The dramatic monologue is not simply a voice speaking, or the lyric first person, but a more specific form: a voice that is not the poet’s speaking to an unheard other in such a way as to reveal both situation and character. Anticipated by some Romantics, including the neglected Felicia Hemans, the form was established when Browning and Tennyson began writing them in the 1830s, and they were launched into Victorian popularity in 1842 by Tennyson’s Poems and Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics.
Both poets continued to write them, and Browning in particular developed the form enormously in Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864), including the astonishing ‘Mr Sludge – the Medium’, spoken by a spiritualist who has just been caught faking it. Browning’s magnum opus was The Ring and the Book (1868-9), a set of twelve dramatic monologues in which opening and closing reflections frame ten speakers who between them expound the trial in 1698 of Count Guido Franceschini for the murder of his wife. Witnesses, the victim, her alleged lover, lawyers, and the Pope all speak, as does the Count, twice, once before his conviction and once after, a vocal medley encompassing a tremendous range of emotions and ethics.
Other Victorian poets explored the form too, Arnold pushing it close to autobiography in ‘Dover Beach’, and Swinburne combining longer lines with a striking imagination of pagan loss in his ‘Hymn to Proserpine’. Both Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti also tried their hands at it in memorably opposite pieces, ‘Jenny’, where the auditor is a prostitute, and ‘The Convent Threshold’. So too did Dowson in the bristlingly titled but haunting ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’.
Critics have tended to think the form faded with Modernism, although T S Eliot used it several times, notably in ‘The Love Song of J, Alfred Prufrock’, and so did Yeats and MacDiarmid. But if it has become less common, it has never gone away, attracting poets as diverse as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Dana Gioia, and Jorie Graham, and continuing to find new strengths and relevance to the world we live in.
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