When I was volunteered to write a summary of the decade's work in Browning criticism and scholarship for Victorian Poetry, this did not seem a too much larger task than the year's evaluations I have been turning out for most of this decade—only one-thousand percent. It was, in any event, not the entirely appropriate, but far too ambitious, task of a summary and evaluation of the century's work. The common wisdom is that criticism, and even editing practices, have (as you like it) finally come of age/gone entirely crazy or to the dogs of late so that recent critical history should, in any event, stand alone, case unparalleled.

In fact, I find now that I am not so sure that the subject easily stands alone. The more I think about what we have said and learned about Browning recently, the more I am seeing patterns that go right back to the century of criticism—so much of it seemingly outdated and overworn—since Browning's death. I should not be so surprised: one of the many things we have been learning by relearning is the dependence of all cultural products, including our own genteel work of criticism, on the work that preceded it and on which it necessarily feeds—feeds much more than we like to admit, with our Romantic and overreaching faith in the originality of critical genius. As modern theoretical criticism has tended to diminish belief in the absolute originality of creative genius, it has seemed only to leave critical originality, by vanity or courtesy, still standing as a hopeful exception. All the recent work in criticism, so new and original, looked at again, seems at least firmly rooted in the past. By the same token our residual Romantic faith in a few Promethean and determining new critical approaches and individual critical movers and shakers bumps up against a growing sense that an invisible hand of critical history has moved us all along a few heavily channeled critical canals. Doubtless certain critical barges catch our attention far more than others, blazoned with sharp thinking, festooned with wit and excellent writing. But the more I assemble the pieces of the picture, the more I begin to see the preoccupations that create our critical culture, that indeed give us as firm critical horizons as those of any other age and make true originality, except as small moments of innovation on the current drift, unimaginable. What will criticism of Browning look like at the bicentenary? We can't know or we would be there already. All we can know is that the scene then will have great historical sap roots in our own—though what now seem the major elements to my eye in 1989 may look like so many irrelevant miscellanea put in one of those time capsules to the desperate reviewer of 2089 who—God love you—should take an interest in what we thought of our contribution at the time.

Perhaps I dare say that the future historian of the reception of Browning in the 1980s will be likely to say very much what we all always say of Victorian culture: it was a time of change and a time of continuity, a time that thought it was undergoing major changes and achieving major conservations. (And of course it thought it was the best of critical times and the worst of critical times.) The sense of great change, great conservation, momentous consequences hanging on the resolution, was nowhere more evident, or strident, than in the set of critical issues turning on the current debates variously labeled deconstruction, post-structuralism, or more broadly, post-modernism. And here the historian, like ourselves, may see the intense disagreements of the time as often more apparent than real, concealing by their shrill opposition the tacit agreement about what issues are central and worth discussing.

Certainly this is the area of Browning studies, as of literary study in general, where there has been the most action—and most lively discussion. I hope I will be forgiven if I begin, like the author of Sordello, by summoning up a worthy from the past to focus this discussion and suggest how deeply seated it is in perennial preoccupations of Browning criticism: I call as undeconstructive a figure as G. K. Chesterton himself—a pre-postmodern, pre-modern, indeed by preference medieval man. Yet his mature fictions, no less than his early tortured drawings, were haunted by a vision of a world in which nothing exists beneath appearance, all things fall apart, noses, as in The Man Who Was Thursday, keep deconstructing. In fear of such a postmodern world he of course called up a ruddy solid man, a kind of Yeatsian fisherman of poetry, the good Robert, English as old ale, creating a super-solid neo-Chaucerian world of fictional people. Never mind that many are villains, fast-talkers, or self-deceivers: they are at least real fictions, with no complexities of difference between art and life, from an age when writers' hearts beat hard and their brains ticked high-blooded. If Chesterton could shore up a vision of Browning's unified sensibility against the ruin promised by the coming century, Santayana, of course, saw him not as the solution but the problem, a force of barbarous emotional chaos threatening to overwhelm organization and order. Browning's position as a contested case—a figure of either reassuring solidity or disturbing disintegration—has persisted through the rage of modernism for order and into the rage of post-modernism at order. The issue could of course be traced back to Browning's own confused vacillations between an objective and subjective role for the poet and these conceptions have also persisted in the debate. Those seeing Browning as a creator of objective and hence "real" characters have focused on explaining their genesis or on the moral issues that naturally come to the fore when we imagine fictional characters as people much like those who live in real Valladolid. Jacob Korg's Browning and Italy (1983) continued this tradition in focusing on the relation between Browning's life (in Italy) and his works (Italian scenes—though mostly from literature not life) and in arguing for the influence of Italy in leading Browning to an objective poetry based on a substantial world of real men and women. Or William Buckler, working in a close analytical and in itself somewhat skeptical tradition associated with the New Criticism in his Poetry and Truth in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1985), nonetheless emphasized moral issues in evaluating Browning's characters, on the presumption that an essentially mimetic art demands an evaluative and moral criticism: how lifelike and convincing are they? what does one say about their values and actions? Or, in an apparently different mode of criticism, Samuel L. Chell in The Dynamic Self: Browning's Poetry of Duration (1984) used Bergson (and not Poulet) to stress the coherence of internal experience and internal time in Browning's rendition of the consciousness of time of a lifetime compressed into a dramatic monologue (and we remember that stream of consciousness itself could function either as an extreme of realism or as its subversion). The combination in Chell of a substantial and referential view of the nature of Browning's art (creating coherent consciousnesses) with an argument stressing Browning's belief in immersion in the destructive element of time and defending Browning against Santayana only suggests on how many different levels of criticism these issues played out their oppositions.

