

The other's discourse is not itself reproduced, it is merely implied, 

but the entire structure of speech would be completely different if 

there were not this reaction to another's implied words. (195) 

Bakhtin's belief goes further than merely refuting Langbaum's claim about the 

auditor's remarks not changing the meaning of the utterance: dialogism suggests 

that through the interlocutor Half-Rome creates his meaning. 

Half-Rome anticipates the points of view not only of his interlocutor, but 

of us as well, otherwise the book could hold little meaning for us. Bakhtin 



28 

believes that "a passive understanding of linguistic meaning is no understanding 

at all" (Dialogic Imagination 281, emphasis added), that even a passive 

understanding of the speaker's intentions contributes nothing new to the word. 

Such an understanding "never goes beyond the boundaries of the word's context 

and in no way enriches the word" (281). In contrast, Bakhtin defines 

understanding as active: 

It assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual 

system filled with specific objects and emotional expressions, and 

is indissolubly merged with the response, with a motivated 

agreement or disagreement. (282) 

As we have already seen, Half-Rome's narrative is not only for the benefit 

of his interlocutor, but is also a response to the prior utterance of the 

interlocutor's cousin. The only way Half-Rome can comprehend the cousin's point 

of view is through the form in which he fashions his monologue of a dialogic 

exchange with the interlocutor. In examining the problem of understanding, 

Bakhtin notes that "understanding strives to match the speaker's word with a 

counter word. "9 In this sense the cousin is the speaker, who Half-Rome is 

striving to understand and counter, and he attains this understanding through the 

interlocutor. Contrary to Langbaum's statement, then, Half-Rome is continually 

learning via the response of his interlocutor, and as a result of this dialogic 

process, he constructs the meaning of utterance and point of view. 

Half-Rome's speech reveals clues of his constant checking and reviewing 

of the interlocutor's beliefs. He deliberately sets out to "shake" the interlocutor's 

confidence in the cousin's version of events. However, Half-Rome's uncertainty 

of progress and need for response is most obviously seen in his asides. These are 

sometimes direct questions to the interlocutor ("Is this your view?" II.603) behind 

which we see Half-Rome gauging the position of the cousin's prior utterance. 

From the response he receives, Half-Rome then constructs his own response, and 

in doing so positions and constructs his own self. 



29 

III 

Many of the verbal strategies we have examined which Half-Rome uses to 

produce a self through the other, also double as political weapons with which to 

attack his interlocutor's ideological construction of society. For example, the 

speaker uses verbal asides that are damning ("Have not you too a cousin that's a 

wag?" II.937). On the personal level, Half-Rome constructs himself in 

contradistinction to the cousin. Like Guido, Half-Rome too has the responsibility 

of keeping a wife and a household. And like Guido, Half-Rome can ill-afford to 

have anyone disrupt his domestic situation through pranks. The anyone is 

specifically the cousin, against whom Half-Rome constructs himself. He therefore 

launches a direct attack on the character and credibility of the other 'speaker' --the 

cousin--who competes for the interlocutor's Weltbild. The interlocutor is caught 

between the ideological constructs of the cousin and of Half-Rome. 

From the beginning, Half-Rome has struggled as a representative of 

ideological forces within society in constant hegemonic friction with other forces. 

Half-Rome is extremely pleased to meet his interlocutor near the Lorenzo Church, 

where the bodies of the Comparini are displayed. "Be ruled by me," he tells his 

listener, and "I'll tell you like a book." (II.2,4) Clearly, Half-Rome intends 

reconstructing events using his own language and is conscious of his intentions 

upon the other, as he notes in parenthetical asides: "Just the man I'd meet" and 

"The right man, and I hold him." (II.1,16) 

What is not yet obvious to us from the opening paragraph is why Half­

Rome is keen to manipulate his interlocutor's point of view, nor what the political 

implications of this ideological conflict will be. Half-Rome uses the argument of 

honoris causd to underpin ideologically his arguments. He says of Violante's 

wounds to the face: 

... punished thus solely for honour's sake, 

Honoris causd, that's the proper term. 

