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and travel” (Browning Society Papers 1966:1:172). In essence, Browning’s Shakespearean appropriation worked all too well. Like the sacred literary monument of Shakespeare, Browning was likewise sanctified as a poet-saint of England. By the close of the century, Browning becomes even more Shakespearean than Shakespeare himself, so that pseudo-religious Bardolatry gives way to even more infectious “Browning Fever.”
Notes
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Browning modeled his first poetic attempts on the Romantic notion of subjectivity, particularly Shelleyan subjectivism—introverted, personal, prophetic. Browning’s first poem, “Pauline” (1833), was panned by most critics for its confessional mode. The most famous example is the unpublished review by John Stuart Mill. Mill was preparing a rather negative critique for Tait’s Magazine when another review appeared first; consequently, Mill returned his copy of the poem to Browning with scathing comments scribbled in the margins. Mill wrote that Browning’s fictional hero-narrator (and perhaps Browning himself) was “possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being” (cited in Maynard 1977: 43). The reading public must have felt the same, for no copies of the original printing were sold.
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Ross Murfin calls the “Essay’’ a part of Browning’s work that has been “scandalously ignored” (1978:3). Irvine and Honan hyperbolically refer to the piece as a “history not so much of Shelley’s poetry as of Browning’s soul” (1974:285). Park Honan claims that the piece is Browning’s “most important prose work” (1964:31).
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All citations of Robert Browning’s poetry refer to line numbers rather than page numbers in Robert Browning (1997), Adam Roberts (ed.).
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All references to King Lear are to the conflated version in the Norton Shakespeare.
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For a good example of a critical analysis that traces Lear’s gradual “self-discovery,” see Jorgensen 1967.
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See Lootens 1996, which articulates this point concerning the Brownings’ marriage.
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