On the level of character, the most obvious and most recurrent arena for debate in Browning criticism, the case for insubstantiality and deconstruction was made most emphatically by E. Warwick Slinn in his Browning and the Fictions of Identity (1982). Here again, far from creating a totally new approach to Browning, Slinn had distinguished predecessors, for instance in J. Hillis Miller's early phenomenological criticism, The Disappearance of God, which stressed a common experience in Browning characters rather than their solid individuality, or in W. David Shaw's focus on argumentation, which created not so much a vision of substantial identity as Kierkegaardian levels of being in character (The Dialectical Temper). Drawing on the full-blown poststructuralist dogmas of the necessary fictive non-referentiality of language, Slinn subjected Browning to a rigorous reading on a "dramatically based model of man as artifice." As in Leo Bersani's seminal study of character in fiction, A Future for Astyanax, substantial characters, all those men and women, are dissolved not merely into dramatis personae but a "shifting series of dramatic hypotheses, unified only by a self-perpetuating consciousness." Each monologue deconstructs its own appearance of creating coherent identity. Slinn has somewhat moderated his views in later, interesting articles (e.g., BSN 15:1-9: VP 25:67-81) but his position, in its extreme deconstructionist first form, found echoes in later criticism, for instance Adam Potkay's somewhat reductive reading of The Ring and the Book (VP 25:143-157). A less influential work, in some respects less challenging in its approaches to individual poems, Constance Hassett's The Elusive Self in the Poetry of Robert Browning (1982) is also a more useful approach to the broad issue of substantiality of character. Hassett in effect argued for discriminating between constructivist sheep, known by the experience of conversion that creates a coherent personality within, and incoherent goats, who, like Guido, are mere artifices of their own will to persuade or perform. She allowed us to see Browning's presentations of character historically, set in a moment (though perhaps it is one of those historical moments that keeps recurring) when the notion of character is in crisis between creation and decreation and thus problematic.

Two finer works of criticism, by Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., and Clyde de L. Ryals, and a suggestive one by Loy D. Martin, with many parallels, took these issues to a different level of critical discourse. Tucker's justly celebrated Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (1980) looked less at the idea of character than at the way in which Browning's language and poetry works. As such his explicitly Derridean investigation of difference in Browning as a process of avoiding closure picked up much of the strength of the New Critical focus on careful analysis of verbal structures. (Tucker's model explication of Cleon's too well-wrought urn perhaps exemplified the liaisons as well as contrasts between Yale past and more recent.) Starting with an elegant restatement of Browning's convoluted relation to Shelley—differing from whom, he learned to always be differing even from himself—continuing with a thorough rereading of that gateway to Browning monologues, Sordello, Tucker elegantly unrolled the process of Browning's poetry in which renewal and new beginnings displace each movement toward artistic finish or completion, thus both enacting and creating modern poetry.

Some of the excitement of Tucker's work—in which we felt a new critical mode really offering a new experience of the work—was repeated in Martin's eclectic, fitfully brilliant and opaque work, Browning's Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject (1985). His notion of processive experience paralleled and drew strength from Slinn and Hassett on Browning's characters, from Tucker on the structure of the poems. To this he added the conceptual schemes of Bakhtin and Kristeva (also suggested by Susan Blalock, BIS 11:39-50) as a way of recognizing the openness and freedom of Browning's poetic world: rather than direct and control his characters he enables them to create a complex system of communication, combining voices of author and speaker, reaching out from the isolated individual to a community of language, everywhere allowing in the monologue a dialogue of social values and of ways of representing reality.

Ryals' work, Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning, 1833-1846 (1983), comes closest to Tucker's in giving us an entire way to reread Browning. Apparently something of a glutton for punishment, Ryals moved from his earlier studies of difficult late Browning to the early difficult (or sometimes tedious) work. What he found there is a different, though often compatible model to Tucker's, more rhetorical than deconstructive, for Browning's ceaseless rewritings of himself. If in Tucker's view Browning is always beginning over again, in Ryals' he is always becoming, moving to position himself at a higher level of being or consciousness. Ryals labeled the process Romantic Irony and stressed the way in which greater breadth of consciousness is always paid for by ironic self-awareness, often both of the limitedness of everyday life and matters and also of the insufficiency of any mythic fabrication of one's becomings into higher intellectual and spiritual states. Such an approach, here focused on the overall strategy of Browning's art, whether in his early long poems, his attempts at drama, or his first monologues, parallels Hassett's to character in that it leaves room for deconstruction and construction, working simultaneously to offer, take back, offer again. The pattern is a familiar one in Paracelsus with its ironies of aspiration, attainment, failure, aspiration in failure, and of course in the essential mode of narrative creation/destruction in Sordello. Like Tucker, Ryals was especially good in opening up Browning's long deplored early masterwork as the critical entrée to his poetics that it is. Also like Tucker, he was somewhat less impressive when he turned to the fruit of that poetics, the early success of the Bells and Pomegranates monologues—though both are excellent on Pippa.

