High Grade Analysis of My Last Duchess

In this video, we cover:

• Context & The Epigraph (Ferrara): Why Browning uses the Italian Renaissance setting to critique Victorian gender expectations and explore male insecurity.

• The Dramatic Monologue & The Unreliable Narrator: How the Duke's attempts to present his wife as inappropriately flirtatious raise red flags for the reader.

• Ekphrastic Poetry & Art as Control: The symbolic significance of keeping the Duchess painted directly on the wall and hidden behind a curtain that only the Duke is allowed to draw.

• Indirect Expressions of Power: Analysing how the Duke masks aggressive imperatives behind polite, well-mannered interrogatives ("Will’t please you sit and look at her?").

• The List of Gifts & The 900-Years-Old Name: How the Duke's disdainful litotes and petty insults expose his fury that the Duchess valued simple natural pleasures—like a bough of cherries or the sunset—the same as his aristocratic pedigree.

• "I Choose Never to Stoop": The Duke's refusal to converse with or "lesson" his wife, viewing any mutual communication as lowering himself.

• The Sinister Climax: Unpacking the terrifying causality behind "I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together" through the use of caesura, end-stopping, and euphemism.

• The Envoy & The Hidden Motive: The structural twist where we discover the listener is an emissary arranging the Duke's next marriage, revealing the entire monologue as an indirect threat.

• Neptune Taming a Sea-Horse: The final mythological bronze statue serving as a chilling metaphor for the Duke’s need to dominate women, ending on the selfish final word: "me."

Timestamps

• 0:00 – Understanding the Context: Ferrara, the Renaissance, and Victorian Society

• 5:16 – Analysing the Title & "My Last Duchess"

• 8:45 – Ekphrastic Poetry & The Painting on the Wall

• 10:52 – Name-Dropping Frà Pandolf & Status

• 12:18 – Imperatives Masked as Interrogatives

• 14:05 – The Unreliable Narrator & The Curtain

• 18:40 – The "Spot of Joy" & The Duke's Sexual Insecurities

• 22:00 – Controlled Speech vs. Spontaneity & Rhyming Couplets

• 24:00 – The List of Gifts: Favor, Cherries, & The White Mule

• 31:25 – The "900-Years-Old Name" & Aristocratic Pride

• 33:30 – "Who'd Stoop to Blame This Sort of Trifling?"

• 37:45 – "I Choose Never to Stoop" & Communication as Weakness

• 38:40 – "I Gave Commands": Caesura, Pauses, and Euphemism

• 41:15 – The Structural Reveal: The Count's Envoy & The Dowry

• 43:40 – Neptune Taming a Sea-Horse & The Final Metaphor

• 46:20 – Summary: Voiceless Women & Browning's Moral Critique

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There are also study materials on the site that can help with this IGCSE:

• Fiction Technique Bank: An extensive revision toolkit outlining key linguistic and structural devices, complete with explanations and model examples to show you how to analyse writer's craft rather than just spotting techniques.

• Unlocking Shakespeare: A complete student guide packed with practical reading strategies, contextual breakdowns, and methods to decode Early Modern English without getting stuck in the language.

• Still I Rise Teaching PowerPoint: A fully resourced, line-by-line slide deck exploring form, structure, poetic devices, and historical context for focused study or revision.

• Poetry Technique Bank: A dedicated guide designed specifically to master poetic form, metre, rhyme schemes, and structural choices across both seen anthology and unseen poetry questions.

Lesson Transcript

0:00 – Understanding the Context: Ferrara, the Renaissance, and Victorian Society

I'm not going to front, I love this poem and I'm really looking forward to teaching it to you. I appreciate that this can feel like a challenging poem because it's old, so it's got quite an archaic writing style, but don't worry. I'm going to make sure you know not just how to analyze this, but how to understand it, cuz of course that's step one, right? You need to understand what the poem is saying to be able to then analyze it. I am though going to start with a little bit of analysis because it help helps put this poem into context and help helps us understand the key themes behind it. The bit of analysis I want to do is this epigraph. Now this is referring to a real event. Ferrera is alluding to the Duke of Ferrera, who was a Duke in the Italian Renaissance, which is in like the 1550s. And he, when he was 24, married a girl when she was 13, and then she died died when she was 16 in mysterious circumstances. So this poem is based on that idea, and it's told from the perspective of the Duke of Ferrera. And so one of the things we have to understand is why Browning is doing that.

