Robert Browning.

Gibson, Mary Ellis

As I have made my way through hundreds, many hundreds, of pages recently published on Robert Browning and, as often as not, on Elizabeth Barrett as well, I have been forced to wonder what it is about these two poets and their poetry that still attracts readers, scholars, publishers. I have tried to reconcile my noble pile of reading with the sobering statistics presented by Clint Machann in last year's review of Arnold studies in this journal, for Machann has documented a significant decline in scholarly writing on Victorian poetry (VP 41 [2003]: 376).

Last year Machann charted the number of entries in the MLA International Bibliography Database for six major Victorian poets during the past four decades--he tabulated the results for Arnold, Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, and Tennyson. His numbers showed a steady increase over the past forty years in the number of entries published on Christina Rossetti and Barrett Browning, and a precipitate decrease over the past thirty years in work published on Robert Browning. Browning's stock by this measure seems to have fallen farther faster than that of either Tennyson or Arnold. In part this more precipitous decline results from Browning having farther to fall, since between 1963 and 1983 his work received significantly more attention than that of the other poets Machann charted. It is clear, nonetheless, that scholars increasingly have directed their attention to other Victorian poets. Still more obviously, the dominant trend has been a decline in attention to Victorian poetry across the board.

To be more specific, the decade from 1973-1982 showed 653 entries for Robert Browning and 34 for Elizabeth Barrett; by 1993-2002 Robert Browning was the principal subject of 244 works of criticism while Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the focus of 158 (it is unclear how a "double entry," say an article on the two together, might have been counted). Though entries on Barrett Browning have quadrupled, entries on the two poets taken together have fallen by half in the last thirty years.

Despite this trend, running against Victorian poetry generally, it is clear that Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning continue to exercise a significant fascination for critics. Certainly this year's rather prodigious output of scholarship and biography testifies to their continuing interest. Much of this interest springs, I believe, from two different, but related factors. First there is a resurgence, at least this year, of interest in Robert Browning and religion. Browning's vexed and vexing theology, as he wrestled both with the rise of historical criticism and the impact of spiritualism to the mid-nineteenth century, seems to speak to contemporary concerns. Second, as Barrett Browning's poetry is once again taken seriously, both her own work and the mutual influence of the two poets have become increasingly important. For all their differences on spiritualism and other matters, Robert's and Elizabeth's mutual construction of their poetic careers continues to attract attention. As the relationship between the two poets is defined in terms not of victimization and rescue but of collaboration and work, the two can be read, and even idealized, as avatars of equality.

During the past year it is the poets' joint story that has drawn the most sustained critical interest. The most important recent contributions to this story are by Mary Sanders Pollock and Pamela Neville-Sington. Pollock's Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning could be called a study in biographical intertextuality, while Neville-Sington's biography, Robert Browning: A Life After Death, investigates not Browning's posthumous reputation but his semi-posthumous existence as the widower of the "poetess." This year too, Iain Finlayson has given us a traditional biography at some length, Browning: A Private Life, and Jochen Haug, paradoxically perhaps, tells us more about Browning's private life than Finlayson can, by focusing his monograph Passions without a Tongue on embodiment in Browning's poetry. Behind all of these readings, with the odd exception of Finlayson's, lurks the power of the poets' own "private" writing, from the letters the two exchanged during their courtship to Scott Lewis' recent two-volume edition of Barrett Browning's extraordinary letters to her sister Arabella.

Mary Sanders Pollock's Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: A Creative Partnership (Ashgate, 2003) argues for the poets' relationship as a collaboration, beneficial to both parties. Developing her theoretical framework from a Bahktinian notion of dialogue, Pollock shows how the two poets profoundly affected each other's work. Using as an example Robert's complex response to Elizabeth's extended critique of "England in Italy" (later "The Englishman in Italy"), she demonstrates that Robert "usually made changes where Barrett suggested, though rarely as she suggested" (p. 64). Pollock distinguishes this kind of mutual critical dialogue from influence. "'Influence,'" she writes,

 is usually one-sided. Even 'mutual influence' implies a willingness
 of each to capitulate, or to incorporate without necessarily
 assimilating, something from the other. In this sense, Barrett and
 Browning did not influence each other at all, although eventually
 they shared a fund of imagery and ideas and, more important, they
 created together a dialogic space in which new ideas and meanings
 could emerge and find their way back into both bodies of poetry.
 From the beginning, as the exchanges about Browning's poetry [during
 their courtship] suggest, the whole correspondence between the
 two poets reveals an erotic energy which ebbs and flows, surfaces
 and subsides, as the two poets argue with and encourage each other.
 (p. 64)