(II.28-29) 



30 

Half-Rome describes the stabbings as punishments, which is to bring the act, 

through discourse, within the realm of civilized and rational behaviour. Authority 

punishes wrong-doers, with what it has deemed to be justification after 

provocation. By labelling Violante's wounds as punishment, Half-Rome yokes 

her actions (whatever they may have been) to the notion of transgression. Half­

Rome interprets and categorises Violante's actions for his interlocutor before he 

details them. This act predisposes his interlocutor to interpret them within Half­

Rome's ideological belief system, and to excuse Guido his actions before learning 

of his motivations. The punishment, Half-Rome says, was done for "honour's 

sake". By using a Latin legal label, he draws the motive for Guido's acts of 

violence within the realm of legal discourse which is hegemonic. Half-Rome 

hopes that if honoris causa can become a motive for the violence recognizable by 

its "proper term" (11.29), the murders might gain a degree of social sanction. For 

Guido's actions to have a grandiose legal nomenclature is to suggest that they are 

not comparable to common murder. Half-Rome constructs events in language that 

privileges and naturalises certain meanings (or potential meanings), while at the 

same time closing off other sets of meanings. 

As a sign for an ideological force within Roman society, Half-Rome has 

implied within the signifier the possibility of 'other' ideological forces. The 

speaker is quite open about this. For instance, he states: 

Now, am I fair or no 

In what I utter? Do I state the facts, 

Having forechosen a side? I promised you! 

(II.1213-15) 

He uses the word "side" which is the oldest sense of "half" and which in most 

cases still retains a sense of being one of two portions of a whole (SOED). As 

we will see later in this chapter, Half-Rome is not above deliberate verbal deceit. 

Yet he innocently protests about not having pre-elected an ideological stance-­

itself a political ploy--or then of selecting the facts to suit. He even concludes 

with a promise to his interlocutor. If Half-Rome is read as an ideological 'side' 

to Roman society, on what philosophical grounds can his ideological position be 



31 

privileged over the 'other side'--or vice versa? We should be mindful of the 

speaker of Book One's warning: 

'T is there-­

The instinctive theorizing whence a fact 

Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look. 

(I.862-4) 

Rather than try to "fix/Truth at the bottom" (I.857-8) with regard to Half-Rome's 

ideologies, we are better served in seeing him as a signified in the process of 

being defined. The production of that ideological identity takes place dialogically 

against that of the other, which in this case is not necessarily commensurate with 

the voice and person of the cousin. 

Dialogically, Half-Rome also competes against the anticipated word of 

Other Half-Rome. Half-Rome has not "forechosen a side" (II.1215); he is that 

side. He is the sign for the axiological belief system which encompasses Guido, 

the speaker, and--if the speaker's rhetoric is ultimately successful--his interlocutor 

as well. Behind the personal struggle for recognition by the speaker, the 

interlocutor and his cousin, lurk the ideological forces of Roman society in 

combat for hegemonic dominance. 

IV 

On a different level, Half-Rome attempts to construct a received version 

of events for future speakers and for history. When Half-Rome introduces 

the cardinal into his narrative, he first tempts his interlocutor by avoiding the 

facts: "I name no names" (II.153). The interlocutor is forced by this manoeuvre 

to seek elucidation. Half-Rome then yokes the cardinal and Guido together in two 

ways: Guido previously served the cardinal, who in tum married Guido to 

Pompilia (II.155-6). When his interlocutor expresses disbelief at this, we hear 

Half-Rome's parenthetical response ("Will you have the truth?" II.157). The 

interlocutor has been set up to seek the details, and when he expresses surprise 



32 

at some of them, Half-Rome responds, by retorting in effect, 'Well you asked for 

details. Do you or don't you want them?' Naturally, what the interlocutor is 

hearing from Half-Rome is not commensurate with what he had earlier heard 

generally, or from his cousin. 

This dialogic explanation is more convincing than the footnote to the 

Penguin edition of The Ring and the Book, (p.646) which claims that '"Guido' 

(line 156) is Browning's error for 'Paolo'." Why then would the interlocutor 

express such surprise at the information as to require Half-Rome to interrupt his 

narrative and deliver his parenthetical challenge? Rather, any confusion between 

Guido and Paolo is a deliberate lie on the part of Half-Rome to confuse and 

persuade his listener. This argument gains further credibility if taken in context 

with another deliberate lie a few lines later. Half-Rome first introduces Curate 

Carlo into the story, a "brisk lad" with a reputation for embellishment. Half­

Rome then reports what he expected Carlo to tell the cardinal by way of 

"improving the event": Pompilia's confession, and Caponsacchi's punishment, 

complete with imagery of Lucifer, Eve, and Adam (Guido) (II.159-169). 