One of the big themes of this poem is exploring the power of men and women. At first it's going to seem like women are presented as powerful because of their beauty and sexuality and how they can control men with that. However, what we are going to realize actually is no, women are powerless in the face of men who are obsessed with power and dominating over women, which they feel they have to because of gender expectations. Today we'd probably call that toxic masculinity, but I would avoid using that phrase when you write essays about this poem. So even if that helps you to process and understand what this poem is about, I don't recommend using that phrase. Instead, talk about the concept of gender expectations around male domination: men needing to be the ones in control and be the ones with power, particularly over women, but also over other men, and how that leads men some men to being possessive, controlling, jealous, and just obsessed with status and power.

Now this poem was not written in the Italian Renaissance. It's set there, but it's not written then; it was written in the Victorian era. And Robert Browning, I would argue, as one of one of the original male feminists, because he was really aware of this this awful attitude towards women that some men had, and the way that society at large was often obsessed with, you know, women being objects and men needing to control and possess them. That's definitely even though he set his poem in the Italian Renaissance, the ideas he's looking at are very relevant to the Victorian England he's writing in. So in a way, he's making a criticism of his his contemporary society. If that is the case though, why set it with the Duke of Ferrero in the Italian Renaissance? And I have two thoughts on this. The first is basing it around a real guy and a a real event gives the poem a realism, and Robert Browning does really want to make this poem feel realistic. We see that as well with the fact that it's in a dramatic monologue, and it's trying to feel very much like a real person speaking. That being said, what I think setting in the Italian Renaissance allows is for the reader to have sufficient distance to not feel like it is a direct criticism, and therefore focus on feeling defensive, and actually perhaps allows more for reflection on men and women and the power dynamics between them, and more of a reflection of: huh, I wonder to what extent this also applies today, rather than Browning really forcing it of yeah, this is true of today and making people feel on the defense because they're being attacked. So this epigraph, even though it is one word, is really really important to our understanding of the poem.

The other thing I want to address just before we go into the main poem itself is the actual title. Now I'm not a big fan of analyzing titles before you've done the main poem, because I think really often the depth of meaning behind a title doesn't become clear until you've gotten into the poem itself, and I think that's definitely true here. But I think it's still worth looking at what is Browning sort of suggesting at before we've even begun.

5:16 – Analysing the Title & "My Last Duchess"

So in "My Last Duchess," there's clearly a focus on the speaker, which we are going to come to recognize is reflective of his possessive personality and how obsessed he is with himself self rather than his partner. And so we've got the very aptly named possessive pronoun. We've then got the fact that he refers his wife via her title of Duchess, and that is going to reflect what we're going to see going through the poem of his obsession with status and wealth. I think it also reflects their relationship in terms of a a distance between them; there is not an intimacy or closeness here, and thus they refer or certainly he refers to her with more formal title. This technique I would talk about the mode of a dress: the name he chooses to refer to his wife. He could have called her like, you know, my last sweet cheeks, my last baby cakes, my last honey bunny, but he does not. He calls her my last Duchess, and that focus on the status and wealth that she had by virtue of being married to him is really significant in helping us get an insight into this character.