Pollock offers a sympathetic reading of the two poets' relationships to each other, finding that each grew as an artist through collaboration with the other. Rather than emphasizing, as a number of previous critics have, Robert's relative lack of poetic productivity during their marriage, Pollock treats in derail the work up to 1856, that is Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and Men and Women. In an afterword which focuses largely on Balustion's Adventure (published in 1871) she treats the years from 1856 to 1861 (Barrett Browning's death) as a time of depletion of energy and spirit for both poets, largely the result of Elizabeth's increasing illness (p. 205). But even during this period of difficulty for his own poetry--particularly given the critics' negative response to Men and Women--Browning was, Pollock argues, drafting a number of the poems that became Dramatis Personae and incubating the ideas for The Ring and the Book. In short, where other critics have seen the glass as half empty and the springs of poetry running dry or worse, Pollock takes a more sympathetic stance. Whatever differences they may have had over parenting, politics, or spiritualism, Pollock reads the Brownings' relationship as good for the poetry of both. Elizabeth broadened her understanding of life and politics, driving toward the novelistic and dialogic power of Aurora Leigh, which Pollock sees as her greatest work. Robert, on the other hand, "was able to relax the adversarial stance toward his models [Shelley for example] and his readers, establishing more cooperative, though still never easy, relationship with his audience" (p. 3). Both Casa Guidi Windows and Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day depart, Pollock argues, from the poets' previous works. The latter, read here persuasively as Menippean satire, she takes to be more successful than Elizabeth's political poem, for in it Barrett Browning has "not yet fully integrated historical authority into her own female poetic voice" (p. 11).

One of Pollock's most interesting readings of Robert's work is her treatment of "Saul"--Elizabeth's detailed and lengthy responses to it, its fragmentary first appearance, and Robert's path toward its completion, probably in 1852-53. Pollock reads "Saul" in terms of the personal, formal, religious and theological challenges it presented. Like other critics she see the eroticism between Saul and David as n safe expression of Robert's own attraction to Elizabeth and another appearance of the trope of rescue. But she argues that the two poets needed to rescue each other, for she sees the thirty-three-year-old Browning as burdened by "an existential loneliness which made him reluctant to reveal the intimate details of his mind and heart" (p. 68). Rather than merely reading "Saul" as a coded love letter trapped within a simple heterosexist instantiation of gendered norms, Pollock argues that the poem is astute about the circulation of desire and the Victorian gendering of art. In the first place, Pollock describes Elizabeth as not merely replicating the position of the victim-to-be-rescued, but as an unusual woman with whom a relationship, rescue myth aside, was "far from the conventional heterosexual romance it came to epitomize" (p. 78). "Saul" undoes gender hierarchies, and "through the doubleness of David--con ventionally feminine beauty and spiritual power--the poem allowed Browning to work out the possibility that femininity was an essential aspect of poetic power" (p. 78). In completing the poem several years later, Browning was able to move beyond the impasse of his first version, through rethinking the poetic line and through the typological identification of David with Christ, a move which Pollock reads as a resolution of the erotic and imaginative tensions of the earlier version that reconciles masculine and feminine, human and divine. In this she shares with Jochen Haug and Pamela Neville-Sington a conviction that embodiment is crucial to understanding not only Browning's theology but his poetics. Pollock is equally sympathetic to Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, offering a reading of it in terms of Menippean satire and the logistoricus; the latter form is the literary precursor of the dream vision poem and incorporates philosophical dialogue within the dreamer's experience. Pollock's discussion of Men and Women touches more lightly on religion to concentrate on "Old Pictures in Florence," which she sees as both a political exploration and a comic rivalry with Elizabeth, "always celebrating the power of renewal and desire" (p. 170).