The fictive speech by Carlo is a variation on what Bakhtin calls "pseudo­

objective motivation". Normally in this form, the logic motivating the sentence 

seems to belong to the author of the narrative, "but in actual fact, the motivation 

lies within the subjective belief system of his characters, or of general opinion" 

(Dialogic Imagination 305). Half-Rome inverts the form in an attempt to conceal 

his own speech behind another's. He constructs Carlo as a character in his own 

narrative, and gives that character objective motivation to speak. The interlocutor 

apparently hears the objective beliefs of the referent Carlo, and perhaps generally 

held public opinion; what he actually receives is the concealed voice of Half­

Rome. 

By the time Half-Rome reports that Carlo did not actually say these things, 

damage has already been done. The possibility of them has been actualised. The 

"fancy" has become "just one fact the more" and Pompilia and Caponsacchi have 

been "charactered" by the words of Carlo as ventriloquized by Half-Rome. Half­

Rome even gives the events a further twist by insinuating that by not saying these 



things Carlo was behaving suspiciously: 

Too wary, he was, too widely awake, I trow. 

Oh but he's quick, the Curate, minds his game! 

(II.172, 181) 

33 

It is not Carlo, but Half-Rome who gives "history's self some help" (II.162), 

especially when he slips a deliberate and blatant lie into the summary of events 

attributed to Carlo. As we saw a few lines earlier when Half-Rome deliberately 

confused Paolo with Guido and then hastily bluffed with a parenthetical aside, he 

does the same with his second lie. He mentions the "wife's confession" (II.163) 

and then boldly elaborates to the interlocutor: 

(This morning she confessed her crime, we know) 

(II.164) 

The lie is footnoted (p.646) which ponderously explains that it is "groundless 

rumour", that in her confession Pompilia "declares herself innocent". Such 

explanation, while technically correct, is to miss the point. It ignores the extent 

to which Half-Rome will go to attack the interlocutor's and his cousin's 

constructions of events. We have not yet learnt why Half-Rome is making such 

a savage attempt at dominating the opposing voice which both is, and speaks 

through, the interlocutor. But this passage alone suggests that for Half-Rome the 

need to dominate is paramount; dialogism would suggest that his survival as a self 

is at stake. 

Politically, Half-Rome is attempting to formalize the received version of 

events. If Pompilia's "confession" (II.164) can become a popular rumour 

throughout Rome, then the orientation of future speakers is influenced. Other 

Half-Rome might protest her innocence in Book III, and Pompilia's own narrative 

of Book VII would deny culpability, but the reception of these narratives will 

already be predisposed to alternative interpretations. In this respect, Half-Rome 

does not always have to convince future listeners of the "truth" of his assertions. 



34 

If he voices an alternative significance, his discourse has actualized its possibility. 

Language then has within it the possibility of Half-Rome's alternative, and future 

speakers must contend with that significance within their discourses. As Book 

One's speaker dryly asks: 

Are means to the end, themselves in part the end? 

Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too? 

(I.704-5) 

V 

Bakhtin argues that for an individual a sign can have no meaning; rather, 

meaning is a creation between individuals, or within a social milieu. Having 

acquired social value, the word carries that significance back to the individual 

consciousness which assimilates it (Marxism 22). 

For Half-Rome the word is heavily invested with the social value of 

patriarchal power. His identity as a self is through patriarchal discourse, which 

privileges male social dominance. Not unexpectedly then, Half-Rome constructs 

events in favour of male initiative or, where males have obviously blundered, in 

terms of female manipulation. Hence while Pietro is "the old murdered fool" 

(II.21), nevertheless "it was Violante gave the first offence" (II.34). Half-Rome 

constructs Pietro as yet another victim of Violante. It was she "who purchased 

[Pompilia] simply to palm on him" (II.57); it was "she, still unknown to Pietro, 

tied the knot/Which nothing cuts except this kind of knife" (II. 66-7) and, 

... when her husband must be told in tum, 

Ply the wife's trade, play off the sex's trick 

And, alternating worry with quiet qualm, 

Bravado with submissiveness, quick fool 

Her Pietro into patience: so it proved. 

