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Robert Browning and the Experimental Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

James Patton McCormick
James Patton McCormick*
Affiliation:
Wayne University, Detroit 1, Mich.
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Extract

From the publication of his first signed poem, Paracelsus (1835), Browning thought of himself and was considered by his contemporaries as a dramatic poet. In the preface to this volume he stated, “I do not very well understand what is called a Dramatic Poem,” but Paracelsus has a dramatic form nonetheless. The longest review of the poem was written by John Forster and was entitled “Evidences of a New Genius for Dramatic Poetry—No. I.” William Charles Macready, the leading actor of the London stage, read Paracelsus and recorded in his diary for 7 December 1835: “the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his time.” And from 1835 to the present numerous critics have called him the great dramatic poet of his century. At the same time they have almost unanimously declared him a failure as a dramatist.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 5 , December 1953 , pp. 982 - 991
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 982 note 1 New Monthly Magasine, xlvi (March 1836), 289–308.

page 982 note 2 The Diories of William Charles Macready, ed. William Toynbee (London, 1912), 1, 265.

page 982 note 3 Allardyce Nicoll, British Drama (New York, 1933), p. 319. See also my “Robert Browning's Reputation in the Nineteenth Century in England and America,” Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations (Evanston, 1937), pp. 10–14.

page 982 note 4 Lawrence Barrett produced it 23 times in America, 1884–86, as a labor of love. Louise Greer, Brouning and America (Chapel Hill, 1952), pp. 1955-202.

page 984 note 5 William Clyde DeVane, A Browning Handbook (New York, 1935), p. 68.

page 985 note 6 Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Life and Letteres of Roberi Browning, rev. ed. (Boston), p. 97.

page 985 note 7 John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (London, 194), I, 315.

page 985 note 8 Letters of Robert Browning, ed. Thurman L. Hood (London, 1933), p. 5.

page 986 note 9 Reported by R. H. Horne, who was in the audience. See Edmund W. Gosse, “The Early Writings of Robert Browning,” Century, xxiii (Dec. 1881), 199. A drama critie reported of the first performance, “A few of the audience laughed,” although he may have been referring to the last scene (Athenaeum, 18 Feb. 1843, p. 166). Browning's friend Joseph Arnocld was also present the first night and wrote shortly after that some of the audience in the boxes “took it upon themselves to be shocked at being betrayed into so much interest fro a young woman who behaved so improperly as Mildred.” See Robert Browning and Alfred Domett,ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (New York, 1906), p. 65.

page 986 note 10 Spectator, xvi (18 Feb. 1843), 159.

page 988 note 11 From Morn to Midnight, trans. Ashley Dukes (New York, 1922), p. 54.

page 991 note 12 Letters of Robert Browing and Elisabeth Barreti Barrett (London, 1899), I, 474, 22, 545, 546.