It is as a comic rivalry, intellectual partnership, and erotic unison that Pollock reads the Brownings' relationship. And hence she concentrates on the years of their courtship and early marriage, before Elizabeth's declining health and increasing addiction, the likely attenuation of their sexual relationship, Elizabeth's obsession with spiritualism, the turn for the worse in European and American politics, and the increasing difficulty of rearing Pen. Pollock's optimism, her persistence in seeing the glass half full, may be a useful counterweight to the reading of Robert's work as burdened or haunted by Elizabeth's expectations, her power as his muse. Biography being what it is, one could move in either direction, but especially in regard to the courtship and early years and even the last more painful years of their marriage, there is much to be said in favor of Pollock's understanding of dialogue and collaboration. Whether we wish to follow this line of reasoning to the conclusion that Elizabeth was a "fellow poet who continued to give [Robert] courage and companionship, even in death" (Pollock, p. 215) is the central question of Pamela Neville-Sington's new biography of Browning.

Well written and well documented as to secondary sources, Pollock's Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning is largely a pleasure to read. Still I can not help noting the various small errors--typographical mistakes which would appear to have crept in after a final proofing (missing letters in ordinary words, etc.) and multiple errors in paragraph indentation. In addition there is the occasional solecism--Countess Cowper, the dedicatee of Balustion's Adventure, becomes "Countess Cooper."

Pollock might have made a yet stronger case for collaboration between the poets, especially in the early years of their marriage, had she had the use of Elizabeth's manuscript letters to her sister or Scott Lewis' wonderful edition of them: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her Sister Arabella (2 vols., Wedgestone Press, 2002). Julia Markus has aptly called this correspondence "one of the jewels of the nineteenth century," and Lewis has placed it in a worthy setting. With scrupulous annotation, textual accuracy, and wonderful introduction and appendices, Lewis has made a must-have book for academic libraries, one that should be read far beyond the confines of Browning studies as a detailed picture of upper-middle-class and middle-class life--from the price of eggs in Italy, to the way that non-conformist religion shaped attitudes and life choices.

Lewis wittily and accurately describes these many and ample letters as "uninhibited, unpremeditated, and unremitting" (p. xxvii) and quotes Barrett Browning herself to that effect: "Never surely were such rambling letters as mine, .. treating of Heaven, earth, & the kitchen, in paragraphs mixed together!" (letter 10, quoted, p. xxix). These witty and vibrant letters allow us a different view of the poets' collaboration--the daily collaboration of two people working together, correcting proof, extracting agreements from publishers (Robert's job, given his perennial tendency to worry more about money than Elizabeth), experiencing rivalry and mutual concern about productivity, and sharing anxiety about reviews. By 1853, significantly, Elizabeth is referring both to her work and to Robert's in the first-person plural. So, for example, when Chapman asks to bring out a third edition of Barrett Browning's poems, she writes to Arabella that "I am deep in the corrections--As there is least to do in the second volume Robert has set me to that, and it is going off to England directly" (letter 95, 1:542). A month later, she writes again to Arabella, this time about a production of Browning's "Colombe's Birthday" at the Haymarket: "Arabel, Robert makes the modest request to you that you will go to see his play at the Haymarket. Of course you will. Seriously speaking, tell George [their brother] & all of them from me that, if they go to anybody's play, they are to go to ours, & clap & shout & save us from damnation,--for really I am anxious about it, seeing that I can't believe that the subtlety & refinement & poetry of Colombe's Birthday will not baffle an English audience" (letter 98, 1:567). Here indeed we see the daily detail of two writers, much concerned about each other's work, trying to spare each other negative criticism and to provide each other material, editorial, and moral support.