(II.74-8) 



35 

Half-Rome's language must overcome the discourse of women if he is to maintain 

his identity. Violante's contending ideology is trivialized as the "wife's trade" 

and the "sex's trick" which is to contain and marginalize it. Her 'devious' 

activities are condescendingly relexicalized as natural to her role as wife and to 

her identity as female, and in addition are universalized as to be expected of all 

women (the wife's trade and the sex's trick). To crown his ideological 

construction, Half-Rome equates the Comparini murders with divine justice-­

"Even the blind can see a providence here" (II.87)--which naturalizes and 

authenticates his patriarchal ideology. 

Half-Rome produces and sustains the authority of his patriarchal identity 

by recourse to hegemonic discourse. By invoking honoris causd he confronts 

alternative and competing discourses with the closed or monologic word of 

authority--in Bakhtinian terms, discourse that brooks no response. In the very act 

of utterance the centripetal forces of official language which Half-Rome invokes 

compete with centrifigual forces of decentralization and disunification (Dialogic 

Imagination 268-71), thus belying Half-Rome's attempts at monologism. The 

defence of honour is hegemonic discourse, appropriated by Half-Rome as his 

personal word, and then propelled forward into the political arena of other 

ideologies and discourses. 

Half-Rome's self is as much at stake on this political level as it was on the 

personal level previously discussed when his self was in contention with the 

interlocutor and the cousin. Half-Rome identifies himself through the external 

structure and discourse of patriarchy. But if the cousin succeeds in cuckolding 

him, his masculine power and authority of being able to control his wife will be 

destroyed. Hence Half-Rome struggles against a,ry discourse that threatens his. 

However foolish Pietro and, later, Guido may have been, of greater 

importance to Half-Rome is the essential issue of wifely obedience. He attempts 

to reinforce that essence by linking Guido, Pompilia and Caponsacchi respectively 

to Adam, Eve and Lucifer through simile and met_aphor (II.167-9). The use of 

these figures reinforces Half-Rome's patriarchally based discourse, which 

privileges his male dominance over that of the deceiving and luring wife. By 



36 

extension, Half-Rome himself becomes an Adam who could fall through the evil 

actions of the Lucifer-cousin. If the interlocutor accepts this connexion, he cannot 

escape finding himself between the ideological positions of Adam (Half-Rome) 

and Lucifer (his cousin). Half-Rome's discourse appropriates the ideology of 

Christian orthodoxy in its struggle against the competing discourse of the cousin. 

Nowhere in this contest is a female discourse given credence; in Book Two it is 

subsumed. 

Half-Rome extends the Biblical metaphor to include Violante and Pietro 

too. In the Bible (Genesis III.16-17) God charges Adam with ruling over Eve 

because of her disobedience, and also punishes Adam for listening to his wife in 

the first place. In Half-Rome's adaptation, Violante's first "trick" is procuring 

Pompilia. Violante then performs a second "trick" of arranging the marriage of 

Pompilia to Guido, 

.. .lest Eve's rule decline 

Over this Adam of hers, whose cabbage-plot 

Throve dubiously since turned fools' -paradise 

(II.253-5) 

Violante's actions, which include showing initiative and making financial 

preparations for the couple's final years, are ideologically denaturalized by being 

described as a rule by Eve over Adam. Pietro, also, is made culpable for not 

restricting his wife to her proper role. In consequence, his cabbage-plot (Garden 

of Eden) is now only a fools' -paradise, insinuating the transitory state of his 

fanciful happiness as punishment for his sin. This metaphoric attack on Violante 

and Pietro serves not only to destroy the credibility of women who exceed their 

proper role, but it reinforces the ideology of patriarchy through scriptural 

authority. If Half-Rome's interlocutor disagrees with the word of Half-Rome, he 

must also contest the hegemonic discourses of patriarchy and scripture as well. 

Conversely, to accept Half-Rome's construction of events is to cast Violante--and 

by extrapolation, Pompilia --in the mould of Biblical deceiver and beguiler at very 

least. In either case, the contending social discourse of the women has been 

successfully marginalized. 



