Browning's Two Guidos

Abstract

Among the many and diverse characters who reveal themselves to us in the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, only one, Count Guido Franceschini, is allowed to step forward and speak a second time. The murderous villain of The Ring and the Book is granted nearly one-fourth of that poem and allowed to speak twice, Browning told Miss Julia Wedgwood, because the Old Yellow Book dictated such an emphasis and because Guido's wickedness must be shown to "rise to the limit conceivable." When Guido speaks that second time we have, the Poet of Book I says, "the same man, another voice" (I, 1285). A comparison of the two monologues reveals distinct methods of structuring a dramatic utterance and distinctly different uses of language by the monologuist. Count Guido in Book V has control of his language at all times, using it as a discursive rhetorical instrument to prove, casuistically, that his treatment and eventual murder of Pompilia and the Comparini were justified. He strives audaciously and eloquently to twist truth in order that his judges will accept a false estimate of his motives and character. He learns nothing new about himself io the process; if his auditors and the reader see through the falsity of the argument and learn something of his essential character, they do so obliquely and against the speaker's wishes; his utterance is a character-revealing action, but there is no self-realization on the part of the speaker.