But the letters also show us the difficulties for both poets, particularly in the later years of their marriage, when, as Elizabeth's health declined, she increased her dependence on morphine and her interest in spiritualism. From her comments and worries about him, we can imagine that Robert was beset with what we would have to recognize as caretaker syndrome, finding with difficulty space for his own person and work. A short excerpt can scarcely capture the headlong rush of Barrett Browning's letter writing, which as her health declined Robert began to consider a dangerous path to over-exertion. Although in the letters through May 1853 we see Barrett referring more and more to spiritualism, by 1854 she is unable to contain her enthusiastic conviction even in the face of Robert's skepticism (which she reports) or Arabella's non-conformist piety. Even in 1853 she is exclaiming to her sister, "My dearest Arabel, if the 'Rapping spirits' pass away, & there is no more heard of them .. if they break like a bubble .. there, will be an end, as you say. But that's the point in doubt, you will be pleased to observe; & instead of the end, I am much inclined to believe it to be the beginning" (letter 99, 1:571). Indeed after describing various controversies about spirit rapping she goes on to tell Arabel, "You may suppose how in the midst of all this visionariness, my poor Robert is in a glorious minority, trying hard to keep his ground as a denier, & and well-nigh carried off his feet--oh, you ought to be with him, Arabel, or really it's hardly fair" (1:572).

It is the wit and the self-recognition in these letters that provide a picture of the Brownings' relationship--and collaboration which--one can neither idealize nor cynically discount. On the one hand, the poet becomes "my poor Robert" but on the other a "glorious minority." Here, implicitly, as elsewhere explicitly, Barrett Browning defends their quarrels and differences as a crucial part of their intellectual partnership. On another quarrel--over their son's upbringing--the letters are equally revealing. Even the most sympathetic reader might be forgiven for growing impatient with Barrett Browning's penchant for transcribing all of Pen's cute sayings to transliterated baby talk. One sees nearly first hand how Pen became the boy (or child rather) who could do no wrong. Barrett Browning's letters to Arabella reveal the lineaments of collaboration and its difficult places as well.

Pamela Neville-Sington in Robert Browning: A Life after Death (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), begins at exactly the point where Pen's upbringing fell solely to Robert, the point of Elizabeth's death in 1861. Within days of his mother's death, Pen lost his long ringlets and short trousers and shortly thereafter the country of his birth. By taking up Henry James's suggestion that the most interesting chapter in Browning's biography would be that of "his return from his long Italian absence ... to address himself to a future indefinite and obscure," Neville-Sington finds a way to bring new interest, a new interpretive lens, and a new biographical framework to a life that has been written and ably written--by William Irvine and Park Honan, John Maynard, and Clyde Ryals to name only the most accomplished scholarly works of recent decades. Although Neville-Sington's biography covers the whole of the poet's lift', it mixes a chronological account of his life after 1861 with retrospective sections connecting themes and events from his later life to his childhood, young adulthood, and marriage.

In Jamesian fashion she charts three of the "indefinite and obscure" relationships that shaped Browning's later life, noting how important for him throughout his life was a series of intimate friendships with women. In particular, Neville-Sington emphasizes his connections to Julia Wedgwood, Louisa, Lady Ashburton, and Katherine Bronson. But the overarching presence in Browning's life, waxing and waning in its importance, was that of his dead wife. Neville-Sington takes a very different view from Pollock of Browning's "collaboration" with Elizabeth Barrett. Indeed she sees it as no collaboration at all. In reflecting on The Ring and the Book, for instance, Neville-Sington quotes Browning's correspondence with Julia Wedgwood to the effect that Julia was like Elizabeth in disapproving of his fascination with morbidity. Neville-Sington speculates that during the composition of his magnum opus the poet "believed that he was doing what would have pleased and gratified Elizabeth." By the time he sent Julia Wedgwood early copy he saw "that he had been deluding himself." Neville-Sington, unlike Pollock, argues that on completion of The Ring and the Book "it must have suddenly become clear to Browning why his fourteen years in Italy, nearly the whole of his marriage, had enveloped him in silence when he should have been so prolific; why that time had been--perhaps 'mistake' was too harsh a word--such a disappointment, at least poetically. Elizabeth's sensibilities, so different from his own, had acted to rein in Robert's vivid imagination, and he was too much in awe of her to rebel. The contrast between the poet's present literary fecundity and past impotence was striking" (pp. 112-113).

