The Ring and the Book

Book-length Victorian narrative poems are pretty low on most people's list of reading priorities these days, and if you are going to read one then you are very likely to go for Aurora Leigh, In Memoriam, or The Princess before attempting any of Robert Browning's longer works. Browning has a not-entirely-undeserved reputation for obscurity, and the sheer density of information you get in one of his poems can be daunting even in the shorter Dramatic Monologues. His poetic language rarely has the lightness and fluidity that you get from Tennyson and Mrs Browning. All the same, I think it's worth the effort to struggle through The Ring and the Book.

If you like the Browning of Dramatic Monologues like "My Last Duchess", you'll be happy to show more know that that's essentially what you get here, only more of it. A lot more. Sandwiched between relatively short head and tailpieces written in the voice of the poet, we get ten long monologues (about 2000 lines each), all telling or commenting on the same story — a late-17th-century Roman murder case — from different points of view. Browning got the idea for this from a collection of documents about the case he found in an old book in the market in Florence, but he didn't actually write it until about ten years later, after his wife's death.

The various monologues touch on all sorts of things: fine points of law, Italian politics, relations between husband and wife, the notion of "honour", the role of the church, the transition between Baroque and Enlightenment, the decline of religious faith, etc, etc. But what Browning seems to be interested in above all is the difficulty of arriving at any kind of objective (legal, scientific) truth about human acts and their motivation, set against the possibility "art" gives of depicting ambiguities and contradictions. Each participant and observer describes an entirely different version of events, coloured by what they have seen and by what they want to achieve though their statements. The individual monologues all make fascinating reading in isolation, but when you put them together they start to form a complex, matrix view of the murder that goes beyond what you get from any of the individual accounts. The final effect is a bit like reading all four books of the Alexandria Quartet.

The pace varies a bit: in the first three monologues, where the speakers are external observers of the events, it feels rather slow, but then it livens up when we get the accounts of the three main characters. The monologues of the two advocates (the defence rather oddly gets to go first) provide the opportunity for some rather laboured jokes against the law and lawyers, but the real high-spot of the whole poem is in the last two books: the Pope's wonderfully-discursive summing-up, where he often seems to be summing up the whole Baroque period, not just this one case; and Guido's dramatic rant against the verdict. These two are often reprinted on their own in anthologies. Guido's final monologue would certainly work well on stage as well: Browning's psychological insight really captures the character in a way that seizes the reader's attention there.

As an experiment, I got this as a print-on-demand hardback. The quality of the book was OK, not wonderful, but it was simply too big and heavy to read comfortably: I ended up reading most of it on my e-reader. show less

Moving in parts, interesting in all, boring in a few... overall very good. It's difficult to summarize because it's very dense. Sometimes the writing comes across as encyclopedic, like a shopping spree browbeating you. Some of it is strained and some of it very fluid, conversational and modern. There's a staggering variety of voices. The pacing is also difficult to manage as a reader. The philosophical arguments slow the reading down, so that each section should be thought over slowly; and yet this is made difficult by the generally fast pace of the monologues (Pompilia is creepily slow). But pacing is also one of this poem's great joys and achievements, along with its voices and diction. It is a very tricky poem... much more show more complicated than other Romantics. show less

This is a fascinating book of lengthy dramatic monologues that all center around a single true crime. It takes energy and thought to understand and stay focused through the lengthy poems included that make up the story, and you don't have to read them either in sequence or all together to find the value in the book, but if you devote the time, you'll find them worthwhile. The voices come across sincerely and the monologues overall are simply striking. If you're a fan of Browning, or of Dickens, I'd strongly recommend these. Those few of you who have enjoyed epic poetry will find a great deal here to love and come back to also. Highly recommended, if not for everyone.

2 vols.