And then finally, you've got the fact that it's his last Duchess. Now one of the key things about this Duke via the dramatic monologue, we are gaining a psychological insight into his character. That is the point of a dramatic monologue: gaining psychological insight into a character. But we don't figure him out straight away. Browning really cleverly sort of trickles his personality, and what at first appears to be a high status, well-mannered, respectable gentleman, by the end of the poem is a monster. That being said, Browning creates a sort of sinister undertone, that potential for darkness from the very beginning, and this "last Duchess" is one of the ways that he does that. So the reason I think there's a slightly sinister undertone to this adjective is because at the beginning of the poem, we're not sure which kind of of last he means. Does he mean last as in that is the last wife I will ever have, and therefore perhaps there could be a tone of sort of sadness and love and fondness? Or does he mean last as that was my last one and now here's my other one, in which case there's a real feeling of her lacking importance to him, a feeling of her just being another one, an objectification? Really really different meaning. And right at the start, certainly from the title, certainly in the case of the first line, we don't know which one it is. We are going to realize as the poem goes on, it's absolutely the objectification um and the fact that he just sees women as just another object he possesses. We're absolutely going to get to that, but we don't have it right at the beginning. The ambiguity in this poem is really important because it's part of how Browning is creating that sort of facade of respectability that a lot of toxic behaviors hide behind.

8:45 – Ekphrastic Poetry & The Painting on the Wall

And in fact, one more thing before we go into—I swear we're actually going to get into the poem in a minute, but one more thing before we do. I think it's worth pointing out that this is an ekphrastic poem. Now that means that it's a poem about art, and of course the art in this case is of the Duchess. And the reason I think that's important is because we're literally talking about a possession; it's simultaneously a person and a possession. And I think the blending of those two things in the form of art is reflective of the Duke's attitude towards women more generally as being beautiful objects, just like a piece of art. I also think it's important because there is an element to this poem that's looking at the power of art: the power of art to capture who we are in perhaps a reliable and unreliable way, and I'll come back to that idea when we get to the section of the poem about the Duchess and the painting of her. To what extent is art symbolic of who we are, I think is something you could say this poem is looking at as well.

But we're actually going to get into the poem now, finally. So the first thing the Duke says is: "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive." Coming back to our ekphrastic poetry, the painting being on the wall is symbolically significant, because of course if it's on the wall, it can never be sold, it can never be bought. It's a permanent fixture, which represents, which symbolizes the control that our Duke has over the art and, by extension, the Duchess. "Looking as if she were alive"—so this line is very ambiguous again. Is that praise to the quality of the art? It's so good you'd think she was actually there in front of you. Or is it sinister? Is he really wanting to remind us she dead? We don't know yet; we will know it's the latter.

10:52 – Name-Dropping Frà Pandolf & Status

"I call that piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands / Worked busily a day, and there she stands." Fra Pandolf is significant. What our Duke is doing here is name-dropping. I wouldn't recommend using the phrase "name-dropping" in an essay, but you could talk about the boastful tone where he's talking about people of power that he knows. So the reason this would be significant: "Fra" is like friar, so we're dealing with a monk, a painter monk. If you can get a painter monk, who should be painting scenes from the Bible, to paint your wife, that says something about the power and status you hold. Kind of like the difference between if you've got a portrait painted of yourself and it was painted by your nan versus painted by Picasso. Who paints you says a lot about how important you are. Again, power of art and how it reflects our status in society. So this boastful tone—he wants the person he's speaking to know he's important, he can get important people to paint his wife. Now we don't know who he's speaking to yet. I'm not going to talk about that yet, I'm going to talk about that later cuz it's going to be really important later, but for now we don't know who he is speaking to.

12:18 – Imperatives Masked as Interrogatives

"Will't please you sit and look at her?" Now what's really interesting about the way this man speaks is his indirect expressions of power. Do you think when he says to you, would you like to sit and look at her, do you think you can say no to this man? No, you don't say no to this man. So it's imperatives masked as interrogatives, and this is part of Browning creating that facade of respectability. The interrogatives is the well-mannered, polite means of communication, and yet there is still a subtle power behind it.

14:05 – The Unreliable Narrator & The Curtain

He then says: "I said 'Fra Pandolf' by design, for never read / Strangers like you that pictured countenance." Translation: I told you who painted it on purpose, because basic, not very educated people like you would not have been able to ever see something like this before. So what we've got here is two kinds of tones: an insulting tone where you are insulting someone based on their lack of status compared to our Duke, but also a tone of superiority—I am better than you. So what Browning is establishing is we've got a man here who likes to exert his power, make sure people know he is the important one here, not them. That of course is something really important for him to foreground considering what he's about to tell us about his wife.

