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Robert Browning and the Epistemology of Romantic Drama City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2015 Dramatic Form and Embodiment: Robert Browning and the Epistemology of Romantic Drama Laura Helen Wallace Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1176 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] DRAMATIC FORM AND EMBODIMENT: ROBERT BROWNING AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF ROMANTIC DRAMA by LAURA WALLACE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 ! ii! ! © 2015 LAURA WALLACE All Rights Reserved ! iii! This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Felicia Bonaparte Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi Date Executive Officer Felicia Bonaparte Joshua Wilner Alexander Schlutz Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK ! iv! Abstract DRAMATIC FORM AND EMBODIMENT: ROBERT BROWNING AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF ROMANTIC DRAMA by Laura Wallace Advisor: Felicia Bonaparte Browning’s famous distinction between the subjective and the objective poet, Shelley and Shakespeare, as well as his own abandonment of the lyric in favour of dramatic poetry, has been commonly interpreted as an epistemological demarcation that separates Browning, as a Victorian poet, from his Romantic predecessors. Defining Shelley as the subjective poet who looks through the individual soul toward “not what man sees, but what God sees—the Ideas of Plato” (283), and Shakespeare as the objective poet who looks, not to his own soul, but upon the material world, choosing “to produce things external” and to “deal with the doings of men” (284), Browning delineates the work of Shelley as the poetry of idealism and the dramatic work of Shakespeare as the poetry of realism; therefore, as idealism and realism are commonly viewed as diametric opposites, Browning’s concept of objectivity has been seen as antithetical to the philosophical idealism of the subjective poet. Although the recent critical consensus has been that Browning rejects idealism, this study will argue that it is actually in idealism, where the ideal is seen to embody itself in the material forms of empirical reality, that Browning develops his poetics of objective realism. I look at the influence of German idealism on Browning’s objective poetics and how he utilizes the famous distinction made by August and Friedrich Schlegel between classical and romantic epistemology to explore the origins of Christian, romantic art and to trace its modern correlative in ! v! philosophical idealism. In doing this Browning presents his own dramatic poetry as the next objective stage in the historical development of romantic idealism. I focus on Browning’s neglected early verse dramas, because it is my contention that Browning’s theory of dramatic form and its culmination in the dramatic monologue cannot be considered in isolation from his plays. Indeed, these verse dramas are not only key to understanding Browning’s development of the monologue form, but also to the very epistemological grounds of his objective poetics. ! vi! Contents 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………..………..1 2. Romantic Epistemology, Symbolism and Browning’s “Infinite Realism” ……….54 3. The Tragedy of Historical Forms: Soul and the Teleology of Democracy in Strafford, King Victor and King Charles, A Soul’s Tragedy and Luria …...…....…..101 4. The Irony of Love: Forms of Knowledge in The Return of the Druses, A Blot in the ’Scutcheon and Colombe’s Birthday………………………………………………..155 5. Symbolic Embodiment, the Dramatic Monologue and the Romantic Drama of Men and Women…………………………………………………………………………202 Works Cited……………………………………………………...…………………237 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Browning’s famous distinction between the subjective and the objective poet, Shelley and Shakespeare, as well as his own abandonment of the lyric in favour of dramatic poetry, has been commonly interpreted as an epistemological demarcation that separates Browning, as a Victorian poet, from his Romantic predecessors. Defining Shelley as the subjective poet who looks through the individual soul toward “not what man sees, but what God sees—the Ideas of Plato” (283), and Shakespeare as the objective poet who looks, not to his own soul, but upon the material world, choosing “to produce things external” and to “deal with the doings of men” (284), Browning delineates the work of Shelley as the poetry of idealism and the dramatic work of Shakespeare as the poetry of realism; therefore, as idealism and realism are commonly viewed as diametric opposites, Browning’s concept of objectivity has been seen as antithetical to the philosophical idealism of the subjective poet. Although the recent critical consensus has been that Browning rejects idealism, this study will argue that it is actually in idealism, where the ideal is seen to embody itself in the