Now of course, there are numerous explanations for the contrast in addition to Elizabeth's sensibilities, though I do not discount Neville-Sington and numerous other critics who have remarked on Browning's relative lack of productivity. One might remember in addition to "the soporific, opiate spell which Elizabeth had, unwittingly, cast over Robert's own poetic genius" (p. 114) numerous other factors which Neville-Sington portrays in some detail: constant worries about money for which Robert seems to have taken the lion's share of responsibility, rearing Pen as an unusually hands-on father, an increasing role as nurse to an increasingly invalided wife, the death of Robert's mother, his father's troubles with Mrs. Mueller and subsequent conviction for breach of promise, the peripatetic life (which Robert seems to have found more disruptive than Elizabeth). Each of these factors exacted its own toll in worry and activity. By 1864 Browning, one might say, had few money worries 'and controlled his own time rather than finding it controlled by family responsibilities. For all his worry about Pen, who was by then fifteen years old, Browning certainly was able to establish his own writing routine and stick to it with few interruptions. Always in Italy, it would seem, he suffered that writer's guilt of never producing enough.

That Elizabeth was both a muse as well as companion--with all the necessary ambivalence of the former--can not be denied. Neville-Sington is particularly good at conveying Elizabeth's abhorrence of anything morbid or pertaining to death--no doubt stemming from the early losses of her mother and of her favorite brother "Bro." It is equally true that Browning was fascinated with morbid anatomy in all its meanings. Both to his friend Isa Blagden and to Julia Wedgwood, as this biography emphasizes, Robert cast himself as the devilish one to Elizabeth's angel. And the literary role of bereaved widower of a famous poet, as Neville-Sington points out, created lifelong obligations, comfort, and misery in which Elizabeth became semi-deified. In her discussion of the poet's relationship with Julia Wedgwood, Neville-Sington makes painfully clear the gossip surrounding the poet, the social need to pair him with every "eligible spinster." Julia Wedgwood, Neville-Sington shows, was much more prudish than she needed to be even in the social fishbowl in which she lived, and yet in protecting herself from gossip she made clear that she recognized how much the poet was still in the grip in 1865 of Elizabeth's presence. Despite the coded intimacy of their correspondence neither could find a path to sustained intimacy short of marriage, which remained for the poet unthinkable. During their courtship, Elizabeth insisted Robert was not to feel entangled by their engagement, and he replied "My crown is loose to my head, not nailed there." But in the years after Elizabeth's death, Neville-Sington argues, "The crown had grown tighter over time. The myth of their marriage (including the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese') which had hitherto been a comfort to the grieving widower, was now threatening to ensnare him" (p. 46).

The second Jamesian episode focusing Neville-Sington's study is Browning's close encounter with Louisa, Lady Ashburton. This is one of the best accounts of their tempestuous connection--though highly conjectural--with Neville-Sington making clear both the poet's divided mind (or mind and body) and his guilt over his own behavior. She reads Balustion's Adventure as exemplifying not only Barrett Browning's views of art but Robert's guilt that his wife's "death had somehow enabled his life--his poetry--to flourish" (p. 137). She traces the way the book itself responds to and rejects his intimacy with Lady Ashburton and the way the book went before him to Loch Luichart, her country house in Scotland where their final explosive meeting occurred--his heart he told Louisa Ashburton was buried in Florence, his flirtation none of his own but the prospect of advantage to Pen. Whereas Pollock reads the persistent voice of Barrett Browning positively, Neville-Sington presents us with a man in emotional crisis, a crisis that takes yet another form in Browning's next poem, Fifine at the Fair, whose themes are lust and infidelity.

The latter portion of A Life After Death treats Browning's complex relationships to Katherine Bronson, the American with whom he and his sister spent many happy weeks in Venice, and to his son Pen. Indeed, despite her fascinating focus on the Jamesian elements of unspoken, misunderstood, or impossible erotic attraction, Neville-Sington might be best at her treatment of the poet's ever-vexed relationship to his son. Pen, it is clear, was more often a burden than a pleasure to his father--and vice versa one might imagine. Into Pen's education Browning poured all his own expectations for success, gentility, hard work, and scholarly accomplishment--and with predictable results. Neville-Sington manages this story with sympathy for both parties.

