HILARY FRASERMiller describes this form as "par excellence the literary genre of histori-
cism" i n that "[i]t presupposes a double awareness on the part of its author,
an awareness which is the very essence of historicism." 37 If the epic
proportions of both Sordello and The Ring and the Book may be said to
contest history's conventionally singular and linear narrative, then Brow-
ning's dramatic monologues, in their exploration of human duplicity,
complicate our understanding of the past in other ways. This distinctive
type of poetry reveals that the human subject is constituted by language, a
feature that not only problematizes earlier Romantic assumptions about
the integrated and authentic poetic subject but also ironizes the authorized
version of the past by showing history in the making. Thus we can see
Browning as the inhabitant of an age self-consciously in a state of
transition: a period in which, according to John Stuart Mill, "[m]ankind
have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet acquired
new ones." 38 Browning was fascinated by the idea of history as a series of
transitional moments. To be sure, he and his own contemporaries were
articulate about their sense of suspension between past and future at a
moment of change. Arnold's speaker in "Stanzas from the Grande Char-
treuse" (1855), for example, declares himself to be "Wandering between
two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born, / With nowhere
yet to rest my head" (MA 85-87). But Browning's monologists generally
have little sense of their pivotal place in history. Take, for instance, Fra
Lippo Lippi, the maverick artist of the Italian Renaissance whose name
titles one of the most admired dramatic monologues in Browning's Men
and Women (1855). Lippi presents his apologia for the ingenious dramatic
realism of his pictorial work, just as he remains conscious of generational
differences in taste and skill - of "the old grave eyes /... peeping o'er my
shoulder as I work" (RB 231-32) and the opportunities to be enjoyed by
future painters: "Oh, oh," he exclaims, "It makes me mad to see what men
shall do / And we in our graves!' (312-13). But as dawn breaks over Lippi's
quattrocento Florence ("There's the grey beginning. Zooks!" he cries
[392]), the reader knows, as the painter does not, that this moment heralds
a significant new phase in Renaissance art.
Such poems brilliantly demonstrate an ability to make history live.
Herbert F. Tucker argues that "they enact the reciprocation of historicist
desire, whereby the reader's backward yearning to know the past feelingly
meets the historical agent's projective will to survive into the future." 39
This is nowhere more dazzlingly the case than in "The Bishop Orders His
Tomb at St Praxed's Church" (1845), spoken by an outrageously corrupt
sixteenth-century Bishop of Rome. Focused as he is on his rivalry with his
predecessor "Old Gandolf" (17), and imagining the figure he will cut in
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