109. The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning

In June 1860 Robert Browning was browsing at an open-air flea-market in Florence. Among the cheap picture-frames and dog-eared prints he came across a battered yellow book. He bought it for one lira — eightpence in English money at the time — and took it home. It proved to be a compendium of legal documents relating to a celebrated murder case of 1698, put together at the time by a lawyer called Francesco Cencini. The picture that emerged from the documents was tragic, squalid and...rather entertaining.

In 1693 Count Guido Franceschini, a 50-year-old nobleman of Arezzo, in somewhat reduced circumstances, decided to take a bride to bolster his fortune. He settled on the 13-year-old Pompilia Comparini, a Roman girl with a small dowry. Pompilia hated her aged, dissolute husband, and after four years of cruelty she decided to run back home to her parents, aided by a young priest who had befriended her, Giuseppe Caponsacchi. The couple were overtaken by Guido at Castelnuovo and arrested on a charge of flight and adultery. It was soon discovered that Pompilia was pregnant — whether by Guido or Caponsacchi it was never discovered — and she was given into the care of an order of nuns for her protection. In December 1697 she was delivered of a baby boy, and went back to live with her parents. Meanwhile Guido was gnashing his teeth, and on January 2 1698 travelled to Rome with four accomplices and murdered the Comparinis, fatally wounding Pompilia, who died four days later. Guido and his bravoes were arrested, tried and sentenced to death, despite an appeal to the Pope.

Such was the story that Browning gleaned from the various depositions and letters of the yellow book. He realized that he had a subject worthy of an epic poem, but before he could do anything with it, tragedy of his own struck: his wife Elizabeth died in June 1861. Browning left Italy for England with his young son, unable to remain at the house, Casa Guidi, where he had enjoyed such a happy married life. The story of the yellow book remained untouched. Browning tried to interest other poets in developing the story, among them Tennyson, but there were no takers. Finally, in 1864, he began himself to work solidly on the poem.

He decided on a poetic structure that mirrored the yellow book. It was to consist of twelve chapters, each reflecting a particular viewpoint as found in the trial material. The finished poem, The Ring and the Book, included superb portraits of Guido, lecherous and unctuous, and fresh from torture on the rack; Pompilia, dying and sad, telling how she had been sold to a hideous old man who had taken her as she was playing with her toys; Caponsacchi, full of scorn for the legal profession that had failed to protect a child; and the Pope, struggling to come to judgement amid the political and moral complexities of the case. The whole was a staggering 21,000 lines long, took Browning four years, and had to be published in four volumes. It was the quintessential High-Victorian epic, and made his reputation.

But the yellow book was only half the title. The ‘ring’ was a gold circlet of Etruscan design, stamped with the letters AEI — Greek for ‘evermore’ — that had belonged to his wife Elizabeth, and which Browning kept on his watch-chain after her death. The poem opens, in a memorable address to the reader, with the ring:

Do you see this ring?
‘T is Rome-work, made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)
Etrurian circlets found, some happy morn,
After a dropping April; found alive
Spark-like ‘mid unearthed slope-side fig-tree roots
That roof old tombs at Chiusi...

Browning goes on to explain the significance of the ring. It is a symbol of the process of poetic composition. Just as the gold of the ring has been allowed to emerge from the ore surrounding it, so has the story been shaped and rounded from the yellow ore of the yellow book. But a ring is more than a ring. It symbolizes marriage, and the marriage that Browning has in mind is not just the doomed and criminal marriage of the Franceschinis, but his own dead marriage to Elizabeth. Elizabeth seems to breathe everywhere in the poem. As Browning’s friend Alexandra Orr put it: ‘Its subject had come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness. It had lived with him, though in the background of consciousness, though those of his keenest sorrow. It was his refuge in that aftertime, in which a subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation.’

Until The Ring and the Book, Browning did not have a wide readership. After its publication in 1868 he was acclaimed as a genius, and earned enough with it to secure himself financially. The Athenaeum, which until that point had been hostile to him, declared The Ring and the Book to be ‘the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakespeare.’ The reasons for this were to do with the great dramatic achievement of the poem, certainly, but also to do with Elizabeth’s death. Elizabeth was celebrated above all for the poetry which expressed her love for Robert (see this blog on Sonnets from the Portuguese), and now Robert was to be celebrated for his own hymn to Elizabeth. It was the evocation in his title of one of the most famous love-stories of the nineteenth century that earned him his final, belated recognition.

Consulted:
Gosse, Edmund: Critical Kit-Kats (Heinemann, 1896)
Taplin, Gardner B.: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (John Murray, 1957)