37 

The political contest occuring in Half-Rome's narrative also involves what 

Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin describes 

how the carnival, 

celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from 

established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, 

privileges, norms, and prohibitions. 10 

It is "during Carnival that's near" (II.1543) that Half-Rome most fears being 

cuckolded by the interlocutor's cousin. During this season of festivity, which 

immediately precedes the high seriousness of Lent, Half-Rome expects that his 

patriarchal authority will be threatened. His narrative is a dramatic attempt to 

establish and assert sufficient dominance through discourse so that his authority 

may withstand the pressures of other discourses. On the literal level this requires 

that Half-Rome's wife be 'ruled' by his word, and that the cousin fear his 

patriarchal ideology of honoris causd suffiently to leave his wife alone. 

Politically, Half-Rome fights to maintain the hegemony of his ideological 

discourse over that of others which will contend during the disruptive carnival. 

The suspension at both the real and the ideal levels of hierarchical rank 

during carnival time is what, according to Bakhtin, led to, 

the creation of special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, 

frank and free, permitting no distance between those who came in 

contact with each other and liberating from norms of etiquette and 

decency imposed at other times. (Rabelais 10) 

This "special carnivalesque, marketplace style of expression" (10) lies dialogically 

behind the personal word as political contest in The Rin& and the Book. 

Bakhtin's carnivalesque brings together the carnival and the fair (or market-place), 

and places them in political opposition to an existing hierarchy. He posits 

laughter as a sign of the carnivalesque. Half-Rome's narrative supports the 

hypothesis that laughter is a sign of political struggle. 



38 

When Half-Rome explains that Violante confessed to having purchased 

Pompilia, he observes that Guido was ridiculed: 

Guido, thus made a laughing-stock abroad, 

A proverb for the market-place at home 

(II.625-6) 

Half-Rome brings together laughter, the market-place, and the Church's "short 

Shrift"--this last being a "boon" by the Pope to mark his eightieth birthday 

(11.539-41). The laughter underscores the mob's voice in a cause celebre of the 

aristocracy. 

By becoming a "laughing-stock" and a "proverb," Count Guido 

Franceschini is being laughed at, not by an individual, but by all the people of the 

market-place. The lower classes are rebelling against aristocracy in the only 

manner open to them short of formal public protest and civil disobedience. The 

laughter makes a parody of the Pope's favour upon his flock to mark his jubilee, 

especially since a member of the aristocracy is among those who fall victim to his 

beneficence. The laughter is directed at all of the carnival's participants, 

including the lower classes. The upwardly mobile Comparini, and their daughter 

Pompilia of "the deepest of our social dregs" (11.560) all tumble from the dreams 

and aspirations that accompany lower classes who marry into the upper echelons 

of society. As Bakhtin asserts, the laughter is gay and triumphant and at the same 

time mocking and deriding. And it is directed at everyone, including the 

carnival's participants (Rabelais 11-12). 

Finally, the incident is lexicalized by Half-Rome as "the first act of the 

farce" (11.622). Guido's marriage and Pompilia's origins are presented as a 

carnivalesque morality play, whose 'moral' can be interpreted according to a 

market-place 'non-official framework' as well as from the ideological framework 

of hegemonic powers within the Church and the aristocracy. Half-Rome's role 

is as reminiscent of a narrator within a pageant, as it is of a speaker without. 

Hence, within Half-Rome's narrative, patriarchal discourse struggles with the 

voice of the market-place mob which transgresses the boundaries between them 

and the aristocracy with their laughter. 



39 

The importance of the approaching carnival to Half-Rome is indicated by 

a further reference he makes to it in connexion with Caponsacchi, who is invoked 

as: 

The hero of the adventure, who so fit 

To tell it in the coming Carnival? 

