Town Talk and the Cause Célèbre of Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book

Abstract

These lines from Robert Browning’s ambitious, blank-verse epic, The Ring and the Book, describe the town talkers of late seventeenth-century Rome as they witness the proceedings of a triple-murder trial. Speaking in propria persona, Browning seems disdainful of the relativistic abandon of “prattle” that “proved wolves sheep and sheep wolves.” Yet the explicit premise of The Ring and the Book is to reanimate talkers—from the dead material of print—who fail, more often than not, to provide clear moral judgments. In the first of twelve books, Browning narrates how he discovered the “inert stuff” of court documents bound in an “old yellow Book” amid the bric-a-brac of a Florentine stall and devised a plan to “enter, spark-like” in order that “something dead may get to live again” (1.469, 33, 755, 729). In 1698, according to the documents, one middle-aged Count Guido Franceschini stood accused of murdering his seventeenyear-old wife, Pompilia, and her adoptive parents, Pietro and Violante Comparini; his motives were an alleged affair between Pompilia and a young priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, and the Comparini’s schemes to secure the count’s wealth. The Ring and the Book renews interest in this old case through the creation of ten dramatic monologues, each offering a different perspective on the case. Notably, the first third of the poem’s nine speakers (Guido himself speaks twice) are members of the general public, precisely the kind of town talkers Browning derides in the epigraph to the present essay. Moreover, the subsequent monologues of those much closer to the case seem unable to escape the proliferation