The dramatic monologuedramas," "mask lyric," and "monodrama." 11 And yet, as Tucker wisely
remarks, " 'Dramatic monologue' is a generic term whose practical useful-
ness does not seem to have been impaired by the failure of literary
historians and taxonomists to achieve consensus in its definition." 12
Indeed, these distinctions have their clear uses. As Alastair Fowler reminds
us, "to decide the genre of a work, then, our aim is to discover its
meaning." 13 What, then, might be the use of a generic term, and specifi-
cally, how does the umbrella term "dramatic monologue" contribute to our
reading of these poems?
Among the finest descriptions of the form remains Arthur Henry
Hallam's 1831 pronouncement, which actually predates the prototypical
examples of the Victorian dramatic monologue produced by Tennyson and
Browning soon thereafter. In a review of Alfred Tennyson's early work, the
friend who would become the subject of Tennyson's great elegy In
Memoriam (1850) wrote, "we contend that it is a new species of poetry, a
graft of the lyric on the dramatic, and Mr. Tennyson deserves the laurel of
an inventor." 14 While the dramatic monologue was seen even in its time as
a new literary form, however, it was not without multiple precedents.
Culler suggests that its origins lie in the classical rhetorical form of
prosopopoeia, or impersonation, while Benjamin Fuson recalls us to Ovid's
Heroides (a series of verse letters from mythical heroines to their lovers), as
well as the long line of precursors within the English literary tradition,
from Geoffrey Chaucer to Felicia Hemans, the early-nineteenth-century
poet. (Hemans is herself often credited with inaugurating the century's use
of this form, in her 1828 collection Records of Woman. 15 ) But it never-
theless appears that the dramatic monologue as we now know it derives
prominently if not exclusively from the work of Tennyson and Browning,
and is one of the few literary genres whose first instances we can date. In
early November 1833, Tennyson read "St. Simeon Stylites," the first of its
kind, to a group of friends, while Browning was first in print, publishing
"Porphyria's Lover" and "Johannes Agricola in Meditation" in the Monthly
Repository in January 1836. At the time the poets did not know each other,
and cannot have known of their concurrent experimentation with what
was to become a new genre.
It is instructive to remember, however, that the term "dramatic mono-
logue" did not attain currency until late in the nineteenth century;
Browning, the foremost practitioner of the genre, appears never himself t o
have employed the phrase. 16 Intermediary terms used by poets, often as
titles for collections, such as "Dramatic Lyrics," "Dramatic Romances,"
"Dramatic Idylls," "Dramatic Studies," "Dramatis Personae," as well as
"Monodrama," indicate their own attempts to place and even to formalize
69