

Essay by Kelly ValencicCollege, UndergraduateA, March 1996

download word file, 6 pages 3.4

Downloaded 95 times

Trials and hearings take place frequently in our society today. In a trial, it is the job of two lawyers to persuade a jury to see a situation a certain way, regardless if it is the right way, the truthful way, or if it is even the way they themselves see it. It is then the jury's obligation, after listening to both sides of the story, to make a decision based on the evidence presented, and in most cases, the evidence is either not presented in its entirety or overwhelmingly slanted to fit one side's particular case. Therefore it is up to the juror to be able to throw away the false information, and to pick out the shreds of truth and make a conclusion based on them. This process, which is extremely common in today's society, was also common in the Victorian Age, in Victorian poetry, in the use of dramatic monologue.

Perfected by Robert Browning in the mid nineteenth century, dramatic monologue very closely mirrors modern society's legal institution. In comparison, the reader is the jury, the speaker of the poem is the lawyer, and, thinking more abstractly, the author, Robert Browning in this case, represents the case as a whole. The decision the jury must make between what is actually right and what the lawyers imply to be right is the same one the reader of a dramatic monologue must make. Browning's Dramatic Lyrics is a collection of poems in which many are written in dramatic monologue. 'Porphyria's Lover' is a poem from Dramatic Lyrics critics often cite when explaining dramatic monologue. Because of it, the reader is pulled between what the speaker thinks is right and what really is. Robert Browning's perfection of dramatic monologue and use of a dramatic mask in his poem...