If the postmodern, poststructuralist controversy enacted itself in Browning criticism as a restatement in new terms of issues central to Browning since his own distinction between objective and subjective poetry, the equally current and vivid feminist movement in criticism found voice through new articulations of equally old issues: namely the issue, beginning in the 1840s, between Robert and Elizabeth. Who dares judge between a wife and her husband? the traditional wisdom asks. "I," said Victorian critics, who of course regularly preferred Elizabeth and, later, saw Robert as an obstacle to their curiosity about her. "I," said Besier, De Vane, and also so many male and female sentimentalists in and out of Browning societies who fixated their gaze on the rescue of poor Andromeda Elizabeth from dragon Edward Barrett by Perseus Robert—a Caponsacchi determined on rescuing his Pompilia and having her too. And "I," have of course said feminist critics of all persuasions who regularly begin with a view of the marriage of the poets and, from that, fabricate their reading of the works. Here, while there has been important work on the long neglected Elizabeth herself, one must begin by saying that there has been far less important work on Robert than that promoted by deconstruction. Feminist approaches to male writers are a relatively late phase in the rapid evolution of feminist criticism since the mid seventies; the first explicitly feminist booklength study of Robert appeared only this year. The most seminal work, also perhaps the most extreme, was an article by Nina Auerbach, "Robert Browning's Last Word" (VP 22:161-173), whose general approach has been followed, with equal wit and panache, by Adrienne Munich (BIS 15:69-78). Beginning by deconstructing the idyll of rescue and happy Victorian marriage, they saw the conflict between two types of poets, two sexes, worked out in the poems, especially The Ring and the Book, where Browning's final one word more, after his spouse's death, serves to appropriate (or, in Munich's adaption of the ring metaphor, encircle and enclose) Elizabeth. If Auerbach's argument led her to understate the strength of Browning's treatment of women, especially the relatively great truth spoken by Pompilia, other approaches to Browning's treatment of women, focusing on the same issues, some-what overstated both Browning's "feminism" and the place of Pompilia in the poem. Buckler's study of The Ring and the Book virtually excepted Pompilia from the careful scrutiny of the limits of human truth in words that he brought to bear on the other speakers. Ann P. Brady's recent Pompilia (1988) followed U.C. Knoepflmacher's argument for Browning's anti-patriarchal feminism (VP 22:139-159) with some illuminating detail on Guido's very specifically sexual tyranny. The work romanticizes both Pompilia and Caponsacchi as saintly discoverers of pure love. The tendency to turn Robert into either a husband devil or a writer of feminist saints' lives was usefully corrected by Ashby Crowder's summary of Browning's perplexed and perplexing attitudes to women (SBHC 14:91-134) and William Walker's look at Pompilia's rhetorical strategies (VP 22:47-63).

Perhaps the most significant work on Browning and women has been free of direct feminist intent but also centrally focused on the Brownings' relation. Lee Erickson's Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Au diences (1984) traced Robert's movement toward writing for an audience of one, his spouse, though this study of a very special reception situation was weakened by his failure to acknowledge the differences and conflicts Auerbach stressed. Daniel Karlin's The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett (1985), one of the more original works on both poets of the past decade, drew on Elvan Kintner's splendid edition of the love letters to provide a striking analysis of both the psychodynamics and mythopoesis involved in this marriage of true, and very complicated, minds. His analysis of the necessary mythmaking in the damnation of Edward Barrett and the inevitable mutual misprision of poet and lover by poet and lover gives a firmer base on which to develop future stories, whether biographical or critical, of the two poets.

Another major field of critical activity of the past decade, what the New Criticism called the affective fallacy and we have come to call reader-response criticism, has also been a steady area of activity in Browning studies. And like feminism and deconstruction, it has very substantial roots in Browning criticism, along with the coordinate reception studies that also emanate from Germany's critical school of Constance. Study of Browning's reception, before we knew it by that name, featured serious evaluation of the aims and limitations of Browning's age in William Peterson's book on the Browning Society, Interrogating the Oracle (1968). Robert Langbaum's classic study of the dramatic monologue in many ways derived its importance from the recasting of traditional genre studies into what we would now call a reader-response mold. Experience in The Poetry of Experience is not only the subject of the poem but an action in the reader, who evaluates the poem on that somewhat restricted response coordinates of sympathy and judgment. Langbaum's relative success in speaking excitingly about Browning at a time when the New Criticism signally failed with him, might have suggested the productivity of this approach, under its new name and theoretical formulations, in the eighties.

Erickson's book, mentioned above, was the closest thing to recent full study of Browning's reception. His approach, with its interesting summaries of information concerning Browning's critical fortunes among his contemporaries, opened up a number of subjects but was also marred by its diffuseness and lack of critical self-definition. His shift to an author-centered criticism to propose the rather strained thesis that Browning moved from writing to people generally to an ever narrower target, first Elizabeth and God, then finally God alone, drew his attention away from the full and rigorous study of the context in which Browning's works were received that we need. John Woolford's recent Browning the Revisionary (1988) also contained useful information on Browning's critical reception, especially the shocking failure of Men and Women. But his main focus in a critically syncretic study was also reader-centered, on Browning's reactions to his contemporary readers' responses—in his next work, where he revised his prior work in a careful response. The dialectic of author and contemporary readers was productive of new approaches to Browning—for instance Woolford's focus on the "structured collections" of monologues in the 1863 reordering of poems, in Dramatis Personae, and in The Ring and the Book. Woolford's definition of a Browning sequence of poems as a strategy to bring the reader into active work of interpretation often left me in doubt whether he was uncovering Browning's structure or merely providing his own response to (that is, his interpretation of) the themes he found in the group of poems. But as an approach that tried to define Browning's relation to his Victorian audience from his point of view—the critical terms here are strategy or response—it was more convincing than Erickson's. Finally, David DeLaura, in a subtle study of interrelations and to some extent intertextuality between Browning and Ruskin (in Victorian Perspectives, ed. John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier, 1989), used Browning's famous comments to Ruskin describing reading as a form of skipping over glaciers as a starting point for fine observations on Browning's demanding, sometimes teasing relation to his reader. He saw Browning positioning himself between the removed classicism of Arnold and the blunt moralism demanded by many Victorian readers—indeed, where Ruskin would have the artist, though he failed sadly to appreciate it in Browning.

