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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the same sense that Dante's great poem can be said to derive its meaning from a Catholic, and Milton's from a Protestant, ethos—so Browning's The Ring and the Book derives its meaning from the relativist ethos predominant in Western culture since the Enlightenment. The first sign of the poem's relativism is in Browning's use of dramatic monologues to tell his story. For though he does not entirely succeed, his aim at least in telling the same story eleven times over through ten dramatic monologues and his own account in Book i, was to replace the objective view of events of traditional drama and narrative with points of view. Such a method can be justified only on the relativist assumption that truth cannot be apprehended in itself but must be “induced” from particular points of view, and that there can be sufficient difference among the points of view to make each repetition interesting and important as a psychological fact.
1 I shall quote by Book and line number from Volumes v and vi of the Centenary edition of Browning's Works (London, 1912).
2 See “Molinos and the Molinists,” Appendix viii of A. K. Cook's A Commentary Upon Browning's “The Ring and the Book” (London, 1920).
3 Quoted in Betty Miller, Robert Browning: A Portrait (London, 1952), p. 231.
4 Henry James, who saw a point-of-view novel in The Ring and the Book, considers dropping the Pope from his hypothetical novelized version—“as too high above the whole connection functionally and historically for us to place him within it dramatically” (“The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book’,” in Notes on Novelists, London, 1914, p. 316).