Reginald Bateman, Teacher and Soldier / A Memorial Volume of Selections from His Lectures and Other Writings

by Reginald Bateman

MY LAST DUCHESS

A paper given in 1911 to a Church Society that wished
guidance for literary study

In this poem Browning takes his subject from the midst of the Renaissance period in Italy, a period when the revival of classical learning was accompanied by a breakdown in the authority of the Church. The conventions of ages were swept away in a few years, and side by side with the new culture, scepticism, cynicism, robbery, lust, and murder prevailed in high places, even in the palaces of the Popes themselves. Under a thin veneer of culture, society became rotten to the core.

The word Ferrara at the head of the poem gives us the clue to the period. Ferrara is an ancient Italian town, and was at one time the seat of a powerful duchy. The ancient ducal palace still frowns down from its eminence upon the country around. The Duke of Ferrara at the period of our poem was one of the most powerful noblemen of Italy.

The speaker in this monologue is the Duke of Ferrara, a typical Renaissance product, cultured and cold and cruel. He is showing the picture of his late wife to an envoy from some Count or other who has sent to negotiate a marriage for his daughter with the widowed Duke.

The first thing to do with a poem like this is to make it live. We will read it.

The character we have represented here is one probably not uncommon at the period. The Duke is a man of intellect, imbued with the new culture, a critic and collector of art treasures. He combines with this appreciation of art, an utter selfishness and cynicism. His heart is incapable of tenderness or emotion. He has an immense pride in his rank and in his ancient name, and an impatience of anything that would derogate from his dignity.

Can you picture him, the polished old villain, as he stands before the picture of the girl he has cruelly done to death and points out its beauties with delicate jewelled finger? On his cultured but sensual features the critical appreciation of a connoisseur for the skill of the artist mingles with some recollection of and pride in the beauty of his former duchess; but of affection there is not a sign, of remorse not a trace.

He married a young girl who probably was contracted to him by her parents without having any voice in the matter. He bestows on her his name and rank, and in return demands—everything, her abject submission to his every whim, her complete indifference to everything and everybody but himself. It was too much. The poor girl could not crush all the humanity out of her heart, nor the vitality out of her body. The Duke saw, with cold disapproval, her fresh interest and pleasure in all around her, her delight in every attention that was offered her, her ever-ready smile. He wanted all these things for himself, and for nobody else. That smile must be for him alone. But unfortunately the Duchess liked whatever "she looked on, and her looks went everywhere," she had a kind word and glance for everybody.

This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.

In other words, he did away with her, had her murdered, an easy thing for a man of his power at this epoch. First, however, he had her portrait painted. If he could not have the Duchess all to himself, he could at least have her picture entirely his own,

... since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I.

He is thinking now of marrying again. Some Count snaps at the bait, the chance of this magnificent alliance for his daughter. Better to kill her with his own hand than to let her pass into the clutches of the Duke. The Duke's object in showing the envoy the picture is probably partly to get the opportunity of letting him know in time what he expects from his wife, so that when the messenger returns he may warn his young lady to keep her smiles under strict control.

Notice how Browning indicates the attitude of the envoy. First he is struck by the marvellous face of the Duchess—

The depth and passion of its earnest glance.

At last he essays a word in her defence,

Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling?

and when the Duke has finished, he sits a little stupefied at the revelation that has been made, and still gazing at the picture. Even when the Duke rises he does not stir, and the latter has to rouse him, a little impatiently, "Will't please you rise?"

To me the most striking thing about this poem is its suggestiveness. It suggests infinitely more than it expresses. It expresses merely a fragment of a conversation; it suggests a whole tragedy.

Browning has, in these few lines, with delicate and curious skill, given us first the Renaissance atmosphere, a mixture of culture and refinement, delight in art and beauty, with immorality and crime; he has suggested to us the characters of the two actors in the drama from which this poem is but a fragment, the polished and cynical Duke and the girl who is sacrificed to his position and wealth; he has even suggested the mixture of deference, loathing, and fear with which the envoy listens to the Duke's description. There are anatomists who from a single bone of any animal will construct the whole skeleton; and so from this scrap which Browning has here given us we can construct the complete drama.

The poem is, as I have remarked, typical of a whole class of Browning's poetry. These poems are usually called dramatic monologues, but perhaps the title given to them by Stopford Brooke is on the whole more suggestive. He calls them imaginative representations.

These poems are, in the first place, the utterance of one person, at a single time, and in one place. Some individual is influenced or induced by some unusual opportunity or circumstance to reveal himself. The veil which conceals his inmost heart is lifted for a moment and we get a glimpse into its depths.

They have a certain dramatic element. Browning himself styled this poem a dramatic romance. They are dramatic in that they are objective as regards the author; the poet is not uttering his own thoughts. The circumstances under which the monologue is spoken are usually dramatic (i.e., such as a playwright might choose to bring out some trait of character), the background, scenery, and even the action is vividly suggested, and there are usually subsidiary figures whose attitude towards the central actor is carefully indicated.

The chief point to notice about these poems is that the poet studies not merely an individual as such, the working out of passion in a single soul, but he takes that individual as a type of some special period, some phase of historical development, some special era of thought. It was Browning's way of using history for poetical purposes, and it was completely his own. This poem is not a very good example, because the personages and events described are not peculiar to any one epoch, but may occur wherever there are two people unhappily married. But even here we have in the Duke not only an intensely interesting, even if objectionable, type of human being, but the concentrated essence of a certain side of the Italian Renaissance.

Browning, in his series of imaginative representations has covered a big field. Artemis Prologuizer, Caliban on Setebos, The Bishop Orders his Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi, A Death in the Desert, Cleon, and many others cover an immense range, from Greek mythology through early and late Renaissance down to the modern life of Europe. "The poet can place us with ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris, Vienna or London, and wherever we go with him we are at home." Scenery, character, time, place, and action are all suitably and harmoniously blended, the characters are vividly alive. The qualifications which Browning brought to these poems were, first, a wide historical knowledge, not so much of separate events as of the main trend of thought in a given period; an intense imaginative power; a wide knowledge of human nature; and last, but not least, in his Italian poems, a familiar acquaintance with "a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing, architecture, popular dress, talk and scenery of the towns and country of Italy from the thirteenth century to modern times." The poem under consideration gives us only a glimpse of the skill with which Browning handles this particular type; but I hope it will be sufficient to induce those who are not acquainted with Browning's other work to study it further.