Browning and the Dramatic MonologueCurry, S. S. (Samuel Silas)
History
Browning and the Dramatic Monologue
Curry, S. S. (Samuel Silas)
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889 -- Criticism and interpretation; Dramatic monologues -- History and criticism
The presentation of a play or of a monologue is its fulfilment, its
completion, expressing more fully the conceptions which were in the mind
of the writer himself, though with the individuality and the true personal
realization of another artist. No two Hamlets have ever been alike, nor
ever can be alike, unless one of the two is an imitation of the other.
Dramatic art implies two artists,--the writer, who gives broad outlines
and suggestions; and the living, sympathetic dramatic interpreter, who
realizes and completes the creation. The author creates a poem and puts it
into words, and the vocal interpreter then gives it life.
A true vocal interpretation of the monologue, as of the play, does not
require the changing of one word or syllable used by the author. It is the
supplying of the living languages.
Words and actions are complemental languages. Verbal expression is more or
less intellectual. It can be recorded. It names ideas and pictures. It is
composed of conventional symbols, and only when the words are understood
by another mind can it suggest a true sequence of ideas and events. Vocal
expression, however, shows the attitude of the mind of the man towards
these ideas. Words are objective symbols of ideas. The modulations of the
voice reveal the process of thinking and feeling. The word, then, in all
cases, implies the living voice. It is but an external form: the voice
reveals the life. Action shows, possibly, even more than tones do, the
character of the man, his relations, his "bearings," his impressions or
points of view.
These three languages are, accordingly, living witnesses. One of them is
not complete, strictly speaking, without the others, and the artistic
rendering of a monologue is simply taking the objective third which the
author gives, and which can be printed, and supplying the subjective
two-thirds which the imagination of the reader must create and realize
from the author's suggestion.
All printed language is but a part of one of these three languages, which
belong together in an organic unity. In the very nature of the case, the
better the writing, the greater the suggestion of the modulations of
voice and body. The highest literature is that which suggests life itself,
and a living man has a beaming eye, a smiling face, a moving body, and a
voice that modulates with every change in idea and feeling. No process has
ever been able to record the complexity of these natural languages. Their
co-ordination depends upon dramatic instinct.
As the play always implies dramatic action, as the mind must picture a
real scene and the characters must move and speak as animated beings
before there can be the least appreciation of its nature as a play, so the
monologue also implies and suggests a real scene or moment of human life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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