The Politics of Character: The Lawyers and Pompilia in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-69)

In his 1869 review of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, Robert Buchanan wrote that "at last, the opus magnum of our generation lies before the world. . . .The fascination of the work is still so strong upon us, our eyes are still so spell-bound by the immortal features of Pompilia (which shine through the troubled mists of the story with almost insufferable beauty), that we feel it difficult to write calmly and without exaggeration; yet we must record at once our conviction, not merely that The Ring and the Book is beyond all parallel the supremest poetical achievement of our time, but that it is the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakespeare."¹ Such effusive praise for Browning's newest work was not rare, and Victorian readers were in surprisingly uniform agreement that the young wife, Pompilia, was one of Browning's greatest figures and gave the poet credit for aesthetic greatness on the basis of his crafting of this beautiful character.² Yet while readers sang the praises of Pompilia, as if she were a living Victorian angel in the house, they suggested that readers could simply skip over the lawyers' monologues completely, and that nothing would be lost in doing so. One reviewer wrote that "few of his [Browning's] readers will not feel a little resentment at Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, and Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius. These characters ought to have acted (and are intended to act) as a foil to the deep tragedy of the piece. . . . They are, however, too irredeemably silly, and that not with a humorous but with a wearisome silliness."³ Another reviewer, typical in his reaction to the lawyers, "suggests that, having written them, the poet should have suppressed them."⁴ And yet another that "the two lawyers we could dispense with; they constitute the marked blemish of the whole piece."⁵ At the time of publication, and for a good century afterwards, the arguments of the lawyers as a whole were considered to be a distraction from the book, an aesthetic problem, something that could, and perhaps should, be avoided by readers, and something whose exception would not harm readers' abilities to grasp the plot, themes, and meaning of the work.

What a survey of readers' responses also suggests is that Pompilia and the lawyers represent two starkly contrasted poles of moral and institutional experience. The angelic Pompilia is in the world of the domestic, the private, and the pure. She is a victim, and all the more likable for her unbelievable suffering. Pompilia's passionate but surprisingly forgiving monologue, for example, is delivered while she lies dying from the twenty-two sword wounds inflicted upon her by Guido and his hired thugs. The lawyers, in contrast, are part of the outside world: the professional, the institutional, and the sullied. The lawyers show little compassion for the victims, and, it is argued, are continually distracted by their self-centered concerns which pull them away from their ethical duties as lawyers. Furthermore, their movement back and forth between English and Latin is disorienting to the reader; the intrusion of professional legal language forces the reader to undertake laborious reading exercises to understand what the lawyers are saying. Hence the characters have been divided, since the publication of the Ring and the Book, along the lines of pure/private/domestic and corrupt/public/institutional.⁶

Now one might expect recent critics to be less absorbed by questions of moral character—to prize the aesthetic or the ironic or the political over a sense of personal honor and appeal—but intriguingly, modern critics have continued to judge and discuss the quality of Browning's characters in ways that depend on the division of public and private, a division that they have largely taken for granted as a natural structuring principle in The Ring and the Book. Many of the more recent readings have attempted to correct Victorian readings of Pompilia by criticizing Browning for an...