In the poem “My Last Duchess”?

Question

1. The duke "unwittingly reveals his true nature"  (according to many literary critics) in the course of this poem.  I find both (strangely) attractive and unattractive elements in the duke's nature.  That the duke is evil and "a bad guy" seems pretty well established.  However, have you ever noticed that sometimes the "bad guy" in a movie seems a lot more interesting to watch?  What attractive aspects of the Duke's nature do you see (if any)?  Why? Note that I didn't say "Good"  -- but "attractive."  Does he possess an energy (a "wicked vitality" in the words of one critic) that makes him seem sort of interesting?

2.  Note the title of the work.  Browning actually retitled it years after he wrote it.  What does the title imply?  Why is the word "last" significant?  Do you think this latest duchess was the first?  Why or why not?

3.  This poem is in part a study of character.  The duke stands as an example of alluring evil -- someone so perfectly creepy and powerful that he seems (in a way) fascinating or at least interesting.  What other literary (or cinematic) characters do you think also fall into this category?  Why do you put them in this category?

Answer 1

I am personally never too fond of Browning dramatic monologues because unlike Shakespeare, there is no development of character; these pieces rather seem to be curiosities for some great Victorian wax museum.  

1) The duke derives from idle stereotypes the English have cherished for Italians since at least the English Renaissance.  Until Geribaldi's somewhat plebian revolution in 1861, the English held absurd notions that Italians, at least among the aristocracy, were passionate, lecherous, violent, haughty, imperious, treacherous, dictatorial to women, and skilled in the use of poison.   (This poem reminds me of an English Renaissance era play set in Italy that included a poisoned portrait that would kill anybody who looked at it.)  This all stems from a sense of inferiority among the English, who felt provincial and insular compared to the Italians, who had their Renaissance 250 years earlier than England, had had even visited China before 1300.  My Last Duchess is 1840s, but you can see this sense is totally evaporated by Forster's 1908 novel, A Room with a View.

I don't personally find the duke strangely attractive, but his exaggeration of his family's age-- 900 years-- either betrays him for a Victorian era speaker, or else ridiculously claims his family were patricians from the late Roman Empire (the real number is five or six hundred.)  I do like how he says, `I chuse never to stoop,' when he says he could have told his wife what he didn't like about her: `Just this or that in you disgusts me...'  Another nice touch is the Duke's totally superfluous excuse for accepting money from his new wife's family (which is slightly inferior because a `Count')-- `Your Master the Count's known munificence is ample warrant that no just pretense of mine for dowry will be disallowed.'

2.  Last means previous, of course.  I am not exactly sure how to interpret the rest of the question; the Duke is clearly speaking with an emissary for the family of his to-be second wife.

3.  I guess.  I find another Italian, Signor Montoni from Ann Radcliffe's novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), far more compelling for perhaps some of the same reasons.  One likes how, as Montoni, the speaker will not stoop to give preferences, but gives `commands' when he has brooked enough displeasure.  But this is mere illustration of stereotype.  While one likes, perhaps, how the Duke can talk so casually about his misdeeds, this is so common in Browning's monologues of personal neurosis that it is almost de-personalised.  His power is not really so vivid as Montoni's is.  I'm sure you could think of better examples...

If you are familiar with Browning's long poem, The Ring and the Book, I find it much more interesting than these individual monologues because, at least, personalities and versions of the story interact over the twelve cantos in what is sometimes an oddly post-modern way.