Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: ‘This is Living Art’ by Josie Billington (review)

Josie Billington’s brief, suggestive study concentrates not so much on influence as on artistic affinity. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Shakespeare, she claims, share “a kindred form of dramatic mentality” (19); for both authors, “writing was demonstrably a creative event not a second-order record of experience” (3). Billington’s choice of focus is a wise one. It allows her to skip over unnecessary demonstrations of Browning’s knowledge of and admiration for shakespeare, which are well known in any case, and to move straight to a nuanced and sophisticated comparison of their artistry. The payoff comes right away, in the first chapter’s opening section—the finest in the book—on Browning’s early dramas, including The Seraphim (1838) and A Drama of Exile (1844). Adducing comparable passages from Shakespearean tragedy, Billington beautifully demonstrates the ways in which Browning’s characters, like shakespeare’s, collaborate in mental processes—they think aloud together—and so seem to exist in a genuinely living, evolving world of thought and action. Nor is Billington’s success limited to her discussion of drama: she makes similarly illuminating points about Browning’s lyrics, comparing their sense of immediacy to shakespeare’s evocation of “the instant of writing” in his sonnets and to “micro-movements” of consciousness in his plays (41, 61). These subtle perceptions of similarity help support Billington’s claim that even Browning’s most learned and formal poems, such as Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), exhibit a truly dramatic voice.

The second half of chapter 1, however, introduces two types of evidence that will be used in the rest of the book to support the claim of affiliation between the two writers: manuscripts and meter, both of which prove to be problematic. Every chapter (there are three in all) makes use of manuscript material to further the argument that Browning was an improvisatory poet—she “knew where she was going before she started, but only how she would get there when she started”—and hence shakespearean (32). But this line of reasoning seems extremely tendentious. If Browning changed her mind about phrasing as she composed, that scarcely sets her apart; any other poet’s rough drafts would show exactly the same thing. And Billington’s attempts to recreate the poet’s evolving mood from manuscript variants—“we seem to see how the embers of grief are being re-ignited in sexual feeling even while [Browning] writes”—are unconvincing (58). The connection of the manuscript evidence to Shakespeare, moreover, is thin at best. Browning’s compositional process is not being compared to Shakespeare’s; that would be impossible, since his manuscripts do not survive. Instead, it is being compared to the improvisatory spontaneity of his characters, or even of a hypothetical actor in one of his plays: “Characteristically, the poet scored out her entire first thought on paper in order the more completely to re-inhabit it in spirit … as an actor in rehearsal or performance might find his language and metre in Shakespeare’s part-script” (89). Unfortunately, therefore, the extended analyses of Browning’s manuscripts do not contribute significantly to the book’s argument, nor to our understanding of particular Browning poems, since the dense individual readings are often difficult to follow.

The sections on meter are more successful, because they contain some insightful close readings. Billington finely observes, for instance, that in Aurora Leigh (1856), sentences concerning death often conclude in the middle of a line—“the caesura repeatedly registers, at mid-line, what are in fact final, mortal, terminal endings”—thus allowing endings and new beginnings to coexist in a single pentameter (101). And the chief claim of these sections seems unexceptionable: that Browning’s versification, especially in Aurora Leigh, “recognizably reproduces many of the characteristics of Shakespeare’s later blank verse” (85). But the supporting evidence for this claim is once again surprisingly weak. Billington premises her argument...