Through this beautiful dramatic monologue, Robert Browning has tried to see deep into the psychological state of the Protagonist Duke of Ferrara and the inner motivations and designs that led him to get his own wife, the last Duchess, murdered. The epigraph of the poem “FERRARA” is suggestive of it being the story of an Italian Duke Ferrara during the Renaissance period and his long-standing reputation, respect, and authority that his family enjoyed for many odd centuries.
The dramatic monologue suggests the presence of some of its listener, the messenger from the Count, through its use of demonstrative adjectives/adverbs, second person pronoun ‘you’ and the invitations of the Duke to the messenger to follow him down the stair to the other guests. The rhetoric used by the Duke to describe his act of wickedness and cruelty is suggestive of the Duke’s cunningness and skill in presenting himself as a just and gratuitous person.
The portrait of the last Duchess painted by Fra Pandolf, who “worked busily a day” to paint it, ends to be a symbol of the Duke’s control of his Duchess over who can look at her, to whom she is to smile, and how much time she can give to any person whom the Duke likes to visit her which was never possible when the Duchess was alive as she was “too soon made glad” and gave “the same smile” to both her husband and any stranger. Through the actions and speeches of the Duke, Robert Browning has tried to look into the Duke’s inner structures of consciousness and shows how haughty, patriarchal, evil, and arrogant the Duke was that he “choose[s]/ Never to stoop” before his wife. And finally, he “gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together”.
© Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 