What Browning is doing is, in the way that the Duke treats the person he's speaking to, we come to question the reliability of what he says about his wife. And I'll keep coming back to this as we see it happening, but the concept of the unreliable narrator is really important here. Our Duchess is going to be portrayed in a particular way, but we're not going to fully trust it because of the way the Duke himself is behaving in this dramatic monologue. The way that he speaks about his wife as well as the way that he speaks to the person that he's talking to, it raises some red flags, if you will, for us as the reader. It means that Browning is creating cracks in that facade of respectability and beginning to reveal more of the awful behavior behaviors of our Duke behind it.

18:40 – The "Spot of Joy" & The Duke's Sexual Insecurities

So he tells um the person he's speaking to that these, you know, uneducated people like him have never seen a picture this amazing, have never seen the "depth and passion of its earnest glance." More ambiguity in this line. Is this a compliment to his wife? It seems on one hand like a compliment. Arguably "depth," "passion," and "earnest" could be seen as laudatory adjectives suggesting that she is someone intense and complex. I would say there's actually a semantic field of complexity within those three words: "depth," "passion," "earnest." However, what the Duke is about to point out is the question around what has caused this look in her. Because he says—I'm going to jump down a couple lines right now: "seemed as they would ask me, if they durst" (that means dared), "how such a glance came there." He then says: "Sir, 'twas not / Her husband's presence only, called that spot / Of joy into the Duchess' cheek." In other words, that look, "depth and passion"—if we think about passion also connoting perhaps romance, it has sexual connotations to it. And therefore what the Duke is saying is she didn't just look at her husband in a sexual manner. So this could also be not a compliment to his wife whatsoever, but actually him pointing out that what the art has captured is her flirtatious ways that she had towards men that she shouldn't have. So this is where we're getting our suggestion at womanly power via her sexuality. There is a power I think connoted in "depth" and "earnestness," but at the same time there is not a power suggested by "glance." "Glance" connotes more of a hesitancy, a feeling that you can't dwell on something for too long, an uncertainty perhaps. So maybe it's a power that she had, but he is implying via "glance" that she tried to keep it more subtle and hidden. Again, a sort of insult against her character by making her seem like someone who is maybe manipulative, not really showing who she really was.

Here's where our unreliable narrator part though cleverly comes in, because if I go back to those lines I jumped before: "since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I." What this reveals for us, what this parentheses (that's the name for the brackets), what this little extra detail reveals is a lot about the Duke rather than his wife. Because what we realize is he has kept this painting on this wall, he has kept it covered by a curtain, and he is saying to this person he's speaking to: the only person allowed to move this curtain is me. That is the ultimate symbol of the control he has over his Duchess. So while he seems to be trying to suggest she is the one with the sort of manipulative power, the parenthesis tells us he has manipulative power.

That manipulative power is also reflected in how euphemistic his speech is: "that spot of joy." We see that in this bit where he says: "perhaps Fra Pandolf chanced to say, 'Her mantle laps / Over my lady's wrist too much'." What he means there: mantle is like a sort of overcoat that somebody's wearing, so it laps over her wrist too much. What he is imagining—what the Duke is imagining—is that the friar said to the Duchess, essentially, to put it crudely: show us some skin. Oh snap, I know it seems like wrist is sexual skin, but again we're dealing with Browning writing in Victorian England when exposing your ankle was considered sexy. So yes, the revealing of a wrist, a bit of arm, would be considered a more more sexual gesture. So what our Duke is suggesting about this painting—obviously we can't see the painting, but he's reflecting on what the person he's speaking to can see—is that our Duchess must be dressed in a more sexually alluring way. Don't get that twisted with like modern standards of dressed in a sexually alluring way where like she's in her underwear; think more Italian Renaissance Victorian standards of sexually alluring way where you can see her wrist. And also that there is a "faint / Half-flush that dies along her throat." That is euphemistic, referring to perhaps her being sexually aroused because of that idea of like when you um are romantically interested in someone you get that sort of blush um, and with it being in her throat as well, it's like she's getting a little bit all hot under the collar, as they say these days. So he is implying that the painter was well aware when he painted her of the sort of sexual undertones of our Duchess, and that he encouraged her to create them with the whole moving mantle. So what our Duke is suggesting—again, our unreliable narrator who is imagining this scenario—is that both painter and painted were complicit in engaging in inappropriate behavior.