Although I paused at her instancing of what the poet "must have thought," Neville-Sington's volume is thoroughly researched and has its own narrative compulsion. Though I would like to hear more about Browning's friendships, and particularly the web of female friendships he shared first with Elizabeth and then with his sister Sarianna, Neville-Sington's biography has the advantage of focus. It led me back to the poems at the beginning of Browning's last volume, Asolando, with new eyes. The poet exhorts in "Now" an unknown sweet one to condense

 In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
 Thought and feeling and soul and sense--Merged
 in a moment which gives me at last
 You around me for once, you beneath me, above me.

Here is the heart of Neville-Sington's Jamesian story. The aged poet "in a rapture of rage," a very embodied if momentary rapture.

Much longer than Neville-Sington's volume and much more resistant to making conjectures about the poet's states of mind is Iain Finlayson's Browning: A Private Life (Harper Collins, 2004). Finlayson claims both that there is a relative "scarcity" of biographies of Robert Browning and that what has been lacking is a "chronological narrative of Browning's life as an upstage drama to complement the downstage chorus of critics of his work" whose studies are "hardly penetrable to any but the Browning academic specialist" (p. 8). Weighing in at about a pound and 758 pages, Browning: A Private Life actually provides something very like a public life of a very private person. For the general reader, Finlayson's book may have a daunting girth; for the academic specialist, Finlayson's sources are possibly more impenetrable than any amount of critical prose. In a bibliographical note, Finlayson acknowledges the Wedgestone Press, publishers of The Brownings' Correspondence in fourteen volumes (to date) and of Scott Lewis' collection of Elizabeth's letters to her sister, reviewed here. But these volumes appear nowhere ill Finlayson's short citation of principal sources or in his notes, and because he cites letters only by recipient and date (and not published source) it would be taxing indeed to trace whether or where a definitive edition is used. It would appear that the Wedgestone Press volumes are not used as they are not explicitly cited. Scholars who wish to use the Biography, then, would be well advised to double check citations of all letters. Given his reliance on sources contemporary to Browning, Finlayson also eschews mention of (and materials available in) John Maynard's Browning's Youth, still the best derailed study of the young poet. He relies heavily on Henry James and G. K. Chesterton, as well as on Alexandra Orr; this trio, while they provide wonderful apercus, is unlikely to lead to new readings of or approaches to Browning's texts, though to be fair this is not Finlayson's stated goal. There are of course strengths to Finlayson's work, particularly his discussion of what Daniel Karlin called Browning's hatreds. At thirty pounds for the volume (not published in the United States), librarians might be better advised to invest in the very lively prose of Barrett Browning's letters.

Both Pollock and Neville-Sington give us a particularly vivid sense of an embodied Browning, whose work--evocations of an angelic Elizabeth aside--more often than not itself evokes embodied experience. Just as David figures the poet through erotic connection, so poetry itself is seen as more an extension of than an antithesis to bodily impulses. Jochen Haug's Passions without a Tongue: Dramatisations of the Body in Robert Browning's Poetry gives these issues central place. This volume, number 89 in Peter Lang's dissertation series, Neue Studien zur Anglisktik und Amerikanistik, goes beyond the typical dissertation in both its scope and its sophistication. Haug's introductory chapter reads like the obligatory dissertation's survey of criticism, but chapters two to five bring new perspectives to Browning's texts. Though in some ways the chapters function as thematic umbrellas rather than single lines of argument, they have much to offer. I was especially struck by Haug's treatment of landscape as body in Pauline and by his discussion of dress and masquerade in a variety of poems and its subsequent application to The Ring and the Book and Pippa Passes. Body language is both a reality for Browning's speakers within the text and a metaphor for Browning's texts; in an extended discussion of the neglected poem "Cristina and Moaldeschi" from Jocoseria, Haug demonstrates how body language becomes performance. The speaker Cristina retains "awareness of the histrionic nature of her performance in particular and of the erotic relationship ... in particular" (p. 89).

