Browning and the Dramatic Monologue

by S. S. Curry

Many faults in the rendering of a monologue have been necessarily suggested in the preceding discussion. There are some, however, which have been but barely referred to, that possibly need some further attention.

The monologue must not be stagy. It should possess the quiet simplicity, the long pauses, the abrupt movement, the animated changes in pitch, and the simple intensity which belong to conversation. The Italian in England would remember and feel again the excitement of danger, and gratitude for delivery; but he would not employ descriptive gestures and declamatory presentation as if delivering an oration.

An important error to be avoided in rendering a monologue is monotony or inflexibility. A monologue is more suggestive than any other form of literature, for it implies sudden exclamations and abrupt transitions. The ideas and feelings are often hardly hinted at by the writer. There is not only greater difficulty in realizing the continuity of ideas and meaning, but a greater necessity for abrupt changes of voice than in any other mode of expression.

The reader of the monologue must suggest the impressions produced upon him, the hidden causes, the unreported words of another character, and at the same time a distinct and definite imaginative situation. Hence, the rendering of a monologue requires the greatest possible accentuation of the processes of thinking and feeling and the most delicate transitions of ideas. An impression produced by a mere look must be definitely revealed by the interpreter.

We thus see the necessity for the employment of great flexibility of voice and of body, and especially the exercise of versatility of the mind. The interpreter must have a sympathetic temperament, and must be able to accentuate and sustain the simplest look, the most delicate inflection and change of pitch, and to modulate the color and movement of his voice with perfect freedom. To read a monologue on one pitch completely perverts its spirit. Monotony is a bad fault in rendering all forms of literature, but it is possibly worse in the monologue on account of the peculiarly broken and suggestive character of that form of writing.

All the elements of conversation must be not only realized, but emphasized. The reader must be able to make some of these so salient as to reveal the very first initiation of an idea; otherwise, the real point may be lost. The thought must be made clear at all hazards.

The monologue must not be tame. Because it is printed in such regular lines the suggestive character may be lost, and the words simply presented as in a story or essay. There is a great temptation to give the feeling with the personal directness of the lyric story or essay. The monologue requires extreme definiteness and decision in the conception of character and feeling, and every point must be made salient.

Another fault in the rendering of the monologue is a declamatory tendency. As the reader discovers but one speaker he confuses the words with a speech. He feels the presence of the audience to whom he is addressing the words, or unconsciously imagines an audience, in preparing his monologue, and forgets entirely the dramatic auditor intended by the author. Thus, the interpreter, confusing the points of situation, transforms the monologue into a stump speech.

It degrades the quiet intensity of “A Grammarian’s Funeral” to make the grammarian’s pupil, who is aiding in bearing his body up the mountain side, declaim against the world. How quietly intense and simple should be the rendering of “By the Fireside.”

Although the subtleties of conversation need some accentuation, and although there is an enlargement of the processes of thinking, and fuller realization of the truth than in conversation, the monologue never becomes a speech. An audience may be felt, but never directly dominated, nor even addressed. In the oration, the speaker directly dominates the audience; in dramatic representation, the artist does not even look at his audience. His eye belongs to his interlocutor. The direction of the audience is that of attraction, and away from the audience that of negation. He must feel a tendency to gravitate in passion towards the audience, and in the negation of passion to turn from them; but still he succeeds, not by direct instruction, but by fidelity of portraiture.