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Paracelsus Once Again: A Study in Imagery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
Nobody will again consider Paracelsus “the work that posterity will probably estimate as Browning's greatest.” Too much critical attention has elucidated its shortcomings. Nonetheless, the amount of comment that it has provoked indicates its importance in Browning's canon. Most of this comment deals with Browning's theme; much deals exclusively with the relation between Paracelsus and Aprile; and a few commentators have attempted to evaluate the place of Paracelsus in Browning's artistic evolution. But, surprisingly, outside of C. Willard Smith's provocative but narrowly-focused study of the star-imagery in Paracelsus and a few passing comments by J. Hillis Miller, William O. Raymond, and F. S. Boas, little attention has concentrated on imagery in the drama. Park Honan, perhaps overly evaluating the drama by the light of Browning's later achievement, says that “one feels again and again its almost total irrelevance to character” and refers to it as “superfluous adornment.” However, tracing several of the image patterns of Paracelsus through their development and seeing how they interweave illustrates that imagery plays a functional role in integrating form, character portrayal, and theme, thereby throwing additional light on Browning's artistry.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975
References
NOTES
1. Berdoe, Edward, The Browning Cyclopaedia, 8th ed. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1916), p. 322.Google Scholar
2. Browning's Star-Imagery: The Study of a Detail in Poetic Design (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 16–42.Google Scholar
3. Miller, , The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 98Google Scholar; Raymond, , “‘The Jewelled Bow’: A Study in Browning's Imagery and Humanism,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 70 (1955)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, rpt. in Drew, Philip, ed., Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 115Google Scholar; Boas, , “Robert Browning's ‘Paracelsus,’” Quarterly Review, 265 (1935), 291–93.Google Scholar
4. Browning's Characters: A Study in Poetic Technique (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 25.Google Scholar
5. This comparison was suggested by Preyer, Robert, “Robert Browning: A Reading of the Early Narratives,” English Literary History, 26 (1959), 542–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I do not intend to suggest that Browning was a forerunner of Wagner; the point of this comparison is to throw light on Browning's technique.
6. Paracelsus, I.390–91, in The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. King, Roma A. Jr. (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1969), Vol. 1.Google Scholar This edition of Paracelsus, edited by Morse Peckham, is hereafter cited in the text.
7. This discussion is indebted to Preyer.
8. This interpretation, which deviates quite widely from the usual comment on the passage, is indebted to Priestley, whose paper on the dramatic irony in Paracelsus throws much light on the relation between Aprile and Paracelsus. See his “The Ironic Pattern of Browning's Paracelsus,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 34 (1964), 68–81.Google Scholar