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society at large, Browning came to represent a more decorous, less coarse Shakespeare, a Victorianized Bard. Shakespeare was a bit vulgar for some Victorian tastes. Emily Hickey, for example, read Browning’s poetry in part because her father absolutely forbade her to read Shakespeare (Peterson 1969:17). Unlike Shakespeare and his “unwholesome” sonnets, Browning and his works begin to symbolize the perfect, “normal” heterosexual poet. Further, Browning becomes an antidote to the ‘‘femininity” of French writers and English poets such as A.C.Swinburne and the vestiges of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Furnivall believed that a “poet should be strong, manly, unpretentious, and Browning was all these” (Peterson 1969:26). And Furnivall was not alone. Another prominent member of the Society, the poet James Thomson, had praised Browning as a poet “[w]ith a masculine soul for passion, a masculine intellect for thought, and a masculine genius for imagination” (Browning Society Papers 1966: 1:247). Browning himself seems to have bought partly into this idea; a letter to Isa Blagden appears particularly revealing:

Yes, —I have read Rossetti’s poems…you know I hate the effeminacy of his school, —the men that dress up like women—that use obsolete forms, too, and archaic accentuations to seem soft… Swinburne started this with other like Belialisms.

(Browning 1951:336)7

Anxiety over homosexuality was beginning to spread in England at this time, and Browning, because of his highly publicized union with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, represented a safer, more traditional, “saintly” poet than even Shakespeare.

By 1888, Browning societies in Britain and America were growing in popularity, sometimes at the expense of Shakespearean study groups. One writer in America observed that “the Shakespeare clubs have been gradually elbowed to the wall” by the Browning societies (Hersey 1890:543). Browning’s literary reputation was also “elbowing” Shakespeare out of the center of the Victorian literary canon, as he becomes the nineteenth-century equal of Shakespeare. This movement results at least in part from Browning’s appropriation of Shakespeare, which begins with the “Essay on Shelley” and continues through the poem “House.” As early as the “Introductory Address” to the Browning Society, Kirkman had stated that while Browning and Shakespeare are equal in thought and reason, “[i]n knowledge of many things [Browning] is necessarily superior to Shakespeare as being the receptive child of the century of science

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