The second half of Haug's study addresses mortality, pain, and death, and the sexual body. In his fourth chapter, Haug provides a new angle on the old question of Browning's conception of the relation between body and spirit. Analyzing a large group of texts he argues that "in all of this, the ultimate question is whether Browning's characters intuitively privilege the body and sensuous experience over spiritual transcendence, and whether the permanence of human creation can make up for the decay of the body" (p. 143). Like Neville-Sington, Haug quotes Browning's letter to Isa Blagden, reflecting on the years of his marriage: "The general impression of the past is as if it had been pain. I would not live it over again, not one day of it. Yet all that seems my real life,--and before and after, nothing at all: I look back on all my life, when I look there: and life is painful" (quoted in Haug, p. 144). So pain becomes the dominant motif. Browning dramatizes himself in his letters, Haug says, as having an acute sense of the realness of bodily pain--a sense he projects into his characters as well. Torture, murder, deathbeds (but not sentimentalized ones), litter the poems, as Haug reminds us. And Haug reads both "Cleon" and "A Grammarian's Funeral" to argue that in Browning's poetry "the separation of body and mind in life proves fatal" (p. 207). Despite the sometime Platonizing moments in Browning's texts, Haug argues, Browning rejects any Platonic notion of the soul separated from the body. In his final chapter, "The Sexual Body as Agent and Object of Desire," Haug analyzes a number of poems to suggest that "Browning's monologues are sexual repression dramatized: the histrionic nature of the dramatic form functions as a way of concealing and enclosing his speakers' bodily insecurities as well as their masculine voyeurism." At the same time the monologue "is an outlet for the dramatic speaker to unleash" sexual energy, indeed, Haug examines how these two movements occur in the same language. His discussion of masculinity, embodiment, and dramatic language ranges widely through the poet's oeuvre.

Taken together, Pollock's sunnier look at the Brownings, Neville-Sington's biography of the poet in his middle and old age, and Haug's critical study show us how Robert Browning wrote Elizabeth's nightmares, particularly her horror of mortality and their mutual horror of "looking" at the naked self. (One thinks of Barrett Browning's repeated floor plans, as she sketched for Arabella the necessity of separate dressing rooms.) While Robert rejected Elizabeth's modes of comfort (morphine, spiritualism), he had his own horror or nightmares. In "Bad Dreams II" from Asolando, which arrived in Venice on the day of his death, we have the beginning lines "You in the flesh and here--/ Your very self! Now wait! / One word! May I hope or fear?" Even in old age, having perhaps made his peace with whatever presences required it, Robert wrote about the dangerous edges of mortality and sexuality.

In addition to biographical and critical studies, the past year saw the publication of a number of interesting articles, among them three treating Browning and religion. Unlike Mary Pollock, Andrew Tate does not deal with the genre of Browning's poem Christmas-Eve so much as its cultural context; but like Pollock he distinguishes poet from the poem's speaker ("'He Himself with his Human Air': Browning Writes the 'Body of Christ,'" Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25 [2003]: 38-55). Primarily, Tare reads Christmas-Eve as a conversion narrative, in which the speaker must abandon his anti-Catholicism and any attraction of the Higher Criticism. In his "theologically orthodox resolution," the speaker still does not sentimentalize evangelicalism. Tate is interested in the poem's cultural context, Pollock in its language--an emphasis which allows her to argue even more forcefully than Tate for the poem's open-endedness.

Two other essays approach Browning's religion from very different points of view. Rowena Fowler places Browning's Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau and Caliban in the context of Victorian statistics ("Blougram's Wager, Guido's Odds: Browning, Chance, and Probability," VP 41 [2003]: 11-30). The Prince in Browning's most "mathematical poem," uses "formulae and theorems to create an illusion of scientific objectivity which is then undercut by his political cynicism" (p. 22). Ethics like religion can become for Browning's speakers a play of numbers, and Caliban, the inventor of his own ungodly game of chance, "casts his version of God in his own image" by killing crabs on a "numerical whim" (p. 22). Finally, Bishop Blougam also calculates the odds. As Fowler puts it, Browning's speakers "unsure of Providence but not averse to risk ... weigh up their chances in a language that revokes, variously, the sophistication of Pascal or the banality of a Victorian insurance salesman" (p. 25).

