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Discussions of 4My Last Duchess', Browning's best known and probably most analysed poem, tend to revolve around the questions of the speaker's character and motivation, the reader's response and the relations between language and representation.1 In this essay, I want to approach 4My Last Duchess' from a rather different angle and reread the poem against the background of Renaissance conventions of speech. My aim is to show that, rather than being determined exclusively by the speaker's character or motivation, the Duke's speech is a situated act and as such conditioned by the poem's specific historical setting and given sociolinguistic norms. I will draw on the famous Renaissance handbook by Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528), to reconstruct these conditions and show that Browning had access to them. While pointing out how the speaker's speech depends on general norms of conversation, I will also argue that it is conditioned by the risks potentially involved in particular politeness strategies, and that the poem thrives on this tension.
Since my reading of 4My Last Duchess' in terms of linguistic and cultural conventions sets itself against the arguments of earlier interpretations, it will be useful to begin by recapitulating some of their salient points. Critics have traditionally debated whether or not the speaker of 4My Last Duchess' manages to remain in control of his rhetoric. For Robert Langbaum, while making his next marriage arrangements, the Duke lets it slip that he cut his last Duchess down to size, quite brutally.2 However, this does not seem to threaten his stature. If the Duchess is 4as if alive', the Duke is larger-than-life, and such absolute superiority helps to explain his lack of discretion. By contrast, others have pointed out that it would be atypical for the proud aristocrat to speak so carelessly. In the Duke's speech in front of the usually veiled portrait of his wife, they have detected a hidden purpose and a covert warning.3 But it has also been argued that the point is not whether or not the Duke speaks purposefully, but that, as he tries to justify what he did, he gets carried away by language itself.4
As post-structuralist theory introduced concepts such as différance, decentredness and dissemination into critical discourse, this kind of focus on...