Woolford's study, especially the good sections on the political attitudes implicit in Browning's strategy to involve the reader in the poems of the 1830s, can profitably be set beside the more specifically reader-oriented work of David E. Latané, Jr., Browning's Sordello and the Aesthetics of Difficulty (1987). Latané usefully located Browning's strategy toward the reader in contemporary attitudes, stemming from the Romantics, about the necessary challenge to the reader made by serious works of literature and he provided a just summary of basic theoretical issues in reader-response criticism. His work was especially helpful in unwinding the mummy's sheet of Sordello by showing us both the thematics of reader issues in the poem (the many readers it conjures up, including ourselves) and in offering a model reading by the active reader. Christine Froula, "Browning's Sordello and the Parables of Modernist Poetics" (ELH 52:965-992) also intelligently discussed readers in Sordello. The dramatic monologues, where reader-text interrelations are most productively at play in Browning, have received less attention. Dorothy Mermin's The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (1984) looked specifically at the varieties of listeners in the poems and their relations to the speakers. Herbert F. Tucker, Jr. (in a contribution to Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Parker, 1985, pp. 226-243), drew upon Ralph Rader's concise generic taxonomy of 1976 (CI 3:131-151) to tease out the conflict in the reader's experience of a dramatic monologue between rhetorical, dramatic communication, and lyric utterance. My own article (BIS 15:105-112) attempted to configure and calculate the dynamics among speaker, listener, and the reader conceived as an overhearer. Perhaps it is worth stressing the reader-oriented approach implicit in so much traditional Browning criticism. Those "new views" of familiar speakers of major monologues that were so common a product of the New Critical emphasis on interpretation of individual poems paradoxically forced us to transcend all single perspectives by displaying the variety of plausible interpretations available to successive readers. If clever special pleaders and devil's advocates, those attractive/despicable wits of the Browning critical world, have been less prominent recently it is perhaps because a more theoretical decade asks for broader views rather than interpretive tours de force alone. Still I enjoyed many briefer articles that forced us to see another side of a monologue we knew thoroughly and had settled in one pattern or a few: for instance, Joseph A. Dupras' (BIS 15:113-122) and Russell M. Goldfarb's (SBHC 13:59-65) reversal of our usual sympathetic response to that genial and worldly imprecision and genius Fra Lippo Lippi. Andrea as a Rabelaisian carnival figure anyone? She or he who should be tired of critical one word mores (as I confess I sometimes am) would be tired of criticism itself.

Studies of influences and sources, a preoccupation in Browning criticism since the days of the first Browning Society, have been themselves heavily influenced by the large critical shadow of Harold Bloom who has, of course, generally been at the center of thinking about tradition and intertextuality. Although Bloom himself has never written extensively on Browning, he has given him a central place as a major poet in the tradition and the first strong successor who had to grapple with Shelley's influence. Indeed this central agon of the imagination was already very present at Yale, through the work of Pottle and DeVane, as a model case for Bloom's rethinking of influence in psychoanalytic terms. Bloom's reading of Childe Roland as antithetical quester, a Romantic reading of a Victorian poet with which we have, most of us, been uncomfortable, has been among the most influential, and provocative, rereadings of Browning since the New Criticism. In his introductory essay for his Chelsea Robert Browning (1985), otherwise not a particularly representative or useful selection of contemporary essays on Browning, Bloom eloquently revisited this central critical preoccupation. His importance has been felt more emphatically in the work of his students, especially Tucker's elegant restatement of the Shelley-Browning relation, not to mention productive parleyings with his view in Erickson's, Martin's, and my own study of the early Browning. Important as Shelley's influence obviously was, I argued that we must also see Browning in a broader relation to central English and continental traditions. Two articles on Browning and Keats, U. C. Knoepflmacher on Keats and Browning's feminism mentioned above, and Martin Bidney on "Madhouse Cells" (SEL 24:671-681) have at least begun to fill in the picture of Browning's broader romantic heritage. John Coates reached back to Cervantes to interpret "How It Strikes a Contemporary" (SBHC 11:41-46) and I argued for Donne's formative influence on Browning's development of the dramatic monologue (John Donne Journal 4:253-257). Two full books and one booklet filled in Browning's relations with Italian, French, and Russian literature. Korg's book, mentioned above, was a compendium of source work on the poems with an Italian setting, especially those on art, though less helpful on Browning's relations to serious Italian writers, classical or contemporary. Other complementary studies of Italian sources were made by Mary Louise Albrecht (SBHC 11:47-60) and Allan Dooley (MP 81:38-46). Roy Gridley, The Brownings and France (1982) was exceptionally useful in detailing Browning's reading in and enthusiasm for French writers, especially contemporaries such as Balzac (his favorite), Stendhal, and Flaubert. Mark Siegchrist's Rough in Brutal Print (1981) thoroughly presented the lurid French legal sources for Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, showing Browning's distortions and changes without denying him his creative rights, as so many commentators on The Ring and the Book have, to lie in the service of imaginative truth. Finally, Patrick Waddington's little book, Browning and Russia (1985) provided a detailed account of what little Browning did know of Russian writers (on a personal level, mainly a not very cordial relation with Turgenev) and examined sources of "Ivàn Ivànovitch." Browning's problematic relation with Arnold was reexamined in two good articles, John Coates's "Two Versions of the Problem of the Modern Intellectual" (MLR 79:769-788) and Jane A. McCusker's study of Arnold and Aristophanes' Apology (MLR 79:783-796). DeLaura, in the study mentioned above, drew upon both articles to position Browning in opposition to Arnold but in fundamental agreement with Ruskin. The article, using the letters DeLaura previously published, was important for its fuller view of Browning's debt to Ruskin in his poetics—a big improvement over the endless retelling of Ruskin's gracious recognition of "The Bishop Orders His Tomb." It also offered an interesting appendix on Browning's distrusting use of Arnold's key term, "culture."

