ENGLISH 102

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My Last Duchess: Overview Author: Lance St. John Butler Date: 1991 From: Reference Guide to English Literature(2nd ed.) Publisher: Gale Document Type: Critical essay Length: 912 words

Full Text: The subtitle ``Ferrara,'' which names an Italian city famous during the Renaissance, gives us the setting for this dramatic monologue, one of Robert Browning's best-known poems in the mode. No exact date is given but clearly the Duke who speaks the poem is one of those Machiavellian reprobates, inevitably Italian, who peopled the imagination of English writers from the 16th century to the time of the gothic novel (in decline by the 1830's). A context of corruption, poison, arrogance, and elegant evil is thus created, all of which form an essential background for the understanding of the poem. It is barely relevant, though true, that Browning based ``My Last Duchess'' on an incident in the life of a real Duke of Ferrara in 1561.

In addition to cultural context, the reader has to supply a large part of the drama that makes this monologue ``dramatic.'' It is, thus, an exercise in half-revelation that requires the reader to take an active role, a requirement enhanced by the rather tortuous syntax. We explore the Duke's mind, and the events that are hinted at, through a dense medium. But the revelations are sufficient for us to be certain of the truth by the end.

Thus, when we read the list of things that the late Duchess appeared to value equally highly (``My favour at her breast/The dropping of the daylight in the west,/The bough of cherries ...'') we are being told that the Duke expects his wife to value a present he has given her (which is, of course, a favour) more highly than a beautiful sunset and, generally, as the highest of things. Similarly, the Duke harps on his ``nine-hundred-years-old name'' as if that were something that a bride should consider the greatest of ``gifts.'' Clearly, if a little obliquely, we come to realise the arrogance of the man who stands condemned out of his own mouth. He chooses ``never to stoop,'' expects his wife to smile a special smile for him and no one else, and, it dawns on us, murders her (``I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together'') for what is almost a whim. Her offence is no one specific crime but a friendly if bland personality that has irritated her husband by not pandering to his notion of his own importance.

Once we have the events of the poem sorted out we can begin to see that Browning offers us further revelations. The Duke, for instance, may have murdered his wife on more than a whim, perhaps being obsessed by sexual jealousy. There is a hint of this in the delight with which he shows his interlocutor the painting, hidden by a curtain that is pulled back by none but the Duke himself, and imagines that Fra Pandolf may have complimented the Duchess about the inimitability of the ``faint/Half-flush that dies along her throat.'' Connected with this is her tendency to blush and the (repeated) ``spot of joy'' that many things, too many in the Duke's view, could call into her cheek. And ``'Twas not/Her husband's presence only'' that could produce this effect on her. An obsessive desire not to be cuckolded and a maddened sense that he cannot conquer his wife seem to lie behind these details.

But the Duke is a dilettante too. The poem opens and closes with an invitation to contemplate an art object (the painting of the Duchess, the Neptune cast for the Duke by ``Claus of Innsbruck''). There is some sort of aesthetic game being played here alongside the darker motives. The ending, accordingly, is both sinister (he will serve his next Duchess the same way, presumably, or, alternatively, is only interested in her dowry) and rather comically inconsequential. Perhaps he is only interested in acquiring money, after all; when he refers to his ``just pretence'' to a good dowry the word ``pretence,'' standing out at the end of a line, is intended as another revelation technically it means ``claim'' but we cannot separate it from the notion that the Duke is acting a part. All this is made possible by Browning's full use of the dramatic possibilities of his genre we become acutely aware of the interlocutor, presumably some sort of ambassador from ``the Count'' whose daughter he is seeking to marry, although this person never utters a word that we hear. Instead the Duke reveals more and more about himself.

Browning nearly defeats the reader entirely at several points where his delight in opaque grammar obscures meaning. The sentence beginning ``Who'd stoop to blame,'' for instance, is quite impossible to make sense of on a first reading, but in general the handling of syntax and of the iambic couplets that the poem is made up of enhance its effect. Thus towards the end of the poem the Duke protests that his proposed new Duchess is, of course, an object in her own right apart from her dowry. He does it thus:

..."his fair daughter's self, as I avowed At starting, is my object. The double break created by ending the line in the middle of the subordinate clause increases our sense of the somewhat vacuous

and hesitant protest that is being made. The mind and moral quality of the man are revealed by what is, after all, a series of technical devices brilliantly handled but not necessarily felt. As ever Browning appears complicated and clever rather than complex and thoughtful.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1991 St. James Press, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Butler, Lance St. John. "My Last Duchess: Overview." Reference Guide to English Literature, edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, 2nd ed., St.

James Press, 1991. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420001126/LitRC?u=bccc_main&sid=LitRC&xid=336609ec. Accessed 23 June 2020.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420001126