What he then says was: "Such stuff was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough / For calling up that spot of joy." In other words, when the Duchess has heard Friar Pandolf say these things to her, rather than being like, whoa, back off guy, I'm married to a Duke, he's the best, I have no interest in you, she's like, oh thank you, thank you so much, as he's like complimented by it. And the Duke obviously disapproves of that: you shouldn't be liking another man noticing your sexuality in any way, that's that's not appropriate. I think we get his disapproval in the phrase "she thought." You know, he's putting it on her, and his imagining of this situation, the way he tells this story, the dialogue he gives to our friar and then his imagining of his wife's thought process, very much places a uh blame on both of them for behaving inappropriately.

22:00 – Controlled Speech vs. Spontaneity & Rhyming Couplets

He then confirms this by saying: "She had / A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad." I want to start by talking about that interrogative there: "how shall I say?" If you look at how long our Duke has been speaking up to this point, he's been going on a bit, as have I perhaps! But anyway, there is a really clever way that he's again indirectly expressing his power by masquerading as someone who is not sure, he's thinking off the cuff, even though actually the way he speaks is clearly very tightly controlled. And so there's this juxtaposition between this little interjection, which would imply a sort of spontaneous thought, with the fact that this entire poem is written in rhyming couplets. That's one of the tightest rhyme schemes you can have, and so the rhyme scheme of the poem is symbolic of the tight control he has over the way that he speaks. So the combination of those two: we've got a man here who knows the power he holds, but knows he must not be too obvious in exerting it, certainly at least in the beginning.

To go back to that wider line, he says: "She had / A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed." We've got our euphemistic language again where "too soon made glad, too easily impressed," he is insulting her as being sort of perhaps naive, but mainly: "she liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere." That's our euphemistic language of: she was way too flirtatious, she got around too many men.

24:00 – The List of Gifts: Favor, Cherries, & The White Mule

"Sir, 'twas all one! Sir, it was all the same." He's about to list different gifts she was given, and his point is she treated all of these gifts the same: "My favour at her breast, / The dropping of the daylight in the West, / The bough of cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule / She rode with round the terrace—all and each / Would draw from her alike the approving speech, / Or blush, at least." This list of gifts is really important for us to break down and analyze.

So "my favour at her breast": a favour in this instance is like a little gift that he's given her to make her think about him. So you might have heard of like, for example, giving a scarf as a favour, so it's like it smells like your romantic partner and then you wear the scarf and you think of them, or like a lock of their hair or vial of their blood, whatever. There can be a lot of different kinds of favours; the point is it's like she's got it on her chest. Now the location of the favour I think is also important: it's on the literal sense likely linked to what the favour is, like perhaps a necklace or a brooch or something like that, but I think there is also a more symbolic meaning of, you know, near to her heart. So the gift from the Duke is something to make her think of him, so the gift he gives her is still ultimately about him. And also that is the one that he thinks she should value most, okay? Keep that in mind. So this is the image that is the laudatory image: a gift that is near to her heart.

The other gifts, he throws some serious shade. So first of all: "the dropping of the daylight in the West." He's talking about a sunset, but he's using a litotes to do it. The reason you would use a litotes is because he's almost trying to like underplay it, make it seem like it's not a big deal in the in the slightest. It's just the dropping; like, "dropping" has such connotations of something clumsy. "Daylight in the West" feels very technical, scientific, uninteresting compared to that much more emotive image of of the breast where the favour is.