The investigation of Browning's own influence on contemporaries and successors, also a topic with a long pedigree in Browning studies, found fertile, largely unfilled soil, in a nonpoet modern, Henry James. Ross Posnock's Henry James and the Problem of Robert Browning (1985) again showed the influence on influ ence studies of Bloom: his elegant argument from both biography and textual comparison suggested that Browning was a central and troubling figure of potency to James. (Men and Women was a forbidden and therefore dangerously attractive book to the young James.) In Posnock's original formulation James created a myth of Browning to overcome his influence, much as Browning did of Shelley and, again like Browning with Shelley, he proceeded to encompass and to rewrite Browning's work in his own fiction. The study was a good critical approach to both writers, with interesting ideas about the development of the theatrical self, as opposed to the sincere self of the Romantics, and the use of perspectivism. I was less persuaded by the comparative readings and somewhat unsure of the cross discussions from biography and society to the works: like New Historicist studies that it resembles, there was both originality and a certain degree of idiosyncrasy.

The relation to Pound continued a valued old chestnut in discussion of Browning and modernism. George Bornstein (in his edition of Ezra Pound Among the Poets, 1985), offered a full review of Pound's Browning, emphasizing the way in which Pound's renovative relation to past writers allowed him to learn from Browning and build on him without the distortions and displacements of Bloomian anxiety. Jonathan Ward (BSN 15:10-27) focused more narrowly on Pound's recasting of historical poetry as he worked through and then away from Browning and, in his penultimate chapter, Loy Martin interestingly underlined the difference in sensibility and relation to the past that led Pound, and even Eliot, to transform totally, and finally abandon, the dramatic monologue. Finally, Bornstein also looked at Browning's relation to Yeats (Yeats Annual 1:114-132) and here we end back in Bloom's main-traveled road with Yeats reacting to, and attempting to swerve away from merely following, Browning and Tennyson's first generation reaction to and swerve from Romanticism.

Many major topics in Browning studies over the years have found contemporary critical restatement, though often less satisfactorily and thoroughly than one would wish. There is the old one of Browning and religion, the issue that moved the Browning Society—those pale, unsatisfied ones in their quest for another answer to the crisis of faith of their time—they being unsatisfied by the Tennysonian turbulence that had contented an earlier generation. Vincent P. Anderson's serviceable Robert Browning as a Religious Poet: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1984), with excerpts and summaries, served to remind us how regularly Browning has been reread to fit each generation's religious preoccupations. We have had heretical Brownings, skeptical Brownings, Brownings very sure of God and pessimist Brownings, existential Brownings, Brownings preoccupied with a central Truth of Incarnation, and Brownings swimming in phenomena, Brownings for whom God is love, and Brownings for whom he refuses to come. Woolford's book restated Whitla's emphasis on the Truth of Incarnation. Hassett's study of how Browning adapted ideas of conversion and apocalypse in his presentation of character offered a more original study of Browning's particular moment—putting to secular use major aspects of religious tradition. The same was true of Glenn Everett's "Typological Structures in Browning's 'Saul'" (VP 23:267-279), which followed generally the work of George Landow and also Linda Peterson's excellent summary, "Biblical Typology and the Self-Portrait of the Poet in Robert Browning" (in Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, ed. Landow, 1979). Everett rightly raised questions about the implications of such a traditional mode of interpretation, here again consciously and perhaps also historically used, in an essentially secular literary form. Peterson's more recent article, "Rereading Christmas-Eve, Rereading Browning" (VP 26:363-380), provided an important reflection on Browning's awareness of hermeneutic problems arising in religious issues and spilling over to all forms of interpretation. Her elegant interpretation of Christmas-Eve saw it as an enactment and demon stration of the problems of religious interpretation, whether typological, based on historical tradition, or rational and mythological. In her persuasive view, we are driven to accept the impossibility of privileging any one interpretive stance; hence Browning's poems employing typology necessarily question and historicize the biblical interpretive structures they offer. I was less persuaded by her special pleading for the poem as a turning point in unleashing Browning's reader to multiple interpretations of monologues (the history of criticism of "My Last Duchess" alone says the moment was far earlier).

Other good interpretive articles have focused on religious issues: Blair Ross on progressive mythology in "Apollo and the Fates," a typological poem outside the Christian system (VP 22:15-30); Michael Berens, on "Karshish" (SBHC 12:41-53), also concerned with religion as universal myth-making; and John Lammers and Jeff Karr (SBHC 12:94-119; 13:37-46) on "Caliban Upon Setebos." Lammers read the poem as a mini-divine comedy ready for his allegorical interpretation; Karr noted parallels to Paley in order to read the poem as a version of natural theology in a Darwinian world; both were helpful, neither fully persuasive.

