Stefan Hawlin - Böcker

Volume 15 in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning presents poetry Browning wrote in his seventies, his last two volumes: Parleyings (1887) and Asolando (1889). The former is the poet's last sustained meditation on life and on his times, a nine-section credo covering religion, history, poetry, politics, art, and music. Asolando is a coda to his whole oeuvre, a mixture of short love lyrics, historical monologues and anecdotes, light verse, and poems which are quite sui generis, all grouped around the theme of 'fancies and fact'. Both volumes are presented here with previously unknown sources, a wealth of new contextual material, and many textual nuances clarified, giving a fresh view of the last phase of Browning's career. What emerges is a poet more seriously Christian, Protestant, and Liberal than previously supposed, more interested in Britain's destiny and Empire, more enmeshed in the local battles of the 1880s?and a writer of considerable range and wit.

Henry James described Browning's extended dramatic poem The Ring and the Book, over 20,000 lines in length, as `a great living thing', `a proportioned monstrous magnificence'. The story was developed from some old legal documents discovered by Browning concerning an actual murder which took place in Rome in 1698, and its writing was his major preoccupation in the 1860s, the early years of his widowerhood in London. This volume gives us the first third of the poems, Books I to IV. The Introduction draws on unpublished letters, journals, and working papers not examined by previous editors, to illuminate how the poem was conceived and researched, the range of people the poet consulted, and the five-year period of composition. The poem's complex publishing history is disentangled in the Text part of the Introduction, including a discussion of the corrections and revisions Browning made on sheets from volumes I, III, and IV of the second edition, which he later forgot and which never appeared in print. Appendix E gives these important variants in full. The annotation presents new contextual matter, including unpublished letters relating to `Lyric Love', Browning's famous invocation to his dead wife. The appendices give the original Italian text of Browning's second source, `Morte dell'Uxoricida Guido Franceschini Decapitato'; two previously unpublished autograph chronologies in which the poet worked out historical details of his story; and a new account of the biographical significance of the `Ring' image. The editors have made six substantive emendations to the text, ranging from inaccuracies in the original typesetting to changes made by Browning after publication. The evolution of the text from manuscript to copy text is also discussed, and an appendix is devoted to a set of corrected proofs preserved at Yale, a textual evolutionary dead end of great interest and significance.

In old age, Browning always referred people to The Ring and the Book as his finest achievement. This is the second of the three volumes of the Oxford edition presenting this great Italian murder-story, including the monologues of the villain, the aristocrat Guido Franceschini, Pompilia his abused wife, and Caponsacchi, the priest who tries to rescue her from death. The commentary, at the bottom of each page, elucidates Browning's creative and sometimes challenging use of language with reference to his correspondence, his historical sources, and his own rich experience of Italy. Previously unidentified allusions are fully explained, and a newly discovered source from a seventeenth-century Italian chronicle is presented for the first time (in Appendix B), allowing further insight into Browning's engagement with history. The copy text of 1888-9 has numerous emendations to its punctuation, both those authorized by the poet in the last year of his life and those resulting from corrected compositors' errors, and these, combined with fourteen emendations to substantives, produce a text as near as possible to Browning's final intentions.

The Ring and the Book, Browning's 21,000 line epic, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. This is the third, and final, volume of the Oxford edition covering this work, comprising the monologue of Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, and then the glowing conclusion to the work as a whole: the monologues of Pope Innocent XII and of Guido in his prison-cell prior to execution, and then the witty, ironic envoi of Book XII. The commentary in this edition contains a wealth of new contextual material that illuminates Browning's work in sometimes surprising ways. The copy text of 1888-9, the final edition of Browning's lifetime, has been scrupulously examined, both in relation to compositors' errors, and Browning's own final corrections to the text: eighty-nine emendations to accidentals, and nineteen emendations to substantives, produce a text as near as possible to Browning's final intentions. Appendix A presents previously unknown source material, concerning the 'cadaver synod' of 897, from Browning's father's historical notebooks. The Afterword gives a fresh view of the real history of the Franceschini murder case, based on new research in the archives in Arezzo.

Accessibly written throughout, this guidebook covers biographical details, information on the historical and social contexts of Browning's work, an overview of the full range of his work and a survey of the major critical debates surrounding him and his work.