(11.1452-3) 

Caponsacchi is what Susan Blalock calls the dandified St. George's Day parody 

hero, replete with cavalier costume and sword, who in fact is rescued by 

Pompilia. 11 Here, Half-Rome touts him as a troubadour who will entertain the 

crowds: 

'Twill make the fortune of whate're saloon 

Hears him recount, with helpful cheek, and eye 

Hotly indignant now, now dewy-dimmed, 

The incidents of flight, pursuit, surprise, 

Capture, with hints of kisses all between -

(1454-8) 

Half-Rome's "hints of kisses" is suggestive of what Bakhtin terms 

"grotesque" aspects of the body--the "lower stratum" concerned with naturalistic 

images as opposed to the "higher stratum" of cosmic and heavenly elements 

(Rabelais 18-27). While the link between kisses and, for example, the rebirthing 

process of copulation and pregnancy, may seem tenuous on the strength of a 

single reference, it gains credibility given Pompilia' s pregnancy, and the way 

Caponsacchi has been portrayed by Half-Rome as more than just a 'courtly' lover. 

Caponsacchi is presented as a troubadour in the context of the cyclic festival of 

Carnival. Half-Rome attempts to classify Caponsacchi's discourse as emanating 

from the lower stratum in contrast to his own higher, and consequently 

authoritative, discourse. Additionally, by associating the priest Caponsacchi with 

the carnival, Half-Rome's discourse is a veiled attack upon the Church. 

Half-Rome's previously mentioned reference to "Carnival that's near" 



40 

(II.1543) occurs a mere five lines from Book Two's conclusion. In the most 

direct and unmistakable manner of the book, Half-Rome tells the interlocutor to 

warn off the cousin from wooing Half-Rome's wife: 

A certain what's-his-name and jackanapes 

Somewhat too civil of eves with lute and song 

About a house here, where I keep a wife. 

(II.1544-6) 

An irresistible parallel exists between Caponsacchi the "courtly Christian" (II. 791) 

who 'cuckolded' Guido (II.890)--"Whatharm in Carnival?" Half-Rome ironically 

asks (II.802)--and the minstrel cousin "with lute and song" (II.1545) who 

currently haunts Half-Rome's house just before the next carnival. 12 In both 

cases officially sanctioned patriarchy is threatened by the transgressing and 

sensual discourse of the carnivalesque. As with Guido, Pompilia and Caponsacchi 

during the previous carnival, this forthcoming carnival will be the spatio-temporal 

site of conflict between the contending ideologies of Half-Rome and the 

interlocutor's cousin. 

Book II is a conflict between Half-Rome and the cousin, and is fought out 

for dominance of the interlocutor and control of Half-Rome's wife whom the 

cousin is wooing. On a personal level, Half-Rome develops a concept of his self 

through his struggle with the cousin as dialogical other. Meanwhile, Half-Rome 

as sign for the ideological forces within society is an area of struggle whose 

rebuttal we witness in Book III. Finally, Half-Rome is a sign whose significance 

is in the process of construction. He writes not only this story, but imbues the 

language of future utterance with possibility. He also constructs us as readers. 

Henceforth, as we read on in The Ring and the Book, we too will engage in 

constant dialogic struggle with the prior word of Half-Rome. 



41 

Notes 

1. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 
All subsequent definitions will be sourced in the text as SOED. 

2. M.M.Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) 
280. 

3. R.Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (New York: Norton, 1963) 190-
91. 

4. M.H.Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Holt, Rinehart 
and Winston, 4th ed., 1981). 

5. M.M.Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis: U of 
Minnesota P, 1984) 196. 

6. A.Shukman, ed., Bakhtin School Papers (Oxford: RPT Publications, 
1983), 154. 

7. D.M. Mermin, "Speaker and Auditor in Browning's Dramatic 
Monologues," University of Toronto Quarterly 45 (1976): 138-57. 

8. See, for example, articles by Potkay (1987) and Slinn (1989) cited in 
Chapter One. 

9. V.N.Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 
Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1973) 102. 

10. M.M.Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984) 
10. 

11. S.Blalock, 'Browning's The Ring and the Book: "A Novel Country",' 
Browning Institute Studies, 11 (1983): 46. 

12. E.W.Slinn, in The Discourse of Self in Victorian Poetry (London: 
MacMillan, 1991) 176, n.18 observes that like Half-Rome, "Guido himself is 
desperately afraid of cuckoldry - see XI.897-919." 



