Browning has, in these few lines, with delicate and curious skill, given us first the Renaissance atmosphere, a mixture of culture and refinement, delight in art and beauty, with immorality and crime; he has suggested to us the characters of the two actors in the drama from which this poem is but a fragment, the polished and cynical Duke and the girl who is sacrificed to his position and wealth; he has even suggested the mixture of deference, loathing, and fear with which the envoy listens to the Duke's description. There are anatomists who from a single bone of any animal will construct the whole skeleton; and so from this scrap which Browning has here given us we can construct the complete drama. The poem is, as I have remarked, typical of a whole class of Browning's poetry. These poems are usually called _dramatic monologues_, but perhaps the title given to them by Stopford Brooke is on the whole more suggestive. He calls them _imaginative representations_. These poems are, in the first place, the utterance of one person, at a single time, and in one place. Some individual is influenced or induced by some unusual opportunity or circumstance to reveal himself. The veil which conceals his inmost heart is lifted for a moment and we get a glimpse into its depths. They have a certain dramatic element. Browning himself styled this poem a _dramatic romance_. They are dramatic in that they are objective as regards the author; the poet is not uttering his own thoughts. The circumstances under which the monologue is spoken are usually dramatic (_i.e._, such as a playwright might choose to bring out some trait of character), the background, scenery, and even the action is vividly suggested, and there are usually subsidiary figures whose attitude towards the central actor is carefully indicated. The chief point to notice about these poems is that the poet studies not merely an individual as such, the working out of passion in a single soul, but he takes that individual as a type of some special period, some phase of historical development, some special era of thought. It was Browning's way of using history for poetical purposes, and it was completely his own. This poem is not a very good example, because the personages and events described are not peculiar to any one epoch, but may occur wherever there are two people unhappily married. But even here we have in the Duke not only an intensely interesting, even if objectionable, type of human being, but the concentrated essence of a certain side of the Italian Renaissance.