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8
The Shakespeareanization of Robert Browning

ROBERT SAWYER

In June of 1879, Robert Browning appeared as a witness in a libel hearing. A freelance editor, who was suing The Athenaeum for damages, charged that the magazine had committed slander by referring to him as a “literary vampire” for his republication of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry without her family’s permission. As Browning stepped into the witness box, the defense counsel, Mr. Parry, decided to forgo the custom of asking the witness to identify himself. Instead, Parry announced, “I need not ask who you are; I would as soon ask William Shakespeare.” According to the Daily Telegraph, Browning ceremoniously “bowed’’ and confessed, “I have been before the public for some years now” (16 June 1879:2).

For at least twenty years prior to this court appearance, Robert Browning had carefully manipulated his public image in order to borrow Shakespeare’s cultural authority for his works. After his much-maligned attempts at Shelleyan subjective poetry in the 1840s, Browning began a public relations campaign to link his name and work with Shakespeare’s.1 His “Essay on Shelley” (1852) represents Browning’s first successful attempt in this enterprise, and his poem “House” (1876) signals one of the last. In the years between publication of these two works, many critics of the mid-Victorian era begin to speak of Browning’s work in Shakespearean terms.

By combining reception study with close reading, and by considering the cultural context of the mid-Victorian period, I will show

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