Browning’s “My Last Duchess”: A Critical Analysis

Robert Browning is most famous for perfecting the literary form of dramatic monologue, and his poem “My Last Duchess” is a one of the finest examples of this poetic form. The poem was first published in 1842 in the volume Dramatic Romances. The poem was originally titled “Italy”, which indicates thereby Browning’s special interest in Italian history and culture. He was particularly interested in Italian Renaissance, and he chose for his poetry dukes, bishops and painters whose lives and characters reflected in some important way the spirit of the Renaissance— its “worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, luxury, and good Latin.” (John Ruskin’s article “Browning and the Renaissance in Italy”)

In his book The Dramatic Monologue, Alan Sinfield has observed that a typical Browning monologue would include a first person speaker who is not the poet, a silent interlocutor whose influence is felt in the poem, a specific time and place, use of colloquial language, some sympathetic involvement with the speaker, and “an ironic discrepancy between the speaker’s view of himself and a larger judgement which the poet implies and the reader must develop”. All the above-mentioned features are present in the poem “My Last Duchess”. In the book The Browning Handbook, William C. Devane points out that the incident described in the poem “My Last Duchess” has a historical basis, and that the Duke, the dramatic speaker of the monologue, is a poetic recreation of Alfonso II d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara (1533-97) and the ‘last duchess’ referred to in the title is his first wife Lucrezia di Cosimo de Medici (who died at the tender age of 17 in suspicious circumstances), after whose death the Duke negotiated for his second marriage through the agent of the Count of Tyrol. This agent is most probably the silent interlocutor of the poem. Further, as Roma A. King points out in her book The Bow and the Lyre, the chief concern of the monologue-writer (i.e. Browning) is the revelation of character of the speaker. Indeed, like Browning’s other famous poems “Andrea Del Sarto” and “Fra Lippo Lippi”, his “My Last Duchess” is also a psychological character study. And, significantly enough, the speaker’s character is unwittingly revealed in the course of his monologue.

As the poem opens, we find the Duke talking to the envoy and showing to him the portrait of his last Duchess, done by the artist Fra Pandolf. The focal point of the picture is the “spot of joy” on the lady’s cheek, which holds the key to the character of the Duchess, as also, by contrast, to the character of the Duke. Feeling that his auditor would like to ask, as others before him would ask (if they dared), how that “spot of joy” came into the Duchess’ cheek, the Duke begins to explain the cause and consequence of the lady’s characteristic blush. It might have been caused, he says, by some casual remark of the artist, such as, “Her mantle laps/ Over my lady’s wrist too much”, or “Paint/ Must never hope to reproduce the faint/ Half-flush that dies along her throat”. The Duchess, in fact, was such a tender-hearted lady that even the slightest show of courtesy was enough to make her smile and blush. Normally, this should be regarded as a virtue, emblematic of the lady’s innate goodness and generosity, but the Duke, with his inflated ego, and a fiercely possessive nature, could not tolerate a wife who would look everywhere and smile on everyone. He acknowledges that the Duchess loved him and smiled to him whenever he passed her but then she also gave a similar response to everyone else. What irked the Duke most was the feeling that the lady, with her easy smile and blushes, was equating him, with his “nine-hundred-year-old name”, with anybody or anything else. The Duke elicited the same response from the lady as a sunset scene, an officious fool, or the white mule did from her. In these comparisons the Duke is being gradually deflated till he is equated with the mule, and made to look comical and stupid. But with a remarkable resilience the Duke retrieves his position and dons the mask of magnanimity and forgiveness. Though he feels unjustly treated by the Duchess, he is apparently too large-hearted to blame her for such trivial flaws: “Who’d stoop to blame/ This sort of trifling?” This is followed by the admission that he is a poor rhetorician, lacking “skill in speech”, so necessary to communicate one’s thoughts and expectations to others. But the careful and calculated phrasing of his speech only proves that he is in fact a clever conversationalist, who is merely trying to creating an impression of modesty and humility. What makes the Duke to keep himself to himself is not his inability to express himself effectively, but rather his pride and haughtiness, his egomania which will not let him stoop: “I choose/ Never to stoop.” Family pride and social status forbid the Duke to meet his wife on equal terms and engage her in a sincere, heart-to-heart dialogue. Burning with jealousy and a fierce, paranoid possessiveness, the Duke decides to silence once and for all the lady and her smiles: “This grew; I gave commands;/ Then all smiles stopped together.”

With a cool unconcern he dismisses the memory of his first victim, and turns to the question of dowry which he is expecting from the Count whose daughter he is about to marry. However, he adds, in the same breath, that he is primarily interested in “his fair daughter’s self”, dowry being of little consequence. His prevarication merely serves to underscore his hypocritical and greedy nature. As he goes downstairs, the Duke stops on the way and shows to the envoy yet another of his collection of artistic masterpieces: “Notice Neptune, though,/ Taming a sea-horse, though a rarity,/ Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!” This final image with which the poem ends is a masterstroke of Browning’s genius, since it shows his ability to condense the whole character of the speaker in a compact image. Just as the “spot of joy” on the lady’s cheek contains the essence of her character— her infinite goodness and generosity— so the statue of Neptune taming a seahorse embodies in a concrete form the cardinal characteristics of the Duke— his megalomaniac, proud and possessive nature, his supreme confidence and connoisseurship.

In his seminal book The Poetry of Experience, Robert Langbaum observes that the peculiar interest of a dramatic monologue lies in the “tension between sympathy and moral judgement” experienced by the readers, which corresponds to the tension between the explicit voice of the speaker and the implicit voice of the poet. This is aptly applicable to the character of the Duke. The Duke’s purpose of uttering this monologue, apparently, is to forewarn the envoy and acquaint him with the code of conduct which he would expect his second wife to follow: his wife must submit to his will and whims, or he will tame her like Neptune taming the seahorse. But, while delivering the monologue, the Duke’s character is unwittingly revealed. While reading the monologue, the readers come across two impressions of the Duke’s character. On the one hand, the explicit voice of the Duke invites the readers to sympathise with him and believe in the image of him as a large-hearted, polite man of courteous manners and refined taste, of noble birth and high position; on the other hand, the readers also gradually become conscious of the real man beneath the mask: he sees a secondary impression (suggested by the implicit voice of the poet) of the Duke as being haughty, insensitive, heartless, tyrannical, megalomaniac, greedy and hypocritical.

Moreover, the poem provides the reader with an insight not only into the Duke’s character, but also into the character of the age, with special reference to the nature of the institution of marriage as it then existed. In those days, the wife was regarded as a piece of private possession, like any other object of art or architecture, and her husband was the sole arbiter of her fate. This was specially so if the husband happened to be, like the Duke, a man of pelf and power.

Finally, we should take note of some of the technical merits of the poem. The poem is an excellent example of Browning’s conversational style. The rhythm, diction and punctuation all belong to a good, natural speech. Though the poem is written in rhymed couplets, the rhyme is not pronounced, and it does not break the poem into clearly defined stanzas. There is a preponderance of run-on lines, with an occasional parenthetical remark which interrupts the smooth flow of verse and gives a speech- like rhythm to the poem.