A Look at Brownings Last Duchess When one first lays eyes on Robert Brownings famous dramatic monologue My Last Duchess prior to reading it all the way through one may think this piece an imagined tribute to the Dukes deceased wife her memory and to their life together However by and by it appears that what initially seemed to be a rather harmless tale is in fact a story peppered with destructive jealousy a favouring of the aesthetic over actual human beings and an eerie obsession with control
My Last Duchess Summary This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso the Duke of Ferrara who lived in the 16th century The Duke is the speaker of the poem and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come to negotiate the Dukes marriage he has recently been widowed to the daughter of another powerful family As he shows the visitor through his palace he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess apparently a young and lovely girl The Duke begins reminiscing about the
The interpretation of poems plays and stories will depend on the persons thought and values of whoever is reading them Thus any theme derived from a body of work depends on that persons interpretation Robert Brownings My Last Duchess Henrik Ibsens A Dolls House and William Faulkners A Rose for Emily each tell widely different stories about the life in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds However most would agree that there is an underlying theme of love in each authors work Each work of fiction d
Compare And Contrast My Last Duchess And Porphyrias Lover On the Issue of Love My Last Duchess and Porphyrias Lover are poems which were written by Robert Browning during the Victorian period The poems expose the failure of a relationship and the complex nature of love between a man and a woman The aspects of jealousy vanity pride obsessive desire beauty and flirtatious behaviour are depicted in both poems The poems were written in the form of a dramatic monologue this gives the reader an insig
In 1842 Robert Browning published a book entitled Dramatic Lyrics which was a famous work that contained a collection of dramatic monologues Two of the poems found in this book were Porphyrias Lover and My Last Duchess In Porphyrias Lover Browning introduces a powerful insight into the demented mind of an extremely possessive man while My Last Duchess tells a story about the Duke of Ferrara revealing to a guest the murder of his wife and the motives behind it The two speakers share similar qual
Conventional Ideals of Masculinity and Irony in My Last Duchess The dramatic monologue is used in this poem to highlight certain events that have deep irony One of them being the irony the Duke presents to the audience about his Personality and the affection for History and arts He is powerful and desires control over everything he wants the audience to imagine of him as a powerful personality with great masculine traits that of pride and kind personality but when the instance comes about his D
n this essay we will try to point out the use of irony that Browning does by looking at how it works in his poems particularly to My Last Duchess My Last Duchess by Robert Browning is written in the form of a dramatic monologue You are being spoken to by the Duke Browning has captured an authentic speaking voice The syntax is manipulated by the author in order to create a conversatinal tone This is a poem telling a story the title of this poem reveals that the speaker a duke is referring to his