This relatively weak addition to thinking and knowledge on the topic of religion found a parallel in the even weaker record of studies on two other great issues, politics and science. Here the earlier critical history itself is less rich, except in regular complaints (such as this one) over the failure to explore such obvious subjects. Yet on first sight the failure seems to have been also Browning's, especially in science. His apparent interest in evolution in Paracelsus yielded to uninformed positions later in his career. Only George Myerson, in an article on the science of Browning's Paracelsus (BSN 15:20-47), returned to this apparently barren field. Drawing on Kuhn's paradigm for the emergence of modern science, he interestingly plotted Paracelsus' growth as one toward scientific as well as moral awareness. Browning endorses the modern scientific view of the world as open, objective, and infinite, though he draws back from a totally secular vision of the universe. We need other studies that similarly examine the implied, if often confused, attitudes of Browning toward the emerging scientific disciplines, hard and soft, of his century.

Politics was a more conscious and habitual theme of Browning's, though we look in vain, as we do in so much nineteenth-century British literature, for the central work overtly about politics. Here three studies have at least raised the discussion to interesting levels of discourse. John Woolford, in an article (BSN 14:1-20) substantially repeated in his recent book, offered a thoughtful analysis of Browning's early liberalism as an author's position. Browning's ideal of power, stemming from what Woolford called Puritan anarchism, made him reject the author's authority over the reader, an elegant way of explaining the embarrassed attempts at sharing authorship in Sordello. In somewhat parallel terms to the early study by Lawrence Poston (PMLA 88:260-270) of Browning's political skepticism as an ironic view of the relation between nobility and power, Woolford interestingly reviewed the themes of renunciation and abdication of power so clear in some of the plays. Robert Viscusi (BIS 12.1-28) found a different, also intriguing, way of unmasking the political positions of the apparently apolitical professed liberal. His study of imperialism in Browning's celebration of Italy avoided the simplicities of classic Marxist imperialist theory by its sensitivity to the positive side of Browning's liberal culture, his ability to balance and hold in suspension various views of a subject, here both the Italy of classical Rome and that of Dante. In this decade of renewed and highly abstract Marxist cultural/literary theory Loy Martin's formulations of a social drive for an event in literary history—the production of the dramatic monologue—were predictably abstract and unfortunately lacking in specific social context. His thesis of a crisis in bourgeois Cartesian individualism leading to a work (of art) alienated from its producer (the author, who cedes authority, here not in the first instance to the reader but to the indeterminable dialogic subjects of the dramatic monologue), leans heavily, almost certainly too heavily, on a single long interpretation of "Pictor Ignotus." It is a way of thinking about the relation between a literary form and a cultural-economic context (superstructure and infrastructure) useful enough in itself but much too speculative in form. Obviously we badly need more comprehensive and fully worked out approaches to both Browning's own discourse on politics and society and his larger place in a rapidly changing Victorian world.

The coordinate subject of history was of course much more directly a concern of the poet and has elicited regular critical comment since, from the only somewhat useful research into the real history behind Browning's poems, undertaken with the rather naive aim of seeing how true Browning's poetry was to history, to the sophisticated historiographical comments of Morse Peckham. There have not been many persons writing about Browning and history in the last decade, but fortunately there was one good article and a substantial, well-developed book. Lee Baker (VP 24:31-46) drew on Hayden White's rhetorical approach to history writing as necessarily a form of fiction making to contrast Browning and Carlyle. He found Carlyle a romantic ironist (as Ryals has found Browning) but Browning an unselfconscious mythmaker. From this analysis he criticized Peckham's view of Browning as an historical relativist, aware of the limits of all positions, including his own. Mary Ellis Gibson's History and the Prism of Art (1987) was a much larger and more impressive approach to the complexities of this major subject in Browning. She cast a wider net, avoiding reductive descriptions of Browning's involvement with history. Her overall position on Browning's historiography was closer to that of Peckham than Baker. She emphasized Browning's affinities to Carlyle as relativist and ironist: she rightly stressed the concern with history Browning learned in his family, from father and half-brothers. She accepted the influence of Ranke and his school in Browning's concern with sources and accurate evidence but saw this as compatible with a perspective on history that stressed context, cultural history, and the relativism of perspectivism. Clearly there is still an issue that will not go away, as Baker rightly insisted, in Browning's countervailing push—let us call it a force of desire against its own skepticism—to have the record mean something and mean for good. Yet it is Browning's persisting relativism and even skepticism, as Gibson competently showed in her good discussions of the rhetoric of the poems on historical issues, that creates the objective plenitude of his art against the reductive mythmaking of his heart. Better, perhaps, to see the tension between the two historicisms, romantic/prophetic and relativist/skeptical as the determining site of the poems. Gibson makes a case for affinities between Browning's historicism and that of twentieth-century writers; but again, this should be balanced against other points of view, especially Ward's article and the section in Martin's book, both mentioned above, on the differences between Browning and Pound's historicism, which take better account of the radically antihistorical vision of much high modernist art.

