Historic Counterparts Research Articles

Browning's Canon Giuseppe Caponsacchi: Warrior-Priest, Dantean Lover, Critic of Society

If the test of The Ring and the Book is what Browning stated it to be namely its veracious repristination of an actual event, it fails. But the test is entirely irrelevant. . . . Browning's Pompilia and Caponsacchi are immeasurably more important than their historic counterparts. They are a great poet's vision of spiritual achievements within the reach of the human soul. They are a sublime assertion of what man may make out of life. The truth of them is the absolute conviction of their ideal possibility which the poet's poetry gives to his poetic fictions. Browning's Pompilia and his Caponsacchi are true, though they never existed, least of all in the man and woman bearing their names in the records of the Roman murder-case.1