The Victorian Era

What Is a Dramatic Monologue?

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The dramatic monologue is a poetic form in which a single speaker, addressing a silent listener at a critical moment, reveals himself or herself in a way that the speaker is often unaware of, and it was a major form of Victorian poetry. The form was particularly associated with Robert Browning, who brought it to its highest pitch, and its influence extended beyond poetry into the Victorian novel and the Victorian theatre. The history of the dramatic monologue is examined in Victorian Poetry. The context of the period is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

The Origins of the Dramatic Monologue

The dramatic monologue had its origins in earlier traditions of first-person verse, from the speeches of classical drama and the medieval complaint to the soliloquies of Renaissance theatre. Its most immediate ancestor was the Romantic lyric of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which had made the exploration of an individual consciousness the central business of poetry.

The Victorian poets transformed this inheritance by separating the speaker from the poet. Where the Romantic lyric had presented the poet’s own feelings, the dramatic monologue presented an invented or historical character whose words could be examined with irony and detachment. The technique owed something to the contemporary theatre and to the Victorian novel, with its growing interest in the inner workings of character and motive.

The Major Victorian Dramatic Monologues

The Victorian dramatic monologue was perfected by Robert Browning (1812 to 1889), whose monologues include My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover, The Bishop Orders His Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto, and Caliban upon Setebos, together with the collections Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864) and the long poem The Ring and the Book (1868 to 1869), which tells the story of a Roman murder trial through a sequence of monologues. Alfred Tennyson (1809 to 1892) also wrote distinguished dramatic monologues, including Ulysses, Tithonus, and St. Simeon Stylites, and the form was practised by many other poets of the period, among them Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Augusta Webster.

The Characteristics of the Dramatic Monologue

The dramatic monologue was characterised by a number of distinctive features. The first was the presence of a single speaker who addresses a silent listener at a critical moment. The second was the revelation of the speaker’s character through the speaker’s own words, often in ways the speaker does not intend. The third was a dramatic situation with its own tension and development, so that the poem implies a story without narrating one directly. The form also depended on the careful construction of a voice, with a diction, rhythm, and tone appropriate to the speaker rather than to the poet.

The dramatic monologue was the subject of a long critical debate in the period. Some critics praised the form as a powerful and innovative instrument for representing human psychology, while others condemned it as artificial, obscure, or morbid, objecting in particular to Browning’s fondness for criminal and corrupt speakers.

The Legacy of the Dramatic Monologue

The legacy of the dramatic monologue is substantial. It was one of the distinctive poetic inventions of the Victorian period, and it became a model for much of the poetry of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Ezra Pound’s Personae are direct descendants of Browning’s monologues, and the form has continued to attract later poets, including Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney.

Conclusion

The dramatic monologue, in which an invented speaker unwittingly reveals his or her character to a silent listener, stands among the most distinctive achievements of Victorian poetry. Browning brought the form to its highest pitch, Tennyson lent it classical dignity, and its descendants can be traced through the poetry of the twentieth century. The history of the dramatic monologue is examined in Victorian Poetry and in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.