A complementary, interesting, and relatively unexplored topic, Browning's relation to the heart of darkness in man's prehistory and in his psyche at least found one able analysis in Dorothy Mermin's "Browning and the Primitive" (VP 20:211-237). Here again Browning is surprisingly in touch with the newer historical—here anthropological—work of students such as Edward Tyler, who saw primitive cultures as the origins, not degradations, of civilized societies. And here again, as Mermin ably showed, Browning counters his own expanding, implicitly relativist vision with his heart's need to impose a Christian mythological pattern—albeit a very sophisticated progressive one—on the span of human history. As interesting was Mermin's sense of Browning's preoccupation in his later works especially, with primitive urges, sexuality, violence, religious ritual, often revealed through dreams and other unconscious phenomena. In this she followed Samuel B. Southwell's Quest for Eros: Browning and "Fifine" (1980). Southwell explored a similar terrain of intellectual history, relating Browning's use of the term "soul" to the emerging concept of the unconscious as outlined by Lancelot Whyte's The Unconscious Before Freud. Like Mermin, he generally saw Browning involved in the fertile discussion of myth, anthropology, primitivism, and sexuality that led both to modern anthropology and Freud. His provocative analysis of Fifine at the Fair seemed more problematic, just because his argument wanted to show what Browning wished to say but dared not. Such an author-, or biography-, centered reading was naturally more effective in suggesting external influences on the poem—the presence of Browning's complicated feelings for the dead Elizabeth, for example—than in fully proving his thesis, that Browning's hidden meaning, the meaning whose name he dared not speak, was a vision of cultural unity built on acceptance of the sexual drive as a central life force. Yet his approach rightly reminded us how very much this poem, which we have tended to treat as a casuistic or metaphysical sport, was involved in the new ideas of woman, sexuality, and primitivism. This area of Browning should not be romanticized into a confrontation between Mr. Browning and the dark gods. Mermin especially sets us on the right track by seeing the emergence of these modern myths of myth, sexuality, and primitivism in Browning as a part of a general intellectual movement in his culture to which, unlike developments in the natural sciences, Browning was rather precisely attuned.

I might end this summary of criticism by daring ourselves to look directly sometimes at the white light that Browning himself mostly avoided: the poetics stated or implicit in his work. What theoretical statement can we find in Browning or create from our reading of his works that might seem somewhat to suffice as an explanation of his unique imagination? Of course answers exist everywhere in all these special studies of aspects of Browning's work. We have been less ready, despite the heady theoretical dialogue of our day, and despite some heavy theoretical statements about Browning, to try a direct art of Browning's poesy. Despite his reticence as a self-explainer, Browning's own statements are not irrelevant. "The Essay on Shelley," as Thomas J. Collins well showed some years ago, offers an elliptic but often stunningly useful system of criticism for speaking of his work. "The Essay on Chatterton," too, as Donald Smalley and I have emphasized, provides ways of talking about Browning's poetic argumentation and his sense of his own development. We have recently had added to this Browning's rather wonderful letter of August 1837 to his French friend, Count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, in which he sketches his history of his own growth as a poet. In the study of Browning and Ruskin mentioned above, DeLaura, who gave us the unusually self-reflexive Ruskin letters, well used them to define precisely the similarities between Browning and Ruskin's poetics. Christine Froula's article, also mentioned above, has called our attention to the poetics that are somewhat more than half stated in Sordello. Her useful discussion in effect completed the statements of Sordello as a poem about the nature of poetry, seeing Browning advocating a turn from a Shelleyan poetics of inspiration to an exploratory and open-ended engagement with experience, in which the reader is involved in the process of making the poem. Her more direct attempt to formulate a poetics from Browning's agonizing self-inquiry into his art in Sordello built upon, or had clear parallels to, the excellent reading of the project of the early Browning that we have had especially in the books by Tucker, Ryals, and Latané.

Perhaps most important, Daniel Karlm's study of the letters of Robert and Elizabeth has amply shown what a helpful ring of keys they are to unlock both poets' poetics as well as their hearts. The problem was of course following their private, allusive, and especially elliptic (indeed filled with actual ellipses) way of discussing their ideas and aspirations for their poetry. Karlin saw Robert creating Elizabeth to take the place of the Shelleyan poet and then using this formulation to reestablish his own view of himself as different from this romantic idea of a poet who is the poetry he speaks.

By contrast, Browning is almost morbidly aware that he speaks not as the linnets sing but through the forms of poetry and the cultural artifice of words. Since Rader's 1976 article, mentioned above, there has been little work directly on issues of genre in Browning, nothing to compare with the earlier work of Donald S. Hair in Browning's Experiments with Genre (1972). Exceptions might be Martin's book, which as I noted brought various theoretical perspectives to bear in explaining the production and nature of the dramatic monologue, or the genre discussions implicit in reader-response approaches to the dramatic monologue. There have been few works—William Butts on Menippean satire in Caliban (SBHC 13:24-36) and Allan Dooley on The Ring and the Book as epic and anti-epic (BIS 15:137-150) are two exceptions—that look directly at Browning's parodie genius in recasting and replaying traditional genres with seemingly effortless dexterity and unlimited resourcefulness. John Woolford's recent book called attention to a special kind of genre in Browning, which he called the structured collection of groups of dramatic monologues.

