My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue by RBrowning.
Just considering the title, the intelligent reader can make interesting hypothesis about the content of the text: the possessive adjective "my" refers to the substantive "Duchess" and reveals the speaker's love interest towards the lady. He speaks about her as if she were one of his things. Moreover, the adjective "last" makes the reader understand that there will not be other Duchesses after her. Summing up, the reader expects the dramatic monologue to be about love affairs.
If considering the subtitle, the reader comes across the name of an Italian city, Ferrara and English readers are not supposed to be familiar with it. It follows that the setting of the monologue is exotic, rather removed from the readers' imaginary and it upholds the substantive Duchess, referring to a typical female title in Ferrara.
The monologue consists of a single verse and 28 rhyming couplets.
The speaker is a Duke addressing to a silent interlocutor, that is, a messenger who visited him in order to discuss about a marriage between his leader's daughter and the Duke himself.
In the very first lines it seems to the reader as if he could hear the words of the Duke. Indeed, deictics like "that" and "there", false starts like "now" and "I said" and invitations like "will't please" belong to conversational English and the language used is informal. The Duke wants the guest to look at his Duchess' fresco that he commissioned to a certain Fra Pandolf. The speaker seems to be really proud of the representation (he calls it "that piece a wonder") since the subject looks as if alive but, to tell the truth, the messenger is the first person who is allowed to admire it, maybe because he is a "stranger" and he did never happen to meet the Duchess. The reader gets numerous pieces of information about her, through the Duke's words: she often blushes, her face suggests passion and depth and her eyes unveil devotion to the Duke. Considering the way the Duke speaks, he seems to be a very authoritative person: the pronoun I is repeated in almost each line and it seems as if the Duchess were afraid of him ("if they durst"). He wants to show all his strength and diplomacy to the stranger but his words unveil an hidden side of his character: he was extremely jealous of his lady and he could not stand that she treated him like everybody else ("she liked whate'er she looked on, she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years -old name with anybody's gift, she smiled whene'er I passed her but who passed without the same smile?"). As a consequence, the revenge he plans in the name of his honor ("Who'd stoop to blame this sort of trifling?") is actually due to his fragility in matter of feelings. It seems as if he needed the exclusive attention of the Duchess, as if she were a second mother to him and, since she did not satisfy such a need, "all smiles stopped together". An allusion to the Duchess' murder figures at line 19, in which Fra Pandolf focuses his attention on the red throat of the lady.
The reader thus understands the meaning of such a monologue: the Duke is warning the messenger about his extreme act in the name of love and the intelligent reader understands that he is not interested in another marriage. He just wants to contemplate and own the picture of his last duchess.
The monologue closes with an invitation to reach the other guests downstairs and the duke cannot get along without showing the messenger his exclusive sculpture in bronze. It was committed to a famous artist and it represents Neptune taming a sea-horse, as well as the duke tamed the lady.