We then have "the bough of cherries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her." So first of all, there's the outright insult in what he calls the person who has given her the gift: the "officious fool." Insulting tone, similar to the way he sort of insulted the person listening to him, but obviously on a much higher level. So there's like a pattern here, in particular there's a pattern in the way that he insults people. Because if you are officious, it means you have an inflated sense of importance. So he is insulting this person as thinking they're better than they are. If you think about the way he insulted his listener earlier, it was also—perhaps this time he didn't even realize he was doing it. I don't think that first one he even realized he was insulting them; he's just got such a sense of superiority he doesn't even know he's doing it. But this time it's very much on purpose, but it's the same idea: you are beneath me. This officious fool just hasn't realized how beneath this Duke he is. The irony of course is that our Duke is obsessed with his own sense of importance, as we can see from how fixated he is on controlling this painting, on name-dropping, on like "my Duchess," "my favour at her breast." So there's an irony in him calling this other person an officious fool, cuz arguably he's behaving in an officious manner. The difference of course being he thinks, you know, he legitimately has a lot of power and status and that person doesn't.

What's also interesting: "broke in the orchard." When you just break something off, again, he's he's using litotes because he's trying to make it seem like this isn't some wonderful creation, it's damage. It's criminal damage! Because if you look at this use of "the," that definite article "the orchard"—when you use "the," it means you're talking about something specific: the cat versus a cat. So "the orchard," he's talking about his orchard, the orchard over there. So in other words, this guy has just given her a gift by, you know, committing criminal damage on his property. So he's really downplaying this gift as being, frankly, pathetic. It's just some fruit, it was from his property anyway, it's from someone who isn't in any way important—not a great gift.

Nor is the other gift of "the white mule." Horses were obviously really commonly owned by people with status and power, and so horses themselves as your possession as someone with status and power could be symbolic of your status and power. Like if you think how often a stallion has connotations of like strength and power, and knights are often on stallions and things like that. A mule is an infertile breeding of a horse and a donkey, so something that's impure, if you will. So that image of the mule comes across as being something quite weak and certainly not desirable. If we think about purity and and good breeding as being, you know, symbols of power and status in humans, the mule is sort of that symbol of lacking those things altogether. The fact that the mule is white, I think, is perhaps also part of part of the insult, because white often symbolizes purity, but as I was just saying, that sort of contradicts what a mule is. And so it gives the illusion of being a good gift, cuz perhaps it's like seen white and pure, but it's not really a good gift cuz it's a mule. So he's listed all of these gifts, and he's clearly insulting multiple of them and suggesting they're not good gifts, but then reminds us that she ranked all of those gifts on the same level.

31:25 – The "900-Years-Old Name" & Aristocratic Pride

Our Duke is really starting to show his true colors here, because there's quite an angry tone that starts coming through from this list as he's insulting all these other gifts. And it keeps going, as you see. Do you see the increase in the number of dashes that we're going to have as he keeps going? I think that's part of reflecting an increased speed in the way that he's speaking um as he's sort of building up his passion with which he is speaking, the frustration and anger that he feels. And the reason he has this anger is he says: "She thanked men,—good! but thanked / Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked / My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name / With anybody's gift."

Here we get to what really irritates him, angers him about this situation: she is comparing and saying that his gift of his title, "nine-hundred-years-old name," is on the same level as something she could get from anybody else. So what angers him is essentially this 900-year-old name. What that symbolizes is his status and power. All of the power he gets is from his title as a Duke, that 900-year-old name. What he sees is essentially a disrespect to his status and power because she does not place it above all else. So it's simultaneously showing us why why he is so obsessed with power, because he thinks that that is the most important thing, and also why he is angry with her: she did not show sufficient respect to his power.

33:30 – "Who'd Stoop to Blame This Sort of Trifling?"

He continues to show us who he really is when he then has this interrogative: "Who'd stoop to blame / This sort of trifling?" Translation: who would lower themselves to address this pathetic behavior? So the way he is speaking now about his wife is really disdainful, and the fact that he puts this in an interrogative suggests that he thinks people should agree with him. The reason I say it's so disdainful: if you're stooping, it means you are, it denotes that you are lowering yourself. What it therefore connotes is that he saw his wife as being beneath him; he did not view her as an equal.