material forms of empirical reality, that Browning develops his poetics of objective realism. I will look at the influence of German idealism on Browning’s objective poetics and how he utilizes the famous distinction made by August and Friedrich Schlegel between classical and romantic epistemology in both Sordello and Men and Women to explore the origins of Christian, romantic art and to trace its modern correlative in philosophical idealism. In doing this Browning presents his own dramatic poetry as the next objective stage in the historical development of romantic idealism. I will show how the idea of embodiment, which is 2 central to idealism, is the conceptual basis for Browning’s own development of objectivity and its representation in dramatic poetry. I pay particular attention to Browning’s neglected early verse dramas, because it is my contention that Browning’s formulation of dramatic form and its culmination in the dramatic monologue cannot be considered in isolation from his plays. Indeed the central premise of this study is that Browning’s verse dramas are central not only to our understanding of the monologue form, but to the very epistemological grounds of his poetic development. Felicia Bonaparte argues that there has not been a sufficient emphasis on the influence of German philosophy and German Romantic literary theory, particularly of the Schlegel brothers, upon the Victorian period, and she cites the many English translations of their works that were published and re-published throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed very little has been written on the crucial link between Browning and German Romanticism. In her work on Browning and German Romantic irony, Patricia Dianne Rigg concedes that one of the main difficulties facing a critic when pursuing the similarities between Browning's poetics and the ideas of German Romanticism is his denial that he knew German philosophy, citing Browning's well known letter to Frederick Furnivall wherein he states that “I have never read a line, original or translated, by Kant, Schelling, or Hegel in my whole life” (25). Mrs. Orr raises a similar objection when she argues that, even though there is a clear affinity between Browning and German idealism in the metaphysics of Sordello, the fact that Browning asserts that he was not conversant with German philosophy surely poses an obstacle to any further line of inquiry: “it is difficult to realize their absence, then and always, from Mr. Browning's mind. But he was emphatic in his assurance that he knew neither the German philosophers nor their 3 reflection in Coleridge, who would have seemed a likely medium between them and him” (108). Mrs. Orr's hesitation explains why critics have perhaps been wary of positing a direct connection between Browning and German idealism; however, I would like to suggest that it was not through the philosophy of Kant, Schelling and Hegel, nor through Coleridge's interpretation of them, that Browning was exposed to German Romantic ideas but instead through the popular translations of Friedrich and August Schlegel. As Bonaparte has demonstrated, it was the Schlegel brothers who were to have a lasting impact on the nineteenth century. Bonaparte explains that the Schlegel brothers were among the first, even before the nineteenth century had officially begun, to recognize the crisis of faith that removed the deity as an epistemological basis on which everything else could rest, foreseeing that empiricism, the philosophy that seemed to be replacing religion, could only lead to conclusions never more than subjective and relative, even in science when its grounds were understood, and so to the absolute skepticism that held reality to be, as Leslie Stephen recognized long before Nietzsche made the point, ultimately only a “fiction.” The German Romantics, Bonaparte argues, set out to find a new epistemological basis in a philosophic theory—a word they used in the etymological sense in which Ruskin uses it too, of a perspective on the world—grounded in imagination. Bonaparte explains that for the German Romantics imagination was not the “decaying sense” of Hobbes, who had defined it for the empiricists, but a faculty that resembled the Platonic idea of noesis, the power that could apprehend ideas, the noumena Kant had held inaccessible, the inner truth of the physical world as well as the truth of the world beyond it, or what had once been called metaphysical. As the Romantics saw the material world as a hieroglyph indicating a deeper meaning, art itself was a symbol that revealed this 4 relationship between the ideal and the real. Thus the characteristic art of the century was what Bulwer-Lytton called, writing of fiction but including all other arts, the novel of “the double plot” in which character and plot tell the story of the real but in which has been embodied a “symbolic signification” (The Poetics of Poesis).
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