RVP Term 2 Week 4
Robert Browning
Class Plan
• “My Last Duchess”: instructor
• Andrea del Sarto: class
• (Time permitting): “Caliban Upon Setebos”: instructor
implied addressee,
ideal recipient
• See Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
• Not useful for all poems, and you do not have to use this
vocabulary; nevertheless, something to notice when present,
but not to always look for
• Implied addressee
• Is the speaker talking to someone?
• Is that person present? Absent?
• How is that person reacting? Are they talking back, doing
something to the surface of the poem; or are they silent?
• Ideal recipient
• The poem may be addressed to one person but intended for
another
• An ideal recipient “gets” the poem’s references, and may
even share its aesthetic/ethical philosophy
Dramatic
monologue
• Comparison: “Now, what news on the Rialto?” (MoV, I.i.1)
• Particularly characteristic of C19
• “Drama” in implication of speech taking place within larger
world, which poem contains
• What to read for:
• Details of surrounding world
• Implied audience of poem
• Potential ironies (difference of knowledge between speaker and
audience, reader and speaker, reader and audience)
• “The dramatic m. gains additional force from the fact that a silent
auditor often constrains or controls the speaker's words, contributing
to complex levels of irony within the poem.” (“Dramatic
Monologue,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics)
“Andrea del Sarto”
• Groups: 1-40, 51-71, 90-115, (244-end)
1. Summarize what happens in these lines.
2. Discuss the relationship between the speaker and the
addressee, and in turn how the reader is implicated in this
relationship.
3. Pick up one figure in these lines that recurs throughout the
poem. Talk about what this recurrence means, in any
sense.
4. This poem gives one philosophical account of the role of
the artist. Describe a philosophical idea that appears in
these lines.