Dramatic
monologue
A monologue is a
lengthy speech by a single person. In a play, when a character utters a
monologue that expresses his or her private thoughts, it is called a soliloquy.
Dramatic monologue, however, does not designate a component in a play, but a
type of lyric poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. In its fullest form,
as represented in Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb,”
“Andrea del Sarto,” and many other poems.
The dramatic monologue
has the following features
(1) 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: the Duke is negotiating with an emissary for a second
wife; the Bishop lies dying; Andrea once more attempts wistfully to believe his
wife’s lies.
(2) 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.
(3) 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.
In monologues such as
“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” and “Caliban upon Setebos,” Browning omits
the second feature, the presence of a silent auditor; but features 1 and 3 are
the necessary conditions of a dramatic monologue. The third feature—the focus
on self-revelation—serves to distinguish a dramatic monologue from its near
relation, the dramatic lyric, which is also a monologue uttered in an
identifiable situation at a dramatic moment. John Donne’s “The Canonization”
and “The Flea” (1613), for example, are dramatic lyrics that lack only one
feature of the dramatic monologue: the focus of interest is primarily on the
speaker’s elaborately ingenious argument, rather than on the character he in[1]advertently
reveals in the course of arguing. And although Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
(1798) is spoken by one person to a silent auditor (his sister) in a specific
situation at a significant moment in his life, it is not a dramatic monologue
proper, both because we are invited to identify the speaker with the poet
himself, and because the organizing principle and focus of interest is not the
revelation of the speaker’s distinctive temperament, but the evolution of his
observations, memories, and thoughts toward the resolution of an emotional
problem. Tennyson wrote “Ulysses” (1842) and other dramatic monologues, and the
form has been used by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, E. A.
Robinson, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and other poets of the twentieth century.
The best-known modern instance is T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” (1915).