Robert Browning
"My Last Duchess" [1842]

OVERVIEW:

This is probably Browning most famous dramatic monologue. It is often used as a prime example of the form.

In this poem the speaker, the duke of Ferrara, is addressing a second character, an agent of an unnamed count whose daughter the duke plans to marry. The situation is take from the life of an actual sixteenth-century Italian duke, but Browning has imagined the specific incident.

The duke is showing the count's agent a portrait of his first wife. She was a beautiful woman, but to the duke's mind she had too little pride. He was frequently offended by her courtesy to other of lower rank, and he found her too easily pleased by a compliment or by a small favor from a servant or some other "unimportant" person. The duke felt that she should derive pleasure essentially only from himself. She should glory in the high social rank into which she had married. The duke could not lower himself ("stoop") to tell her what she did that annoyed him. Instead, he took action, or "gave commands." The exact nature of the commands is not made explicit, but whatever they were, the duchess is gone, most likely dead. Now the duke is negotiating the terms of a new marriage agreement.

He tells the count's agent about his displeasure with his first wife in order to make clear to the second woman what sort of conduct he will expect from her, but of course he does not stoop to stating his demands explicitly. As the poem ends, the two men turn away from the portrait and go downstairs to join the rest of the company at the duke's palace. As they go, the duke casually points out one of his other works of art, a bronze statue of Neptune.

DETAIL:

The Silent Listener in Browning's "My Last Duchess"

Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin [http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/victorian/rb/duchess2.html]

How do we read "My Last Duchess," one of the most representative dramatic monologues? The old "sympathy/judgment" model does not seem to work very well. Langbaum, the main proponent of this view, finds that the Duke's

immense attractiveness . . . his conviction of match less superiority, his intelligence, and bland amoral ity, his poise, his taste for art, his manners, overwhelm the envoy, causing him apparently to suspend judgment of the duke, for he raises no demur. The reader is no less overwhelmed. We suspend moral judg ment because we prefer to participate in the duke's power and freedom, in his hard core of character fiercely loyal to itself. (83)

Hazard Adams points out that sympathy does not seem to be the right word for our relationship to the Duke (151-52), and Philip Drew protests that suspending our moral judgment should not require "an anaesthetizing of the moral sense for the duration of the poem" (28). Langbaum is right that the intellectual exercise of inferring the real character of the last Duchess from what the Duke says about her to the envoy and then going on to make a moral judgment about him constitutes a large part of our enjoyment of the poem, but that enjoyment is not dependent upon our entering into sympathy with the Duke.

Rather, we enter into this scene on the side of the envoy, and at that level we feel the pull of the Duke's commanding rhetoric. In order to read the poem, we must create the scene in imagination, which means "losing ourselves" within it, forgetting, for the moment, our real, present surroundings in favor of active involvement in the dramatic situation. Our entry is facilitated by its most striking feature, which is the way the Duke so directly addresses us. His narrative in the center of the poem is carefully framed by the first ten lines and the last ten, in which he addresses someone as "you." Because we do not discover until after he has told his tale that this second person is in fact present in the poem, at the moment of our reading we can only assume that it is us to whom he is speaking. (It is true that we eventually discover that this "you" to whom he is speaking is an envoy from a Count, but this identification is not made until very late in the poem.) We are slightly disoriented, on a first reading, by that direct address, and we recognize that an effort is being made to suggest that we are the silent partner in a conversation; even the omission of quotation marks helps sustain the illusion that we have encountered a character who is speaking directly to us. Trusting that our curiosity about what is going on in the poem will keep us reading despite our lack of information about the character of the auditor, Browning leaves us only one source for that information, the Duke's monologue.

Begin the Begin