1) The speaker is not the poet himself. He a Duke and he has been drawn from a history. He is delineate against a precise setting: he is the Duke of Ferrara and the story is set in his palace in Ferrara, in Italy.
 

2) a) The listener.
Clues: “Will’t please you sit and look at her?”, “Strangers like you”, “Sir”, “Will’t please you rise?”, “The Count your master’s”, “We’ll go together down”

b) The present situation
Yes, the Duke is going to marry the Count’s niece.

c) The subject matter
1) The monologue refers to a past situation, the life and the dead of the Duchess, and a present one: the wedding of the Duke with a new woman. The two events are connected because the two women were and will be both married with the Duke.
2) Adjectives: courtly, jealous, possessive, proud, class-conscious.
3) The Duke is self-confident and he wants to have the control over everyone. He thinks he is strong and powerful but his attitudes reveal a weak personality because of his jealousness and need to be the most important person to “his last” Duchess.

d) The language
1) Place: “Ferrara”, “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall”, “We’ll go together down”, “Notice Neptune(…)”
2) Situation: “We’ll meet the company below”, “No just pretence of mine for dowry will be disallowed”
3) Direct address: “Will’t please you sit…”, “Will’t please you rise?”
4) Contracted forms: “That’s”, “Will’t”, “’twas not”, “’twas all one!”
5) Paused, signalled by dashes: line 29, line 39, line 36, line 39, line 42
6) Fillers: “How shall I say?”, “I know not how”

e) The tone
The tone of the monologue is cold, reflective, strong.

Check Your Knowledge
1) In My Last Duchess the setting is the city of Ferrara during the 1600. The imaginary speaker is the Duke of Ferrara who is addressing a … of the Count whose daughter he intends to marry. While negotiating the marriage, he shows a portrait of his latest wife and talks about her. Two very different personalities emerge in the poem. The young wife flushes with joy at very simple things – the sunset, the cherries and the white mule; she is kind to everybody including people of lower ranks. The Duke finds it unbearable that she puts the same value on, for example, a “bough of cherries” as on the gift of his nine-hundred-year-old name. He is proud, class-conscious and possessive. He reveals himself as a tyrant who wants to have absolute control over his wife. As he was unable to, he “gave commands; then all the smiles stopped together”. As the men are going downstairs the Duke expresses his confidence that the Count will grant his possible request for an ample “dowry”, quickly adding “though his fair daughter’s self is my object”. His last remark is about a sculpture of Neptune “taming a sea horse” which is a visual metaphor for the Duke’s wish to tame those under his control.