A third essay also returns to questions of doubt and belief. Robert Inglesfield focuses on the cultural context of Browning's engagement with belief and doubt in "Two Interpolated Speeches in Robert Browning's 'A Death in the Desert'" (VP 41 [2003]: 333-347). Inglesfield covers the familiar territory of Browning's engagement with Renan and Strauss, steering a middle course between William O. Raymond's reading and Elinor Shaffer's. He argues for the importance of Herbert Spencer's First Principles as suggesting one line of argument in the poem. Inglesfield discusses Spencer's place in the interpolated speeches of the monologue, which "frequently take the form of questions" or consist "largely of series of questions" (p. 335). While the poem answers various critiques of Christianity with a notion of progressive revelation, it dries not answer the skeptical questions raised on their own terms. Hence, we might say the closure of all three poems, Christmas-Eve, Easter-Day, and "A Death in the Desert," can provide only the most tenuous of conclusions. While Fowler's essay breaks new ground, all three can be said to provide a fuller context for reflecting on Browning and religion.

Finally, I want to mention the most interesting recent essay treating Browning's language. In "Browning and Translationese" Matthew Reynolds engages in a tour de force, ranging across languages, texts, and writers, to elucidate Browning's unusual "double tongue" (EIC 53, no. 2 [2003]: 97-128). It is impossible in brief to do justice to Reynolds' brilliant article--he moves from Browning's Italian monologists, to his Greek translations, to a remarkable reading of The Ring and the Book. In the italian monologues we find "a vividly imagined impossibility: speakers indubitably foreign whose command of English is--more than fluent--native" (p. 101). In the poems from the Greek and in The Ring and the Book, in contrast, we find translationese, a language bearing the marks of "the foreign language which lies behind" (p. 99). Reynolds' distinctions among the various ratios of foreign languages to English in Browning's poetry enable a virtuoso performance. After a detailed discussion of the language of Browning's translations from the Greek, Reynolds argues:

 The Agamemnon of Aeschylus is not only the translation of a tragedy
 but translation as tragedy. Like Agamemnon at Aulis, the translator
 is faced with an impossible choice: render the source text into
 idiomatic English and thereby lose its foreignness, or sacrifice the
 Iphigenia of familiarity and lead a host of English words into battle
 with the foreign tongue. Balustion's Adventure chooses (with some
 qualification) the first option; Aristophanes' Apology hesitates
 between the two. Only the Agamemnon is committed to the path of
 heroic failure, each verbal act destroying as much as it saves.
 (p. 113)

Having shown how Browning eventually pursued translation as heroic failure, Reynolds returns to The Ring and the Book, demonstrating how "multiple linguistic inflections" "mark out ratios of representation which vary from quotation through degrees of transcript and varieties of 'translation' to untrammeled English" (p. 116). Such observations allow us to see from a completely fresh perspective, for example, the lawyers' performances in The Ring and the Book. The effect of Browning's varied inflections is to force us to "sense the outside of the language we cannot help but inhabit" (p. 125). In Reynolds' essay, the closest readings open the widest vistas.

It is wonderful to consider, from the perspective of translation, how Browning the poet virtually lived in English as a foreign tongue. It is likely this was Pen's actual experience of the language. Italy, for the father, served not as a locus of cultural identification but of linguistic instability. Think of his titles--Dramatis Personae, Balustion's Adventure, "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology, Of Pacchiarotto, La Saisiaz, Jocoseria, and finally Asolando. Just as he felt, at the beginning of his career, impelled to publish under a title he was forced to explain, so at the end with Asolando. Even here, in his last book, Browning created a title he needed to explain and defend. The word Asolando, his introductory note says, was used--but only in speech--by Cardinal Bembo, meaning "to disport in the open air, amuse oneself at random." Browning may have recollected his life in Italy as pain, but in the doubled language of his poetry the pleasure of play was never far to seek.