My Last Duchess

Exercise 1: Read the poem and focus on the speaker

The speaker is clearly separated from the poet. In fact the content of the monologue is not about Browning’s personal experience but about an Italian Duke of the 16^th century. To employ legend character means to underline the distance between the thoughts of the poet and the stream of consciousness of the dramatis personae.

Exercise 2:

A)     The listener: will’t please you sit and look at her? ; Like you; are you to turn; Sir; Oh Sir; will’t please you rise? ; We’ll meet the company below; Nay we go together down, Sir?; notice Neptune.

B)      The subject matter:

1) The only link between a past and a present situation is the painting on the wall. But the Duke’s life style in the present has not relationship with the past.

2) In my opinion the Duke is an egocentric person. He thinks himself more important and stronger than others. He has the power to judge and choose about the life of people around him. As a matter of fact according to his ego he orders to kill the only one person who doesn’t submit herself by his personality, his last wife. “Since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I”.

3) The Duke sees himself always in a positive way. He does always the right thing in the right moment. But the reader’s idea about the Duke’s personality is different because he is not in the story, so he is free to make a personal idea of the characters.

C)      The language:

1)      We’ll go together down

2)      Will’t please you rise?

3)      Whate’er

4)      Even had you skill in speech- (which I have not)- …

5)      I repeat

D)     The tone

At the beginning the tone of the monologue is quite calm but when the Duke starts speaking about his dead wife the tone changes becoming an excite and passion one.

Check your Knowledge

Exercise 1

In My Last Duchess is the city of Ferrara during the 16^th century. The imaginary speaker is the Duke of Ferrara who is addressing in a           of the Count whose daughter he intends to marry. While negotiating the marriage, he shows him a portrait of his death wife and talks about her. Two very different personality emerge in the poem. The young wife flushes with joy at very simple thing- the sunset, the cherries and the white mule; she is kindly to everybody including people of lower ranks. The Duke find 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 who wants to have absolute control over his wife. As he was unable to, “he gave command; then all smiled stopped together”. As the man are going away the Duke express his confidence that the Count will grant his reasonable 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 metaphor of the Duke’s wish to tame those under his control.

Exercise 2

It has been argued that the attention given to the dramatic monologue in the Victorian Age represents a singe of reaction against the inward looking tendency of Romantic poetry, a wish to move away from the poets own insights and get into a more objective/historical world. In other words, the use of the dramatic monologue undetermined the Romantic relationship between the speaker and the poet and allowed the Victorian poet to widen his      of themes and tones, while achieving            self expression.