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Page 148 King Lear and the wise Fool in the play who knows much more than the “blind” Lear or Gloucester. The impossibility of a single interpretation may be suggested by Roland’s lines preceding the conclusion, when the speaker seems to challenge the reader: “Solve it you!” (l. 167). Still, the blowing of Roland’s horn recalls the scene in Act 5 of Lear in which Edgar appears on the “third sound of the trumpet” (5.3.113) to reclaim his real identity and to triumph over his evil brother Edmund in battle. Further, Roland’s lines ‘‘I saw them and knew them all” (l. 202), coming as they do in the last stanza, signal a new perspective, whether it be the recognition of death or the emergence of a new empathy with mankind, or both. In “Childe Roland” Browning achieves the dramatic vision of his own construction of the objective Shakespeare. Browning stated later that “Childe Roland came upon me as a kind of dream. I had to write it, then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe. But it was simply that I had to do it” (cited in De Vane 1955:229). Not only does Browning suggest that his Shakespearean appropriation had entered his unconscious, but he also may be thinking of Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest (a play from which he would soon substantially borrow), which describes life as “such stuff/As dreams are made on; and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156–58). Thus, not only literary composition, but also life may be no more than a mere dream, or in Childe Roland’s case, a disturbing nightmare. In focusing on Childe Roland’s replication of Lear’s journey from blindness to self-knowledge, Browning’s poem focuses on the drama of “men among men,” prefiguring a strain of humanist criticism that focuses on the heroic journey toward enlightenment of Shakespeare’s “great” tragic heroes.5 Only a hint of the unconscious, the nightmare recognition of life’s insubstantial status, disturbs the careful and complete delineation of Roland’s quest and growing awareness of the human condition. The relation between the objective poet’s subordination to the world and the subjective poet’s assertion of self coheres less smoothly, ironically enough, in the later poem “Caliban.” A second way to claim Shakespearean authority and yet ward off notions of influence is to write what today would be called a prequel. Long before materialist and postcolonialist critics attended to his situation, “Caliban upon Setebos” portrays the Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the moments before the play begins. Hence, Browning inverts the idea of literary authority by turning Shakespeare into Browning’s literary heir. The intertextual struggle between |
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