Augusta Webster, Dramatic Forms, and the Religious Aesthetic of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book

Perhaps no other nineteenth-century poet is so firmly and inexorably associated with a specific poetic genre as is Robert Browning with the dramatic monologue. Readers have long appreciated his fascination with and ability to reveal human perversity and malevolence, as he explores not only the psychological make-up of malcontents, but also, as Daniel Karlin writes, “the animating quality of hatred.”¹ These characteristics are particularly striking in religious figures that intrigue readers with their unseemly materialism and worldliness. Some obvious examples of such figures are Browning’s two bishops—the greedy, sensual, and brutal bishop on his deathbed at St. Praxed’s and the satirical model of casuistry, Blougram. As a master of the dramatic monologue, Browning’s influence on his contemporaries and his posthumous shaping of twentieth-century dramatic poetry are of interest to scholars. However, of interest as well are the ways in which Browning’s development as a dramatic poet follows a trajectory that takes a sharp turn in his long poem The Ring and the Book and the intriguing fact that this altered poetic style is similar to that of a significant dramatic poet of his time, Augusta Webster.

As the younger dramatic poet, Webster admired and emulated Browning, conveying her respect for him in the titles of her two volumes of dramatic poetry: her 1866 Dramatic Studies hints at a conceptual similarity to Browning’s 1864 Dramatis Personae, and her later volume, Portraits, is modeled in thematic ways on Browning’s earlier Men and Women. In a long, erudite two-part review of his translation of Aeschylus for the Examiner a decade later, she articulates her allegiance to Browning, who had lost some favor with “the British public” he addresses in The Ring and the Book.² Beginning with Dramatic Studies, which was published two years before The Ring and the Book, Webster wrote monodrama rather than dramatic monologue, and it is this specifically performative dramatic feature that is an important element of Browning’s long poem.³ Arguably, The Ring and the Book, with which Browning was preoccupied from 1862 until its publication in 1868, marks a transitional period in both his literary and his personal lives: he wrote it during his adjustment to life in England after his long sojourn in Italy, the time in which he was also adjusting to life without Elizabeth Barrett. Browning’s experiment with dramatic forms in his epic poem is an important feature of this transition that has not yet been studied; significantly, in two sections central to his conception of The Ring and the Book, the speeches of Pompilia and the Pope, he positions reader and speaker according to the same principles of monodrama with which Webster was adept.⁴ While we do not know whether Browning and Webster consulted on poetic production, and we do know that he kept the manuscript of his long poem primarily to himself, he began to work on the poem in earnest after the publication of Dramatis Personae, and he was still polishing the poem after the publication of Webster’s first volume of dramatic poetry.⁵ Webster’s Jeanne d’Arc, Sister Annunciata, the Painter, and the Preacher each provides a fruitful lens through which we might consider Browning’s transition from the type of dramatic monologue that typifies both Men and Women and Dramatis Personae to the dramatic forms that shape the speeches of the Pope and Pompilia in The Ring and the Book. In this article, I focus on the ways in which Webster’s Preacher and Jeanne d’Arc might serve to illuminate the nuances of Browning’s ongoing development as a dramatic poet.

Historically, the trajectory of Browning’s poetic development has been connected to the embarrassing deluge of criticism of his early poetry and dramas. Recently, Britta Martens has challenged that assumption, and, working with poems that she identifies as Browning speaking in his own voice, she situates Browning’s work in general in his sustained Romanticist poetics.⁶ It is this element of Browning’s work, I suggest...