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Browning's Plays: Prologue to Men and Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Mary Rose Sullivan
Mary Rose Sullivan
Affiliation:
University of Colorado at Denver
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Extract

The eight plays Robert Browning wrote before Men and Women (1855) are the least read and, by common consent, the least successful of his works, but they deserve attention from anyone interested in Browning's ideas. In agreeing that the blame must be divided between the “romantic temper of the age” and the poet's “inability to objectify conflict,” critics have dismissed Browning's dramatic efforts as “laboratory experiments” which taught him mainly that he could never be a dramatist and should restrict himself to psychological analysis in poetry. But if Browning was uncertain about how to say what he wanted, he was not at all uncertain about what he wanted to say, and a study of the repeated patterns of theme and characterization in the plays shows that the experience of writing for the stage provided an invaluable opportunity for him to work out his developing moral philosophy. The demands of stage presentation forced him to crystallize his unresolved ethical theories and led him to that study of motivation without which the great character studies of Men and Women could not have been written.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 3 , Spring 1975 , pp. 17 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

NOTES

1. The plays are: Strafford (1837)Google Scholar, Pippa Passes (1841)Google Scholar, King Victor and King Charles (1842)Google Scholar, The Return of the Druses (1843)Google Scholar, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843)Google Scholar, Colombe's Birthday (1844)Google Scholar, Luria (1846)Google Scholar, and A Soul's Tragedy (1846).Google ScholarIn a Balcony, the remaining dramatic work, was published in Men and Women and so is not included in this discussion.

This essay was originally prepared for a seminar on Browning at the Modern Language Association annual meeting in New York in December 1974.

2. Some recent studies which deal with the plays as experiments in technique are: Honan, Park, Browning's Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Shaw, W. David, The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Hair, Donald S., Browning's Experiments with Genre (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1972).Google ScholarDuBois, Arthur E., “Robert Browning, Dramatist,” Studies in Philology, 33 (1936), 626–55Google Scholar, has noted the recurrent pattern of the ideal versus the real in the plays, but his conclusion, that their irony shows a movement toward a new form of tragic comedy, amounts to another genre study. Only Lawrence Poston, III, has looked closely at the content of the plays; in “Browning's Political Skepticism: Sordello and the Plays,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 88 (1973), 260–70Google Scholar, his conclusion, that Browning views political commitment as an obstacle to heroic action, coincides with my broader argument here about the dangers of idealization in the moral sphere.

3. Sordello, which Browning was working on at the same time as Strafford although he did not publish it until 1840, reveals a similar pattern in its divided hero.

4. All quotations are from The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Porter, Charlotte and Clarke, Helen A., 12 vols. (New York: E. R. Dumont, 1898).Google ScholarStrafford appears in Vol. 2Google Scholar, King Victor and King Charles and Pippa Passes in Vol. 1Google Scholar, and Return of the Druses, Luria, and A Soul's Tragedy in Vol. 3.Google Scholar Act and line numbers for the quotations are included in the text, and scene numbers where applicable.

5. It is worth noting, as an example of the connection between Browning's earliest dramatic efforts and his later works, how the concern with an egoistic character's loss of self-identity takes the same form in Strafford and The Ring and the Book. In the play, Strafford's last words show a preoccupation with his name, whether in years to come the public and even he himself will remember it, and he insists that the visitors to his prison cell must let him speak: “I want just now, / To hear the sound of my own tongue. This place / Is full of ghosts” (V.ii.82–84). More than thirty years later, Browning has his arch-egoist, Guido Franceschini, remind his cell visitors of the illustrious name they threaten with extinction, and then say, “Let me talk … talk I must” to hold on to that “something changeless at the heart of me / To know me by, some nucleus that's myself.…”

6. In his Browning's Essay on Chatterton (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), Donald Smalley sees Browning as sympathetic to Djabal, in The Return of the DrusesGoogle Scholar, because his dilemma is the same as that of the young poet he defends. However, Browning makes an entirely different kind of case for Chatterton than for his dramatic impostors. Chatterton's is an example of positive role-playing to realize his potential—“Genius almost invariably begins to develop itself by imitation” (p. 111)—and he maintains the role only as a way out of bondage: he acted “for this and no other motive—to break through his slavery—at any sacrifice to get back to truth—” (p. 128). Djabal, on the other hand, acts from highly questionable motives.

7. See Nelson, Charles E., “Role-Playing in The Ring and the Book,” Victorian Poetry, 4 (1966), 91–98Google Scholar, for a study of another, much later example of positive impersonation, that of the priest Caponsacchi, who tries on the role of knight-hero and finds it releases his best instincts.