Robert Browning’s ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’
Nigel Wheale analyses Browning’s ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ as a consummate example
of the dramatic monologue.
The dramatic monologue is most effective when the speaker is reprehensible.
This is the view of Robert Langbaum, whose critical study, The Poetry of Experience. The Dramatic
Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition is still one of the best accounts of the genre (and see E.
Warwick Slinn’s Dramatic Monologues for a recent overview). Langbaum writes that:
the genius of the dramatic monologue [is] the effect created by the tension between
sympathy and moral judgement.
The nameless Bishop who contemplates his death, and the tomb that – he desperately hopes – will
memorialise him within Saint Praxed’s Basilica, is one of Browning’s most complex dramatic personae
for exactly this reason: is he to be pitied, despised, or even, in some respects, admired?
Nameless and Dangerous
Why don’t we know the name of this Bishop, or of the Duke of Ferrara in ‘My Last Duchess’, or of the
pathological killer, Porphyria’s lover? Their anonymity serves to situate the reader even more firmly
within each character’s particular subjectivity, which provokes our unease.
We are ‘focalised’ within their pronouns and verbs as we read them, and so are forced to adopt the
points of view that express these distorted mentalities.
Are there any character traits shared between these three seemingly distinct individuals? Each of
them is driven to possess and capture a life through perverse, even criminal desires. The Duke’s
jealousy of his vibrant, responsive Duchess drives him to destroy and preserve her through Frà
Pandolf’s portrait. Porphyria’s lover must also murder in order to possess the perfection of a young
woman’s love:
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good
Perverse Aesthetes
The Bishop struggles to eternalise his own life and status in the form of an elaborate, Renaissance
monument. Each of them seeks to transform life itself into a beautiful, aestheticised object; all three in
this sense are perverse aesthetes.
The Duke is a collector of ‘objets d’art’ and has exquisite taste, he relishes the most delicate
sensations and intuitions, such as the fact that even painting
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat:
Porphyria’s insecure, perhaps socially ‘inferior’ lover (as hinted by lines 23-4) is also a highly
cultivated aesthete. His description of Porphyria as she sits beside him creates a perfect image that
any number of nineteenth-century artists might have painted. ‘Porphyry’ is a very beautiful, patterned
form of crystalline rock, so in a sense the lover turns his beloved into a lifeless sculpture by killing her
(‘without a stain’, 45).
Similarly, the small chapel of Santa Prassede, Rome, is a ‘jewel box’ of exquisite mosaic decoration,
and so a suitably refined setting for the Bishop’s desire for display and immortality through stone. This
venue is also implicitly ironic since the Basilica’s dedication to Praxedes and Pudentiana
commemorates early female martyrs who were murdered because, among other charitable works,
they gave Christian, and presumably modest, burial to fellow believers, and so broke pagan Roman
law. The Bishop’s direct, traditional exhortation that sets the ‘topos’ or theme of his sermon is
therefore profoundly ironic – ‘Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!’ (Ecclesiastes 1: 2).
Critiquing the High Church
Does the venial Bishop understand this as clearly as his audience? Is he aware that the materialist
culture of the Renaissance church is a flagrant corruption of the original Christian project? Some
scholars associate Browning’s critique of historical forms of Christianity in these dramatic monologues
with an implied criticism of mid-nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism. Contemporary debates raged
about the form that true Christian belief should take, and it was not difficult to read across from
Browning’s vivid characters to the arguments between ‘high’ (elaborate) and ‘low’ (simple) forms of
liturgical worship (Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning shared a strong personal commitment to
‘low church’ forms of belief). But if Browning intended any critique, then it was always only by
implication as, at the close of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the murderous obsessive exclaims gleefully:
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word! (59–60)
If the Bishop (and his entire institution) is possessed by ‘Vanitas’, then the man himself has also been
guilty of ‘Cupiditas’, or excessive desire for material and carnal pleasures. He first addresses his
audience – are they actually present, or are they too just another part of his feverish dream? – as his
‘Nephews’, a common euphemism for the illegitimate sons of the supposedly celibate clergy of the
time. John Ruskin, the most influential aesthetic and social critic of the nineteenth century, deeply
admired this poem by Browning because it offered such a concentrated portrait of all that Ruskin felt
was corrupt in the Italian High Renaissance church.
