R640604B. Dramatis Personæ.

The Examiner, 4 June 1864, p. 360.

Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 340.

The chief book of the week is the new volume of Mr. Browning’s poems, entitled “Dramatis Personæ,” because in each of them the poet speaks, not in his own person, but through some character in the great drama of life, whose nature, history, and present situation have to be inferred from the course of the poem. Each piece in the volume, except that there are three voices in the Epilogue, thus consists entirely of soliloquy, with or without suggestion of dialogue by a reflection of thoughts of a second speaker from the language of the first. An extract from one of the poems has been incidentally given this week in our notice of a pamphlet upon Spirit-Rapping.

Reviewed:

Dramatis Personæ (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1864.

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