42 

CHAPTER THREE 

Other Half-Rome's Identification with Guido 

I 

Book Three's title, Other Half-Rome, encourages readers to treat the poem 

as a 'mirror' of Book Two. Half-Rome was seen as expressing sympathy for 

Guido's predicament, and now Other Half-Rome is perceived as favouring 

Pompilia's interpretation of events. Readers are tempted to read the pair as the 

'two sides' of the story. Instead, this chapter explores the multiple stories 

contained within the speaker's narrative, and also it examines the political struggle 

between his discourse and the polyphony of other discourses he encounters. 

Book III is at once Other Half-Rome's story, and the story of the speaker himself. 

Book Three differs markedly from either Book Two or Book Four in a 

dialogically significant manner. Unlike the other two, which have easily 

identifiable interlocutors, Other Half-Rome provides little evidence of an auditor 

present at the telling. If there is an interlocutor who is physically present, he is 

marginalised to the point of near-invisibility. This chapter reviews the evidence 

for an interlocutor's presence, and suggests that even if a listener is present, he 

may not in fact be fulfilling the role of other during Other Half-Rome's process 

of construction of self, or during his political contest with other discourses. 

II 

The final twenty-one lines of Book III would appear to be a direct address 

by Other Half-Rome to Guido. However, since Guido is known to be incarcerated 

at this time, he is regarded by most critics as a notional interlocutor. This final 

passage includes one of the book's four vocatives to an interlocutor ("Sir" 

IIl.1687). This final passage will be examined in detail in Part III of this chapter, 

along with dissenting interpretations. 



43 

Of the other three times that Half-Rome addresses a "Sir", the first does 

not occur until almost halfway through the book: 

As it had been just so much Hebrew, Sir: 

For why? (III. 754-5) 

This was revised in the edition of the Poetical Works, of 1888-89, as follows: 

As if it had been just so much Chinese. 

For why? 

The removal of the first vocative leaves just two other instances, which do not 

appear until the final four-fifths of the poem (at III.1335 and 1411). The deletion 

of the first "Sir" for the later edition further obscures the already slight presence 

of an interlocutor in the narrative, and suggests Browning's desire to minimise 

attention to the speaker's interlocutor. Yet, by not deleting the other two direct 

addresses, Browning leaves open the possibility of various interpretations. 

C.S.Finley, for example, finds a degree of fault with Browning: 

I cannot help believing that Browning's revision was somewhat 

unthinking and resulted partly from his own uncertainty about this 

monologue. I suspect the poet felt that "The Other Half-Rome" 

was no "fancy-fit," but he was unable or unwilling to revise the 

poem to make it bear out more clearly the poet-speaker's preview 

in Book I. As it stands, he made a few revisions that do not serve 

to further dramatize the limitations of the speaker. "1 

Finley believes that the deletion of the first vocative removes the key to 

the sense of involvement various pronoun references have with an auditor at that 

point of the narrative. He observes that within a hundred and forty lines of the 

first vocative, "Other Half-Rome includes his listener in his discourse a total of 

thirteen times either by 'you,' 'we,' or 'us"' (132). The narrative at that part of 

Book III questions the motives of Caponsacchi's actions. The inclusion of the 

'Sir' in the first edition, according to Finley, "dynamically involves [Other Half-



44 

Rome's] auditor in the questioning. The question 'For why?' seems immediately 

addressed to the listener." Yet in the revision, the pronouns have "no definite 

relationship to an auditor." Application of dialogism would provide Finley with 

a different conclusion. He would be required to search beneath the surface of 

Other Half-Rome's utterance for a subsumed auditor, through whom Other Half­

Rome was constructing his sense of self. This in turn would force Finley to 

question whether Book III was really about Other Half-Rome after all, rather than 

about Pompilia et al. 

Admittedly, a dialogical analysis of Book III would have been simpler and 

tidier had Browning revised all three vocatives out of the poem for the 1888-89 

edition, instead of removing merely the first. Those speculative circumstances 

would have clearly illustrated that a speaker need not have an interlocutor 

physically present to still engage in dialogue, as is illustrated by the Pope in Book 

X. The profusion of pronouns would have underscored the dialogic nature of the 

'monologue'. Yet, finally, by deleting only the first direct address, Browning 

does not negate this argument. Dialogically, it matters little whether an 

interlocutor is physically present or not. If one is not, a speaker will soon 

conjure one up. In Book III of either edition, the interlocutor's physical presence 

is so muted that his disclosure is deeply subsumed within the voice of Other Half­

Rome. 