A Poet’s Sensuality?
The Bishop’s agitated, anxious frame of mind is perfectly expressed by his interrupted reflections
during the opening ten lines of his monologue, as he jumps from thoughts of his sons, to his mistress,
and then to his male rival whom he is determined to defeat, even in death. The Bishop is a voluptuary,
but he has a poet’s appreciation of the physicality of things, as in his description of his proposed
tomb’s nine columns:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.
The wine’s ‘mighty pulse’, as it flows from a bottle, is a description worthy of John Keats, whose
poetry was a formative influence for the genre of dramatic monologue (Langbaum: 49–53); Browning
had visited Keats’ grave in Rome just before he came across Santa Prassede, his ‘St Praxed’s
Chapel’). And the Bishop’s precise, evocative instructions for locating his buried chunk of blue lapis
lazuli have this same quality of sensuous precision:
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail
We might deplore this cleric’s hopeless corruption and venality that so clearly betray his office and
everything that he is meant to stand for, yet simultaneously we might admire and be persuaded
precisely by the genius of his sensual perception, the very quality that condemns him. The Duke of
Ferrara and Porphyria’s lover are manifestly vicious, murderous individuals, but the Bishop’s
weaknesses – pride, vanity, sensuality – are ones that any reader may share (even if not to the same
degree!). Therefore it is a more difficult question to decide just how ‘reprehensible’ this character is, in
Robert Langbaum’s terms.
Judging the Bishop
The critical moment for any judgement of the Bishop’s nature occurs when he anticipates his life after
death, in which he has a profound, if misplaced, faith. He imagines how he will lie ‘through centuries’,
beneath his tomb, yet still in possession of all his physical senses, hearing ‘the blessed mutter of the
mass’, feeling ‘the steady candle-flame’ and tasting ‘Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke’ as
if it were a narcotic (80-4). In theological terms, the critical line here is when the Bishop declares that
he will ‘see God made and eaten all day long’ (82): this could be a legitimate expression of proper
Catholic belief, or the most blatant example of this individual’s corrupt materialism.
The Bishop and Transubstantiation
Debates about the true nature of the Eucharist, the sacrament of bread and wine that celebrates the
Last Supper as the means of joining with Christ, were very contentious in the mid-nineteenth century
– ‘The contest of spirit with matter was always a favourite Victorian obsession’ (Slinn: 94, and see
Isobel Armstrong’s ‘Experiments in the 1830s’). The ‘low’ Church, Reformation attitude was that the
elements of the sacrament, bread and wine, remained simply that, material reminders of the original
Supper. The traditional ‘high’ Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, was (and is) that wafer and wine
mystically become the body and blood of the God, with which the believer joins by taking them at the
sacramental moment. The Bishop’s unquestioning faith that he will be able to watch ‘God made and
eaten all day long’ therefore demonstrates his absolutely orthodox trust in the reality of
transubstantiation; he possesses the true, Catholic belief. It is for each reader to decide whether this
redeems the Bishop, in their own view, by granting him a faith that could yet save him from that pride
and cupidity which will otherwise condemn the man to mere bodily corruption within his tomb of fine
stone.
Further Reading
Isobel Armstrong, ‘Experiments in the 1830s. Browning and the Benthamite
Formation’, in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, (2002).
‘Preview’ available online at Google Books.
David Gore, ‘A Noisy Poem. Voice and Ventriloquism in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’,
emagazine 48, (April 2010).
Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience. The Dramatic Monologue in
Modern Literary Experience, (1963). Text downloadable from the Internet
Archive.
E. Warwick Slinn, ‘Dramatic Monologue’ in Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman
and Anthony H. Harrison (eds) A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Blackwell,
2002). ‘Preview’ available online at Google Books.
Victorianweb.org has useful notes and links for Browning and his dramatic
monologues.
Nigel Wheale is a poet living in the Orkneys. He is a frequent contributor to emagazine.
This article was first published in emagazine 54, December 2011