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Page 155 sympathies into the most diverse individualities” (172). Kirkman concludes that “Browning is our nearest to Shakespeare” (172). James Thomson, at the third meeting, puts Browning in the company of those who “have learned everything and forgotten nothing,” including Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Goethe (239). At the eighth meeting, Hiram Corson, speaking on “The Idea of Personality,” comments: ‘‘the range of thought and passion which [Browning’s poetry] exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a single exception, since the days of Shakspere [sic]” (293). Another similarity between the two authors involves their portrayal of dramatic character. In the notes on Browning’s poems contained in the Society bibliography for 1881, Furnivall suggests that Browning culminated in characterization in that 2nd period, as Shakspere did in his second period Henry IV. But Dramatis Personae and Ring and the Book are greater than Men and Women, as Hamlet is greater than Henry IV. (Browning Society Papers 1966:1:157) At the twenty-fourth meeting, J.Cotter Morrison makes a number of connections between Shakespeare’s Caliban and Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos.” The forty-fourth meeting features a paper entitled “Browning’s Jews and Shakespeare’s Jews.” Arthur Symons ponders the question, “Is Browning Dramatic?,” at the twenty-fourth meeting. In this essay, Symons makes a slight distinction between the two: “Shakspere [sic] makes his characters live; Browning makes his think” (2:6). A respondent disputes even this difference at the eighty-third meeting, arguing that Browning’s characters are as “living and real as Richard the 2nd or Hamlet,” and further concludes that “Shakspere’s [sic] characters seem quite as full of thought as any of the creations of Browning (3:141). There was also a movement to distinguish the two poets from one another, usually at Shakespeare’s expense. E.D.West, as early as the fifteenth meeting of the Browning Society, claimed: Shakspere, innately a positivist, can let any phenomenon be to him as an ultimate fact, which he does not care to go beyond. Browning, born a speculator, cannot and will not forgo the attempt to get at what lies behind the visible things of the world’s order. (1:417) |
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