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2 The Trespass of Intimacy Artists in Crime To Shakespeare Browning owes his very origins as a poet. He told J. S. Mill that a performance of Edmund Kean as Richard Crookback led him to write Pauline, his first attempt to realize a childish scheme “to act, as well to make verses, music, and God knows . . . what castles in Spain” (1981, 1, 1021). Part of the magic Browning shares with Shakespeare in this “Fool’s Paradise” is an ability to “assume and realize” different characters . It includes an uncanny power to make an audience intimate with dupes, charlatans, and villains. By constantly explaining to an audience the traps he is setting, Richard Crookback makes his victims seem obtuse. But the purpose of his explanation is not just to diminish Anne or Prince Edward but to draw in the playgoer. By taking us “completely into the destroyer’s confidence as if we were trusted accomplices” (Harbage, 1963, 355), a villain like Richard, Iago, or Browning’s own Duke of Ferrara is allowed to encroach on our trust. Enforced intimacy invades our comfort zone. It comes uncomfortably close to breaking down taboos. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard Crookback is marked by what one critic calls “juvenility and genius. Nothing Shakespeare ever wrote was apparently done with more gusto” (Goddard, 1951, 35). The “sense of triumph in power, in exuberance of invention” is equally evident in Browning’s Duke and the Spanish monk. At once juvenile and diabolical, they play with the Duchess’s portrait or with the monk’s enemy, Brother Lawrence, as a delinquent child might play with a toy. After the success of Dramatic Lyrics and Richard III, Browning and Shakespeare might easily have continued to exploit the early popularity of artists in crime like the Duke of Ferrara or Richard Crookback. But instead of inventing any fictional character he chooses, Browning, like Shakespeare, comes under a different spell: the lure of historical re-creation. Not content with mere pretense, Browning deepens his art in Men and Women and Dramatis Personae by resuscitating historical or literary person- the trespass of intimacy 21 ages, Renaissance artists like Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto, whose histories are recorded in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, or else fictional characters like Shakespeare’s own Caliban.1 In the same way, Shakespeare himself has to balance the illusions of an easy theatrical success like The Comedy of Errors with the demanding concern for fact of historical plays like the three parts of King Henry VI. As Harold Goddard paradoxically reflects, “It may have been history that saved him from the theatre” (1951, 56). Browning’s transition from an early theatrical masterpiece like “My Last Duchess” to the psychological and intellectual complexities of monologues by Cleon, Karshish, and St. John marks an important development in his effort to portray “action in character” rather than “character in action.” It parallels Shakespeare’s growing mastery of an irresolute, antiphonal style, which exists in an oddly crude and wooden form in Crookback’s last soliloquy in Richard III. Shakespeare’s attempt to “hammer out” what Stephen Greenblatt calls “a kind of inner theatre” (2004, 300) is better achieved in Richard II’s elegant prison soliloquy and (most notably) in the less polished but intellectually more supple soliloquy in which Brutus debates with himself the reasons for and against killing Caesar. A prototype of Browning’s aesthetic criminals, Richard adorns his villainy with grotesque aesthetic touches. When he murders Henry, he says his bloodstained sword sheds “purple tears” for “the poor king’s death” (3 Henry VI 5.6.63–64). Claiming that he “came into the world with [his] legs forward” (71) in order to waste no time removing relatives with better claims to the throne, Richard boasts that the teeth he is born with has allowed him to “snarl and bite and play the dog” in a progressive decline from the human to the animal. Though Richard’s skill with words shows he is a poet, he realizes that poetry, like love, requires some consonance or harmony of souls. But since Richard is “[himself] alone” (83), he is both one of a kind and solitary. He has “no brother” and is “like no brother” (80). Being loveless and unique, he rhymes and chimes with nothing. Constantly watching and marveling at his brilliance as an actor and a villain , Richard turns his self-advertised deformity and wickedness into a subject for art. Since the hunchbacked Richard cannot...

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