Robert Browning's Dramatic Monologues

  BROWNING’S DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE   Robert Browning had a special bent for drama. He wrote many plays but they could not be as successful as his poetry was. Drama is essentially a representation of action but in Browning’s plays, the action was entirely internal. He laid emphasis on soul study, introspection and psychological analysis and so his plays faced failure on stage. But optimistic Browning did not feel dejected. He reduced the size of the plays and wrote dramatic monologues which turned to a great success.   It is true that he did not invent this genre but Hugh Walker’s remarks are quite worth quoting here;   “He made it specially his own and no one else has ever put such a rich and varied material into it.”   The dramatic monologue is dramatic because it is the utterance of a imaginary characters and not of the poet himself. In dramatic monologue, the characters do not develop through any description on the part of the poet but through a conflict between the op