“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.” So vaunts the wealthy Duke of Ferrara in Robert Browning’s famous dramatic monologue, alluding to the young wife whose likeness he captured in a painting before commanding her murder. Cunning, collected, and ruthless, the Duke is a master of nuanced speech and emotions; he controls the pacing of his speech as he does the suspenseful plot that unfolds. As readers, we feel frightened of his machinations but also culpable as unwitting spectators to his understated crime—much like the poor unsuspecting page who brokers the Duke’s next marriage. In many ways, the Duke from “My Last Duchess” looms as a gatekeeper to this book, standing as an imposing presence in Victorian poetry, but also as a symbol of Gothic villainy. He joins the ranks of cruel, unsavory speakers from many nineteenth-century poems, including Tennyson’s “St. Simeon Stylites” and Browning’s 1842 collection, Dramatic Lyrics.

But such memorable villains are not native to nineteenth-century lyrics. More than just a landmark figure in the development of the dramatic monologue, the Duke embodies the Gothic character of the iniquitous patriarch. Here we have an Italian aristocrat who celebrates, with elegance, the expediency of his wife’s murder. He gestures towards the figure of a woman who has been silenced, murdered, and frozen within a frame. His confession takes the form of calculated boasts. He recalls the murderous villains from spectacularly popular Gothic novels of the 1790s, including those by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, from The Mysteries of Udolpho’s evil Count Montoni to Father Schedoni of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. When it comes to the Victorian dramatic monologue, critics have, for the most part, been oblivious to the fact that Gothic villains have been staring us in the face the entire time.