(1842) ROBERT BROWNING – MY LAST DUCHESS

 

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive”

And so begins Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue – and one of my favorite villainous dramatic monologues at that. Make no mistake – the Duke (prefaced as Ferrara) is a villain. Indeed, his monologue unveils himself as a narcissistic sociopath – and particularly chilling in its calm and casual delivery, even potentially charming in its eloquence but for what it unveils (as perhaps with all the best villainous monologues).

The Duke introduces his last Duchess, not in person but in her painting – which he keeps curtained off for his gaze only (or that of his select guests, including the one to whom he’s speaking in the poem), a detail easy to miss in first reading but which acquires significance as the poem advances.

He then introduces her transgressions:

 

“She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”.

 

At first, this seems to insinuate a roving eye, until he reveals what the sort of things that made his young naïve bride glad – a sunset, the gift of a cherry bough, even perhaps a compliment from the portrait artist himself. Indeed, most of the supposed “transgressions” seem to take place in his own mind – or his own narcissistic need that she pay him the proper attention.

 

“She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift”

 

And then come the lines that I always find so chilling in its cold detachment – and so heartbreakingly tragic for his last Duchess

 

“Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together”

 

And so the Duke unveils himself as akin to a mafia don who took out a hit on his wife. Because she smiled too much.

It’s even more heartbreakingly tragic as it is based (loosely – or perhaps not) on real historical figures – the fifth Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso Il d’Este) and his wife, the teenaged Lucrezia de Medici, dead at the age of seventeen. Browning had more in mind than simply recreating a historical character. The Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for the juxtaposition of artistic and intellectual heights with the ruthlessness of its aristocratic elite that did indeed resemble mafia families.