Browning and the Dramatic Monologue

by S. S. Curry

To a certain extent, the lyric spirit and the dramatic can never be completely separated. There has never been a good play that was not lyric as well as dramatic. There has never been a true lyric poem that has not revealed some trait of human character and implied certain relations of human beings to each other. It is only the predominance of feeling and mood that makes a poem lyric, or the predominance of relations or conflicts of human beings that makes a passage dramatic. All the elements of poetry are inseparably united because they express living aspects of the human heart.

Shakespeare’s soliloquies deserve careful study as the best introduction to the deep nature of the monologue. They are objective embodiments in words of feelings and moods of which the speaker himself is only partly conscious. This is the very climax of literature,—to word what no individual ever words. In a sense, this is true of a lyric, which may interpret in the many words of a song what in life is a mere look or the hardly revealed attitude of a soul. The deepest feelings of love can never be expressed in the prose of conversation. They can be suggested only in the exalted language of poetry.

These principles apply especially to the appreciation of a soliloquy. Of this phase of dramatic or literary art there has been but one master, and that was Shakespeare. He could make Hamlet think and feel before us without relation to another human being. He is the only author, practically, who has ever been able to portray a character entirely alone. In the great climaxes of his plays, we feel that he is dealing with the interpretation of the deepest moods and motives of life.

The exclamation, “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,” after the departure of the King and the Court, reveals to us Hamlet’s real condition, his impression or premonition that something is wrong. We are thus prepared for the effect of the news brought by Horatio and Marcellus, because his attitude has been first revealed to us by Shakespeare. Shakespeare alone could perform this marvellous feat. Again, one of the most important acts closes with a soliloquy which reveals Hamlet’s spirit more definitely than could be done in any other way. This soliloquy comes naturally. Hamlet drives all from him, that he may arrange the dozen lines which he wishes to add to the play. This plan has come to him while he was listening to the actor, and must be shown by his action during the actor’s speech. Hamlet, in a proper stage arrangement, is so placed as to occupy the attention of the audience while the actor is reciting. The impressions produced upon him, and not the player’s rehearsal, form the centre of interest. By turning away while listening to the actor, he can indicate his agitation and the action of his mind in deciding upon the plan which is definitely stated in the soliloquy and forms the culmination of the act.

Notice, too, how Shakespeare makes this soliloquy come naturally between his dismissal of the two emissaries of the King and the writing of the addition to the play. Hamlet’s soul is laid bare. He is roused to a pitch of great excitement over the grief of the actor and his own indifference to his father’s murder. Then, taking up the play, he begins to prepare his extra lines, and with this closes the most passionate of all soliloquies.

Strictly speaking, a soliloquy is only a revelation of the thinking of a person entirely alone and uninfluenced by another; but a monologue implies thinking influenced by some peculiar type of hearer.

Browning’s soliloquies are practically monologues. We feel that the character almost “others” itself and talks to itself as if to another person. This is also natural. We know it by observing children. But it is very different from the lonely soul revealing itself in Shakespeare’s soliloquies. In fact, the monologue has taken such hold upon Browning that even Pippa’s soliloquies in “Pippa Passes” are practically monologues.

In the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” the monk talks to himself almost as to another person, and his every idea is influenced by Brother Lawrence, whom he sees in the garden below him, but to whom he does not speak and who does not see him.

SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER

Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims—
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
At the meal we sit together:
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?
What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?
Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps—
Marked with L for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
—Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as ’twere a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he’d let it show!)
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp—
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp.
Oh, those melons? If he’s able
We’re to have a feast: so nice!
One goes to the Abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!—And I, too, at such trouble
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
Or, there’s Satan!—one might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss, till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine ...
’St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratiâ
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!