earticle

영어

The diverse imperfect characters of Robert Browning's dramatic monologues were created by a poet who thought of human beings and the world with affection, and such characters also reflect his readers' human imperfectious. Among his works, especially in his greatest long poem The Ring and the Book, there are many imperfect characters of various personalities, and in this poem Browning directly addressed his contemporaries in Britain in the 19th century. Therefore this paper examines what awareness Browning had of his contemporary readers and what he thought of them, by analyzing the general Roman speakers' points of view toward the Guido case mainly in Book 2, Book 3, and Book 4 of The Ring and the Book. “Half-Rome” in Book 2 took advantage of the Guido case to warn or threaten his own wife's seducer. “The Other Half-Rome” in Book 3 showed a self-interested view of the case. “Tertium Quid”, the speaker of Book 4, displayed to an ethical relativism. Thus, through the attitudes of the speakers failing to approach the truth for their individual reasons, readers realize that the pictures of the speakers are no different from themselves. And the fact that Browning presented these general speakers before any other speakers except the poet/speaker resulted from an intentional descriptive strategy of the author to help readers discover their images of themselves first by reading the work, and so, to gain a more objective perspective in the poem as well as in the problems of 19th century Britain.