The Ring and the Book, published serially in 1868-9, is one of the
most daring and innovative poems in the English language. The story
is based on the trial of an Italian nobleman, Guido Franceschini,
for the murder of his wife Pompilia in Rome in 1698. Browning's
discovery of the 'old yellow book', a bundle of legal documents and
letters relating to the trial, on a second-hand market stall in
Florence, sparked an imaginative engagement with this sordid tale
of domestic cruelty, adultery, and greed which grew, through four
years of arduous labour, into an epic peopled not by gods and
warriors but by concrete, recognizably human beings. Fusing the
technique of the dramatic monologue, the form he had made his own,
with the grandeur of classical epic and the vivid realism of the
modern novel, Browning created a unique hybrid form that allowed
him not only to bring to life an entire historical period but also
to reflect on the process of artistic creation itself -the forging
of the golden 'ring' of the poem from the 'pure crude fact' of its
historical original. This edition, comprising volumes 5 and 6 in
the acclaimed Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Browning's
poems, does full justice to the scope and depth of Browning's
achievement. The headnote in volume 5 gives an authoritative
account of the poem's composition, publication, sources, and
reception, making use of hitherto unpublished letters and textual
material. In addition to giving readers help, where needed, with
historical and linguistic comprehension, the notes track Browning's
formidable range of allusion, from the most erudite to the most
vulgar. The appendices in volume 6 present a selection from the
original sources, a list of variants from extant proofs, and key
passages from Browning's fascinating and revealing correspondence
with one of the earliest readers of the poem, Julia Wedgwood. The
aim is to enable readers not just to understand the poem as an
object of study, but to take pleasure in its abounding intellectual
and emotional energies.
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