Dominican Scholar Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship Faculty and Staff Scholarship 5-2016 Town-Talk and the Cause Célèbre of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book Amy R. Wong Department of Literature and Languages, Dominican University of California,
[email protected] https://doi.org/10.1086/685427 Survey: Let us know how this paper benefits you. Recommended Citation Wong, Amy R., "Town-Talk and the Cause Célèbre of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book" (2016). Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship. 294. https://doi.org/10.1086/685427 DOI http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/685427 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty and Staff Scholarship at Dominican Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Dominican Scholar. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Town Talk and the Cause Célèbre of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book AMY R. WONG Dominican University of California There prattled they, discoursed the right and wrong, Turned wrong to right, proved wolves sheep and sheep wolves. (Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book [1868–69])1 These lines from Robert Browning’s ambitious, blank-verse epic, The Ring and the Book, describe the town talkers of late seventeenth-century Rome as they witness the proceedings of a triple-murder trial. Speaking in pro- pria persona, Browning seems disdainful of the relativistic abandon of “prattle” that “proved wolves sheep and sheep wolves.” Yet the explicit premise of The Ring and the Book is to reanimate talkers—from the dead material of print—who fail, more often than not, to provide clear moral judgments.