We then have this line: "Even had you skill / In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will / Quite clear." Of course, irony in what he's saying there: he clearly has skill in speech. But I think what Browning is doing here, if we think about that dramatic monologue and revealing giving a psychological insight into our character: he's just revealed who he is, the stooping in my 900-year-old name, and then he's trying to rebuild that facade of of modesty again. I I am not skilled in speech, but we are not falling for it this time! The unreliable narrator is showing himself. We are not going to really think this is a modest person, like he is trying to act like he is. Placing boasting next to modesty highlights the falseness of this character and the fact that he is really manipulating the presentation of himself and making the whole thing come across as really unreliable.

It's important to note that the reason we want that Browning wants us to come to realize how unreliable narrator is, is it's going to get us to reframe the way we view the Duchess and her relationship with the Duke. Up to this point, there may have been a sense of the Duchess seeming like the one in the wrong, again, using her sexual power in an inappropriate way and being disrespectful to her husband. But we're going to have a turn now and change. I wouldn't call it a volta because it happens very progressively and steadily rather than there being like a specific line where it flips, but what we're going to realize is our poor Duchess had no power. This man was the one with the power. It's all very possible she did absolutely nothing actually wrong, but he was so insecure, he was so obsessed with needing to dominate, that he was interpreting her behavior in a certain way and then acted.

37:45 – "I Choose Never to Stoop" & Communication as Weakness

So let's have a look at that. He says: "Even had you skill / In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will / Quite clear to such an one, and say, 'Just this / Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, / Or there exceed the mark'—and if she let / Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set / Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, / —E'en then would be some stooping." Let me break that down into plain English. He is saying: even if you had the ability to talk to your partner and say to her, this aspect about you disgusts me, here you aren't good enough, there you go way beyond appropriate behavior; even if you could talk to her and tell her that, and if she actually listened and learned from you rather than trying to argue back with you and make excuses; even if that happened, you're still lowering yourself!

Do you hear how messed up that behavior is? He is saying that having a conversation with your wife—and let's be frank, from the dialogue that he puts in, not a conversation between equals, a conversation in which he sets out his expectations that he has of her and how she is failing them—to converse with your wife is to lower yourself. So he's really showing just how unequal he sees her, and he's doing that himself in his own imagined scenario. He is revealing his true character in how he explains his thought process of what is and is not acceptable. So that, again, that's that dramatic monologue that's being so brilliantly used by Browning here.

And then we get this killer line: "and I choose / Never to stoop." There is in that short sentence a firmness, a bluntness in how clear he is about: I do not lower myself, I focus on power. And I think that the positioning of the enjambment—it's not just about maintaining the rhyme scheme, of course that's part of it, of maintaining the rhyming couplet, but it's also I think part of them placing "Never" at the start of a line to place that extra emphasis on the adverb to again enhance that definitive, like, firmness of his tone, and show almost a stubbornness, the unwillingness to compromise on what he feels is his power in the relationship.

38:40 – "I Gave Commands": Caesura, Pauses, and Euphemism

"Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, / Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without / Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands / As if alive."

Hopefully in the way that I read that, you could hear the power of the pause. And Browning creates those pauses with caesura and end-stopping, which he has used elsewhere in the poem, but not to this intensity, this many this close together in a chunk of the poem. The reason, of course, is he is trying to slow the pace of the poem right down, because what our Duke is saying, we need to understand the nefarious euphemism behind it. There is a sinister—there is between those three sentences a chain of causality between "I gave commands," then "all smiles stopped together." He brought an end to the behavior. But where it becomes really sinister: "There she stands / As if alive," reminding us she's dead immediately after telling us he stopped the behavior. The closest he comes to implying he had her killed—implying, he never says it. But this is part of how he expresses his power, right? Indirect expression of power. But the caesura and the end-stopping, along with that euphemistic language, make sure our listener is not going to miss the euphemistic language.

