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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. …

DURING THE LAST DECADE SCHOLARS HAVE SHOWN INTEREST IN NINETEENTH-century women who wrote in the dramatic form "masculinized" by such poets as Browning and Tennyson. (1) In her own day, Augusta Webster was compared favorably to Robert Browning, and she herself pays tribute to Browning in "A Transcript and a Transcription," a review for The Examiner of Browning's "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus," a review later collected in A Housewife's Opinions. However, Webster published in every genre, actually producing proportionately little in the way of dramatic monologue. In fact, in the last twenty-four years of her life, the prolific Augusta Webster published no dramatic poetry at all; consequently, we cannot assume that she defined herself as a writer of dramatic poetry. We need to take a more comprehensive look at a woman who promises to figure prominently in contemporary Victorian studies. Gaining insight into just how Augusta Webster did define herself as a writer has been complicated, I think, by her high profile socio-political life and by her feminist interests. Indeed, because Webster worked for the London branch of the National Committee for Women's Suffrage in the 1870s and served on the London School Board in the 1880s, we have naturally been interested in literary work that seems to us to reflect her feminist concerns. However, Webster had another profession from 1884 until her untimely death from cancer in 1894: she worked for the Athenaeum, primarily as a poetry reviewer. In this position she was able to articulate a fair[y complex system of poetics based on a balance of technical ability, innovation, and self-discipline. Significantly, this system pertains mainly to lyric rather than to dramatic poetry. In keeping with convention, her contributions to the Athenaeum were anonymous, but the marked editor's file, housed at City University London, provides an important context for a discussion of Webster's work. (2) These "review essays" are frequently comprehensive enough to allow Webster to situate poetic composition within a fairly extensive theoretical context. In 1881, three years before she joined the Athenaeum, Webster published A Book of Rhyme, included in which is a sequence of metrically ordered, inter-rhyming poems that she originally called English Stornelli, and later, in the 1893 reprint, English Rispetti. In 1881 as well, Webster wrote the earliest dated fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet in her unfinished sonnet sequence that was published posthumously in 1895 as Mother and Daughter. Therefore, throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Webster's poetic leanings were decidedly lyric, and the few dated sonnets suggest a continuity between the rispetti, the sonnets, and the critical reviews in the Athenaeum. I intend in this paper to study the English Rispetti, a controlled form with conventions of its own, within the context of some of the poetics Webster articulates so eloquently in the Athenaeum. While Webster's principles of poetic construction obviously evolved during her years as poetry critic, the pre-Athenaeum rispetti seem to apply all the important theoretical points relating to the balance of creative innovation and conformity to convention that she uses to measure excellence in the Athenaeum. Hence, Webster theorizes in her Athenaeum reviews the precision in language and attention to form that she demonstrates in the rispetti. In substance, as well as in language and form, the Rispetti mark an important phase in Webster's creative life, for the sequence is an ironic presentation of the complexity of human existence in its temporal and temporary state. One might argue that the human preoccupation with the brevity of life and the inexorable march of time has been a sustained preoccupation in literature, but the Victorian sense of time, drastically transformed into an understanding of the implications of deep time by the publications of Darwin and his predecessors, finds its way into a great deal of nineteenth-century literature) Webster's presentation of human life and human love, as much as her facility with the dramatic, connects her to Browning, for the rispetti underscore the irony of a human existence that is limited and finite even as they celebrate the power and mutability of human love. …

By the 1870s, when Augusta Webster had published two volumes of dramatic poetry, Robert Browning had developed the dramatic monologue to a standard against which dramatic poetry was mea sured. Recent scholars of the dramatic monologue have continued the tradition of defining the genre exclusively through reference to male poets, primarily Browning.1 However, I think that we need to reconsider this association of the objective "mask" of dramatic poetry with the masculine, for the fact is that Victorian women wrote a great deal of dramatic poetry. Herein lies a dilemma: the dramatic monologue has consistently been associated with masculine reticence, particularly with an anti-Romantic, reactionary reticence on the part of Victorian male poets to express the inner self and project outward those passions that define the poetic self. Brownings public with drawal of his private poetic voice and his decision to distance himself emotionally from his subject are well known. The general contrast to dramatic poetry is emotive, expressive, and subjective lyric poetry, a poetic genre which implies a close relationship between speaker and poet. The problem we face now is that, although it cannot be called "lyric," dramatic poetry by women tends to be less specific in defining the speaker, thereby retaining an important attribute of lyric poetry and delineating a rather transparent dramatic "mask." Dora Greenwell's "Christina," Amy Levy's "Magdalen," and most of Webster's Portraits and Dramatic Studies, for example, are all works that have been labelled dramatic monologues; however, in each of these works the speaker is vaguely, at times, abstractly, drawn. These speakers are all far more broadly representative types than are