Dramatic monologue

Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

POETIC FORMS & GENRES

Dramatic Monologue


MONOLOGUE A monologue is a speech delivered by a

single person. In a play, when a character utters a monologue expressing his or her private thoughts, this is called a soliloquy.

Prosopopaeia: a classical rhetorical device in which a writer uses another person or object to communicate.

Monologues popular in medieval religious verse

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: each tale spoken in a different character's voice.


MONOLOGUE – HISTORY CONT'D

Renaissance and Elizabethan writers such as Marlowe, Drayton and Raleigh all wrote monologues

Restoration and Augustan verse did not much use this form.

Nor did Romantic poets, who tended to write as though they themselves were the speaker.

Robert Browning made the dramatic monologue a popular form in the Victorian Period.


A Lyric Poem implies the speaker is the poet, or a version of the poet.

A Dramatic Lyric has a dramatic situation:

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus,Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school-boys and sour prentices, Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices ;

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

(from Donne, 'The Sun Rising')


ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889) Men and Women (1855) a collection of 51

poems – all but the last one are written in the voice of characters.

E.g. 'Fra Lippo Lippi': in the voice of the 15th century real-life Italian monk and painter, Filippo Lippi

Explores the conflict of a religious life or a life of leisure, and the importance of art and beauty.


FROM FRA LIPPO LIPPI

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!You need not clap your torches to my face.Zooks, what's to blame? You think you see a

monk!What 'tis past midnight, and you go the

rounds,And here you catch me at an alley's endWhere sportive ladies leave their door ajar?


‘...we're made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted - better to us,

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out...’


‘Your hand, sir, and good-bye: no lights, no lights!

The street's hushed, and I know my own way back,

Don't fear me! There's the grey beginning. Zooks!’

[ends]


FROM MY LAST DUCHESS (1842) ‘That's my last duchess painted on the

wall,Looking as if she were alive. I callThat piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's handsWorked busily a day, and there she stands.


M. H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue:

A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment

This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.

The main principle controlling the poet's choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character


The Dramatic Monologue was important for the Victorian poets, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson in particular, and especially Browning, who wrote some of the most well-known Dramatic Monologues in English poetry.

After them, the Modernists of the twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, also used the Dramatic Monologue though often in a more problematised manner.

A decline in certainties from the Romantic

period onwards: the poet is more inclined to examine individual, subjective experience rather than refer to external authority (Robert Langbaum in The Poetry of Experience)


By the early twentieth century, Modernists felt that their culture was fragmented and disintegrating, along with the whole idea of truth

Modernist dramatic monologue deliberately undermines the naturalistic conception of character.

e.g. 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (T. S. Eliot 1917): a distinct character speaking in the poem, or a voice more closely associated with the poet? Some critics have called these sorts of poems 'Mask-lyrics'.


‘LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats 5

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit. ‘


However, there is still a considerable interest in writing what are clearly dramatic monologues among 20thC poets, many of them women.

From 'The Farmer's Bride' (Charlotte Mew, 1916):

‘Three Summers since I chose a maid,

Too young maybe - but more's to do

At harvest-time than bide and woo.

When us was wed she turned afraid

Of love and me and all things human;

Like the shut of a winter's day.

Her smile went out, and 'twasn't a woman--

More like a little, frightened fay.

One night, in the Fall, she runned away. ..’


CAROL ANN DUFFY, 'THE WORLD'S WIFE', 1999

an entire collection made up of dramatic monologues in various female voices (wives or female equivalents of male figures in myth or history).

From 'Mrs. Aesop':

'By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory. He was small,didn't prepossess. So he tried to impress. Dead men,Mrs. Aesop, he'd say, tell no tales. Well, let me tell you

nowthat the bird in his hand shat on his sleeve,never mind the two worth less in the bush. Tedious.'


VICKI FEAVER 'THE HANDLESS MAIDEN' (1994)

Other poets (often but not all women poets) have turned to fable and myth to voice their concerns: Vicki Feaver for example has also written dramatic monologues in the voice of mythical ('The Handless Maiden') and Biblical heroines ('Judith').

‘I cried for my hands

my father cut off; for the lumpy, itching scars

of my stumps; for the silver hands

my husband gave me – that spun and wove

but had no feeling...’

(from 'The Handless Maiden')


In a different monologue, 'Judith', Feaver speaks in the voice of the Old Testament character whose husband was killed in battle and who expresses her anger and grief as she seeks revenge:

'In the end I think I almost became Judith; though I was

obviously ambivalent about this close personal

identification because the early drafts of the poem

veer between a first person voice and a safe, more

distant, third person narration...It is obvious to me now

that the poem was a vehicle for the grief and rage I

was feeling when I wrote it. The story is Judith's but the

emotions are mine'


QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER...

Who is speaking and what is the situation? If there is an 'unseen interlocutor' what is the relationship between speaker and other character(s)?

What does the speaker want from the addressee, if there is one?

Does the speaker change or reveal anything over the course of the monologue?

What do we as readers think about what we hear? Is there a message?

Dramatic monologue

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