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“Count Guido Franceschini”: The Villain as Artist in The Ring and the Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Michael G. Yetman
Michael G. Yetman*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana
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Abstract

Book v of The Ring and the Book affords us a view of Guido Franceschini very different from that provided by his second monologue. This difference is accountable to the Active rhetorical method that Guido employs in confronting the judges at his murder trial. In Book XI, having failed in his attempt to prolong life through fiction, Guido resorts to what he calls a more “voluble rhetoric” of the soul, thus becoming accessible to us for the first time in the same way that we see the other speakers in the poem. An analysis of Guido's fiction in Book V, especially his rendering of Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and himself, as the hero, heroine, and wronged husband, respectively, of popular medieval and renaissance literature reveals a conception of art as deception, contrary to Browning's informing belief in art as a means of arriving at truth by heightening rather than distorting reality. A comparison of Book XI with the earlier monologue indicates that, in addition to making plain the enormity of his villain's evil nature, Browning uses Guido's second monologue as an implicit repudiation of what he considers to be the specious theory of art that Guido relies upon in Book v.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 5 , October 1972 , pp. 1093 - 1102
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 Robert Langbaum, “The Ring and the Book: A Relativist Poem,” The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Random, 1957), pp. 109–36.

2 All references to The Ring and the Book are taken from The Works of Robert Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, Centenary Ed., 10 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1912), Vols, v and vi.

3 Charles E. Nelson, “Role-Playing in The Ring and the Book” Victorian Poetry (1966), 91–98.

4 A Commentary upon Browning's The Ring and the Book (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1920), p. 47.

5 Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, ii, Browning's Roman Murder Story: A Reading of The Ring and the Book (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968).

6 Michael G. Yetman, “Giuseppe Caponsacchi : ‘A Very Reputable Priest’ ?” Baylor Browning Interests, ed. Jack W. Herring, No. 21 (Waco, Tex.: Armstrong Browning Library, 1970), pp. 1–24.

7 Mary Rose Sullivan, Browning's Voices in The Ring and the Book: A Study of Method and Meaning (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969).