by Sally Morris

Created on: July 02, 2008

MY LAST DUCHESS
Scene: Ferrara by Robert Browning

This is one of the best! I remember as a child listening in rapt fascination when my mother (very accomplished in this) recited "My Last Duchess". Reading it again now, after many years, once again am I chilled by the cold, cruel Duke of Ferrara.

We know at once he is entertaining someone, an emissary, as it turns out, from a certain Count, by showing off his impresssive collection. He has just drawn a curtain to reveal a portrait of his last Duchess. She was evidently young and beautiful, and now dead, but the important thing to Ferrara is that he commissioned a "big name" to execute the painting and does not lose the opportunity to brag about it.

Of course we're eager to learn more about this lady and as he speaks of her he sounds dispassionate, almost off-hand. In our imagination we can almost hear the strains of the lute in the hall below as he tells us in one quiet, casual remark that he is a controlling person. "Sir, 'twas not her husband's presence only called that spot of joy into the Duchess' cheek . . ." He tells us that he was possessive and jealous.

Apparently the poor girl tried to look on the bright side, appreciative of the kind remarks or gestures of the artist, various courtiers, taking pleasure in riding her white mule around the terrace (probably as far as she was allowed to roam). Ferrara resents this. "She had a heart, how shall I say, too soon made glad, too easily impressed," and, "'twas all one! My favor at her breast, the dropping of the daylight in the West . . . ." He obviously felt she had no right to enjoy a sunset.

The man was obsessed. His unyielding arrogance in having a "nine-hundred-years'-old name" he believed she didn't value highly enough, and his attitude that it wasn't even worth his "stooping" to school her in just what about her behavior was "disgusting" to him. And she was making excuses.

So his obsession with his dissatisfaction in his wife grew. We can see him silently waiting, watching, disapproving, contemptuous, plotting to punish her or maybe just wanting to be rid of her. So, an assassination is described in one short, veiled line: "I gave commands. Then all smiles stopped together." Has murder ever been so coolly conceived or described?

Browning's style of writing, the monologue which appears to be a quiet rant by a madman, is effective in the way the Duke seems to ramble but is clearly returning over and over to his obsession with his last Duchess.

She was just another

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