The interlocutor--whether or not physically present--is so dominated by the 

voice of Other Half-Rome as to have confused and misled some critics about his 

role or even his existence. For example, R.D.Altick and J.F.Loucks claim that 

Other Half-Rome, 

... appears to have no specific and constant auditor, and may be 

considered as delivering for the most part a long speech to an 

indeterminate audience, which is occasionally appealed to 

directly .... But the evidence is uncertain. The allusions to 'you' 

... and 'we' ... suggest the presence of an auditor. The pronouns, 

however, may simply represent the Other Half-Rome's rhetorical 

habit. 2 



45 

By contrast, Mary Sullivan suggests "that it is addressed to an audience of 

one rather than to a group and that the one is probably a friend, since the speaker 

makes little attempt to attract or hold his attention, instead seeming to feel sure 

of a sympathetic response. "3 

The physical presence of an interlocutor at Other Half-Rome's telling 

cannot be discounted, if only because of the three direct addresses. Yet, because 

the interlocutor is so marginalised and absorbed within the discourse of Other 

Half-Rome, his ideological position can be fixed only approximately through 

Other Half-Rome's own dialogical positioning. Under these circumstances there 

are good grounds for treating the interlocutor of Book III as though he were 

notional--that is, as a social construct by Other Half-Rome to meet his need for 

an other through which to construct himself. Browning's removal of the first 

"Sir" in the final revision reinforces this approach by further obscuring the 

interlocutor's physical presence. However, it is fundamental to dialogism that the 

interlocutor's importance remains paramount to Other Half-Rome's construction 

of reality irrespective of whether he is physically present, is an indeterminate 

audience, or is notional. Meanwhile, it is necessary to return to the other notional 

interlocutor of the poem--Guido--who also causes problems for some critics. 

III 

Dialogism assists in clarifying the role, and presence (or absence) of 

people other than the speaker in dialogues and even in monologues. This is 

particularly the case at the conclusion of Book III of The Ring and the Book, 

which has been interpreted quite extremely in some cases. 

The concluding twenty-one lines are regarded by most critics as being an 

address by Other Half-Rome directly to Guido, and not to the interlocutor (present 

or notional) of the preceding 1673 lines of the poem. In the final passage, 

according to Altick and Loucks, Other Half-Rome reveals that: 



like his predecessor [i.e. Half-Rome], he is interested personally 

in the case, not because it happens to mirror his own situation--it 

obviously does not--but because he is nursing a long-standing 

grievance against the accused himself. He cannot forgive an insult 

... by Guido, who was co-heir of an estate administered by the 

speaker. Guido's objection to the Other Half-Rome's performance 

of that trust has become a stain upon his honour fully as malign as 

that which Half-Rome has represented Guido to have suffered 

through his wife's elopement with the priest. (Roman Murder Story 

43) 

46 

Dialogically, it is irrelevant that Other Half-Rome's narrative has been "another 

sample-speech i' the market-place/o' the Barberini by the Capucins" (I.896-7) 

while Guido has been incarcerated in "that New Prison by Castle Angelo/ At the 

bridge-foot" (I.1284-5). Hitherto, Other Half-Rome's speech has been "an 

apparently judicious weighing of evidence on both sides" (Roman Murder Story 

42) which finally breaks down into a voice of passionate outrage: 

That were too temptingly commodious, Count! 

(III.1674) 

His previous "judicious temper" (42) was bound to break down eventually, to 

reveal Other Half-Rome's deepest feelings about Guido, because it is through 

Guido that Other Half-Rome defines himself. Bakhtin writes: 

It is only in the other human being, in fact, that a living, 

aesthetically (and ethically) convincing experience of human 

finitude is given to me.... [The] body is not something self­

sufficient: it needs the other, needs his recognition and his form­

giving activity. 4 

Other Half-Rome reveals more than just his long-standing grievances; he reveals 

his identity in relation to an other against and through whom he defines himself. 

As evidence for this we find that he draws parallels between himself and Guido: 



I who have no wife, 

Being yet sensitive in my degree 

as Guido (III.1678-80) 

47 

It was only recently as a middle-aged man that Guido was able to find a marriage 

partner, and then only through the initiative of his brother. The lack of a wife 

obviously bears