The Politics of Character: The Lawyers and Pompilia in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-69)

Abstract

In his 1869 review of Robert Browning's The Ring and Book, Robert Buchanan wrote that last, opus magnum of our generation lies before world.... The fascination of work is still so strong upon us, our eyes are still so spell-bound by immortal features of Pompilia (which shine through troubled mists of story with almost insufferable beauty), that we feel it difficult to write calmly and without exaggeration; yet we must record at once our conviction, not merely that The Ring and Book is beyond all parallel supremest poetical achievement of our time, but that it is most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since days of Shakespeare. (1) Such effusive praise for Browning's newest work was not rare, and Victorian readers were in surprisingly uniform agreement that young wife, Pompilia, was one of Browning's greatest figures and gave poet credit for aesthetic greatness on basis of his crafting of this beautiful character. (2) Yet while readers sang praises of Pompilia, as if she were a living Victorian angel in house, they suggested that readers could simply skip over lawyers' monologues completely, and that nothing would be lost in doing so. One reviewer wrote that few of his [Browning's] readers will not feel a little resentment at Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, and Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius. These characters ought to have acted (and are intended to act) as a foil to deep tragedy of piece.... They are, however, too irredeemably silly, and that not with a humorous but with a wearisome silliness. (3) Another reviewer, typical in his reaction to lawyers, that, having written them, poet should have suppressed them. (4) And yet another that the two lawyers we could dispense with; they constitute marked blemish of whole piece. (5) At time of publication, and for a good century afterwards, arguments of lawyers as a whole were considered to be a distraction from book, an aesthetic problem, something that could, and perhaps should, be avoided by readers, and something whose exception would not harm readers' abilities to grasp plot, themes, and meaning of work. What a survey of readers' responses also suggests is that Pompilia and lawyers represent two starkly contrasted poles of moral and institutional experience. The angelic Pompilia is in world of domestic, private, and pure. She is a victim, and all more likable for her unbelievable suffering. Pompilia's passionate but surprisingly forgiving monologue, for example, is delivered while she lies dying from twenty-two sword wounds inflicted upon her by Guido and his hired thugs. The lawyers, in contrast, are part of outside world: professional, institutional, and sullied. The lawyers show little compassion for victims, and, it is argued, are continually distracted by their self-centered concerns which pull them away from their ethical duties as lawyers. Furthermore, their movement back and forth between English and Latin is disorienting to reader; intrusion of professional legal language forces reader to undertake laborious reading exercises to understand what lawyers are saying. Hence characters have been divided, since publication of Ring and Book, along lines of pure/private/domestic and corrupt/public/institutional. (6) Now one might expect recent critics to be less absorbed by questions of moral character-to prize aesthetic or ironic or political over a sense of personal honor and appeal-but intriguingly, modern critics have continued to judge and discuss quality of Browning's characters in ways that depend on division of public and private, a division that they have largely taken for granted as a natural structuring principle in The Ring and Book. Many of more recent readings have attempted to correct Victorian readings of Pompilia by criticizing Browning for an antifeminist construction of Pompilia, or by celebrating ways in which Pompilia has greater agency than she at first appears to possess, but in either case they have judged Pompilia, in large part, based on their perceptions of her access to public sphere. …