41:15 – The Structural Reveal: The Count's Envoy & The Dowry

This next bit, "Will't please you rise?", I think is such a masterful move by Browning, because our Duke has just shown himself at his nastiest, at his most ominous and controlling with implying that he had his last wife murdered, and then, in a flash in the same line, he returns to the well-mannered facade—except of course now we really know it's a facade, and this is an awful human being.

What is then covered, it comes across as a section uh that's very plain with nothing going on, but its structural significance is huge. It says: "We'll meet / The company below, then. I repeat, / The Count your master's known munificence / Is ample warrant that no just pretence / Of mine for dowry will be disallowed." Translation: we go see the people downstairs. I repeat, the Count your master's known wealth and generosity is more than enough reason for me to get whatever dowry I want. So we realize the person he is speaking to is someone who has been sent to him on behalf of a Count, and this Count has a daughter that the Duke intends to marry; that would be implied by the dowry. So we suddenly realize not just who he's speaking to, but why he's telling this story. This whole story is a threat! This is what my last wife did; you better make sure my next wife will behave. This whole whole story is a giant threat warning indirectly what happens to women who try to go against this Duke. Honestly, this guy is possibly the biggest monster you will ever read about in a poem, and I am obsessed with how amazingly Browning has created him.

We then have this line: "Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed / At starting, is my object." Translation: though, as I said at the beginning, the daughter is ultimately the thing that I want. Now obviously the use of the word "object" there, I mean, do you even need me to analyze that for you? How he views women is crystal clear. He is completely focused on himself. Although he claims the daughter is the primary thought, structurally she was still the second second thought after the dowry, and so we know that this is about him: it's about money, it's about power, it's about owning women.

43:40 – Neptune Taming a Sea-Horse & The Final Metaphor

He then says: "Nay, we'll go / Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, / Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!" The way this poem ends is brilliant. He points out another piece of art. So that in itself, just moving on to the new piece of art symbolizes how unimportant this Duchess really is to him; she's just another object he has. I got a painting of this Duchess, look at my nice sculpture of a horse, a sea-horse.

It also—you know how I said ages ago that part of what this poem is looking at is the power of art and the extent to which it accurately represents us? The irony is the painting of the Duchess, we don't fully trust the degree to which the Duke interprets that painting. Is it really reflective of who she is, or was this just a young innocent girl who was kind and and smiled at people and thanked them for some gifts? There is a question around the the amount we can trust the interpretation of the art. That being said, the "Neptune taming a sea-horse," I mean, again, do you even need me to explain why this guy likes this art? He this Duke loves art that is a god taming a creature. He's the god, women are the creature. He loves the dominance, he loves the power, he loves to control. I mean, this guy isn't exactly subtle in his art interests, is he? So that art does arguably really symbolize his character and his relationship, I would argue, with others around him generally, because we do see this person he's speaking to, he he, you know, sees himself as above them. But particularly that taming, the idea of needing to control something, that's his relationship with women.

And then final line: "Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!" Claus of Innsbruck, just as with Fra Pandolf earlier, name-dropping. This time the fact that it's an international artist, cuz of course he's Italian, Claus of Innsbruck German—no, Austrian. Germans and Austrians, please forgive me! He's name-dropping again, showing that status and wealth. And the last word of the poem is quite literally "me."

46:20 – Summary: Voiceless Women & Browning's Moral Critique

When we think about our Duchess then, we've got someone who has no voice and is not a part of a story being told about her. The use of dramatic monologue and the entire coming from the Duke's perspective leaves our woman voiceless, another aspect just symbolizing her powerlessness in all of this. She cannot control the narrative that is being told about her. We also see the way women are defined by their beauty and their sexuality and that idea of that's where their power comes from, but ultimately actually they are powerless in the face of the far more powerful man, in particular the man who wants to control and dominate them.

All of that might be told via an Italian Renaissance, but would feel very relevant in Victorian England. So to go back to what I said at the very beginning, what Browning is doing is criticizing the contemporary world he saw around him through this story of the Duke and his last Duchess.