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Page 153 please you, no foot over the threshold of mine!” (ll. 11–12). This disturbing image of the author’s life laid bare obviously troubled Browning, and the poem articulates his plea for personal privacy. Browning begins the conclusion of “House” by again paraphrasing Wordsworth: “‘With this same key/Shakespeare unlocked his heart,’ once more!” (ll. 38–39). In Wordsworth’s poem, the poet suggests that Shakespeare, like many others, has revealed himself in his sonnets. Browning therefore challenges Wordsworth’s assertion, exclaiming, “Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!’’ (l. 40). For if Shakespeare were revealing himself, it would completely undermine Browning’s depiction of Shakespeare as the dramatic, purely objective poet, one central argument in the “Essay on Shelley.” It is clear that Browning refused to equate Shakespeare with any Romantic display of autobiographical poetry, particularly in relation to the sonnets. The debate concerning the homoerotic quality of Shakespeare’s sonnets began to intensify at about the same time as Browning’s “House,” and in part this debate compelled Browning’s more ardent followers to begin disassociating Browning’s image from Shakespeare’s. The controversy had, however, been ongoing for some time. George Stevens, for example, writing on Sonnet 20 in the late eighteenth century, had claimed: “It is impossible to read this fulsome panegyric, addressed to a male object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation” (cited in Pequigney 1985:30). In the very same year that Browning was composing “House,” other writers were delicately distancing both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s works from those of Shakespeare. As Tricia Lootens (1996) has convincingly argued, the Brownings’ marriage came to be considered a kind of corrective to troubling questions regarding sexuality in the last part of the nineteenth century.6 While Browning resisted the biographical reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets— “[i]f so, the less Shakespeare he” —Browning’s contemporaries began to promote him as a more masculine and sanitized bard than Shakespeare himself. Browning’s appropriation of Shakespeare grants him such cultural authority that he begins to crowd Shakespeare himself in the center of the Victorian literary canon. One might even conclude that Browning “out-Shakespeares” Shakespeare by the close of the nineteenth century. A final example of the success of Browning’s Shakespearean appropriation concerns his appointment to the presidency of the New Shakspere [sic] Society in 1879, three years after |
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