Robert Browning's Romantic Irony in The Ring and the Book (review)

Robert Browning's Romantic Irony in The Ring and the Book, by Patricia Diane Rigg; pp. 153. Madison, NJ and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999, $31.50, £26.00.

Patricia Diane Rigg's thoughtful new monograph makes three important contributions to our understanding of Robert Browning. Her metaphor of three concentric circles of narration in The Ring and the Book (1868-69), ordered according to the speaker's distance from the privileged circle occupied by Pompilia at the center, offers a better interpretative model than the more familiar pyramid that places the Pope's monologue at the apex of a triangle. Developing Clyde de L. Ryals's idea, Rigg also uses Friedrich Schlegel's theories of Romantic irony to elucidate the truth of opposites in The Ring and the Book. Her third and final contribution is to demonstrate Browning's talent for paradox. Though he wants to be a visionary poet like Percy Bysshe Shelley, who draws the world into himself, Browning is also a dramatic Proteus, a poet of negative capability like John Keats, who assumes every shape the outside world can offer.

Few commentators are as successful as Rigg in showing how The Ring and the Book combines skepticism and belief. She skillfully demonstrates that in moving inward from the poet's outer circle of narration, to the second circle occupied by the Roman speakers and the lawyers, to the middle and inner circles of the Pope, Guido and Caponsacchi, and finally to Pompilia herself at the epicenter, the poet and his readers come closer and closer to the truth. But as Rigg also observes, "the movement outward is de-creative or skeptical, as each monologue contributes to the whole poem by undermining the integrity of 'the text'" (21). In other words, the centrifugal movement of unbelief and skepticism keeps reversing the centripetal movement of faith. And since Pompilia draws "us in to the heart of events" even as "she compels us to complete the countering skeptical withdrawal toward the Poet and his historicising activity" (11), the poem's coiling cluster of monologues has to circle and recircle the enigma at their heart without ever truly penetrating it.

The combination of such contradictory qualities as skepticism and belief leads Rigg to formulate her second thesis: that Browning is a Romantic theorist in the tradition of Schlegel. In her own words, "Browning seems ironically content both that he has presented a complete truth and that the complete truth cannot be presented. This paradoxical treatment of truth in The Ring and the Book is what makes Browning a Romantic ironist" (19-20). Unlike the classical ironist, who assumes that he and his audience share the same values and that any deviations from these values can be accurately assessed and criticized, the Romantic ironist endorses opposite or contradictory values simultaneously. Though theorists such as Kenneth Burke have argued that irony is incompatible with the relativism that Romantic (or double irony) seems to posit, Browning uses both kinds of irony. Browning's Pope, for example, is a single or classical ironist in firm possession of the truth: Guido's deviation from it is a deserved target of his censure. But as a double ironist, Browning's poet in The Ring and the Book knows that there is often truth on both sides of an issue. He realizes that the more he knows about the mystery of the Roman murder, the less he knows. Like Guido in his final speech, the poet may even have a lingering dread that he has not "spoken one word all this while / Out of the world of words [he] had to say" (Ring 11.2409-10). For as Rigg concludes, the poet "is as enthusiastically committed to an act of 'repristination' as he is skeptically aware that he cannot possibly perform such an act" (20).

A third contribution of the book is its demonstration of Browning's talent...