There has also been nothing on the varieties of resources in language in Browning to compare with Park Honan's 1961 Browning's Characters. With some success, both Martin and Gibson risked making their already somewhat prolix books too diffuse in order to include chapters linking their general topics to analysis of style and diction. Gibson saw Browning's commitment to the objective detail of recorded history and to accepting life lived through history finding its parallel in a language filled with colloquial speech, hard, knotty, and difficult style, and the resistant "clayey soil" of specific words for real things, people, places. She then suggested a system of variation from this standard diction by which characters are satirized through grandiloquent speech or elevated by sincere lyric. This was useful for certain poems but, unlike Honan's study, it tended to reduce Browning's infinite variety too much to one plain song—that indeed of an essentially prose Browning. In a chapter on "The Being Written" Martin used a linguistic analysis, primarily of progressive verb forms, to show on a local level how Browning finds a way of communicating open-ended process rather than closed and complete being. As he acknowledged, this was a systematically formulated parallel to the similar analyses of processive effect in Tucker's readings of Browning's poems. Oddly, the analysis of individual poems is more persuasive, because it seems clearly to hold true for the poem in question. Martin's broader description of "typical" Browning linguistic effects left me uneasily aware of its unscientific form and uneasy about the intimidating computer studies, comparing Browning's usages to norms in other poets (or average great poets!) that could back a proper linguistic study.

Objective scholarship will always be with us—and indeed we have great reason to be thankful for the painstaking and careful labors in the vineyards of a number of biographical scholars and editors. The emphasis for the eighties should be on the fine work of editors. In biography there have been no full-length studies to succeed Irving and Honan's 1974 The Book, the Ring and the Poet or, if I do say so myself, my own 1977 study of the formative period and culture, Browning's Youth. Donald Thomas' survey biography, Robert Browning: A Life Within a Life (1982), merely retold others' tales, often without even using the latest scholarship. Gridley's study of the Brownings in France provided important new information and a gracious account of the Brownings' infatuation with France, Paris, and all things French. Korg's study of Browning and Italy, with less new information and a far less surprising story to tell, did recount gracefully Browning's once lyric, later somewhat tired love affair with Italy. The much briefer fling with Russia was carefully reported, with some important new detail, in Waddington's study. Perhaps most important, Daniel Karlin's reading of those perplexing and voluminous love letters from the Cherokee, also noted above, provided the best plotting and psychological analysis of the real courtship years that we have. We should be grateful for a number of other special studies in biography, John Coulter's (BSN 15, nos. 2-3:3-19) identification of the Brownings' residence at New Cross from work in local records; Richard Purdy's (YULG 61:143-153) gracious summary of the relation with Ripert-Monclar, now available in the record of the letters as well; and Meredith's Raymond (SBHC 14:32-62) well-researched and well-presented account of the Brownings' magnificent Maecenas, John Kenyon. These most illuminating stabs into the relative dark of Browning's biography suggest how much more could be accomplished through determined biographical research. Honan's treatment of the late Browning, my own of the early life and culture, and many of these specialized studies rightly begin with the assumption that the biography of Browning is not complete in detail, is filled with traditional myths and pieties that need critical examination, and is, like criticism, and despite its dependence on the good gold of fact, finally a matter of individual fabrication and interpretation—and thus always beginning over again with each new student of the poet and his life.

This survey of the decade's work in Browning studies, which seems to me to be reporting in fact some substantial new strengths, if also some relative weaknesses, in our contemporary current of ideas about Browning, is structured to end in any case on an upbeat. I have been suggesting how much more than we may like to think our critical approaches to Browning have grown out of and built on the tradition of discourse about him and his work. In the record of editing this is more obvious. The work of generations in assembling and editing the full record of Browning works and letters has been coming to remarkable fruition. The achievement of the last decade was striking. From its position as one of the weakest (and indeed even rather ridiculed) areas of basic scholarship in Victorian literature, Browning studies now stand fair to be one of the best and most sophisticated. And, as often, sophistication here has come in the maturing theoretical study of editing to mean both great knowledge and also a willingness to live in awareness of diversity and differences of opinion. Oddly, it was more lack of knowledge than of sophistication that brought Browning editing efforts in the 1970s into disrepute. The now notorious first four volumes of the Ohio Browning foundered especially over the ignorance of the entire Browning world about Browning's own writing, editing, and publishing practices and the location and even existence of certain manuscripts and revises. That lack has been and is still being rather massively corrected. Part of the problem was the incredible dispersion of Browning family letters, manuscripts, and books at the great Sotheby sale in 1913, at which the entire remains of the poet's literary life were sold off in large lots, often to other booksellers who kept breaking them down and dispersing them to buyers throughout the world.

Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, lately assisted in part of their work by Betty Coley, have done us all a truly major benefit in tracking down as many of these materials as they could and cataloging them carefully in two essential works of reference: The Brownings' Correspondence: A Checklist, published by Kelley and Hudson in 1978, and The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction (1984), compiled by Kelley and Coley. The latter completed this great task of reassembling the collection in catalog form in a magnificent way. It gave Browning students—both those of Robert and Elizabeth—a single invaluable source for locating manuscripts, proofs, revises, corrected copies, notebooks, diaries, address books, memoranda, and even all the known copies of Pauline. 2519 books of Browning or his family were identified—albeit some, here, as in other parts of the Reconstruction, only by booksellers' references—as well as presentation copies, association copies and manuscripts, and even lists of likenesses and photos, works of art, and household and personal effects, including 37 known locks of hair of the Brownings! We are now far more in control of the primary information available on Browning than on most other Victorian writers: a major, foundational achievement.

Kelley and Hudson, whose grasp seems surprisingly well suited to their bold reach, have added to this great work with the very solid beginnings of another—publication of The Brownings' Correspondence. There have now appeared seven volumes. All, certainly including the most recent (1989), maintained impressively high standards not only of comprehension and editorial accuracy—which we expected—but also of scholarship and annotation, where Hudson's work splendidly complemented Kelley's assembling and editing. The publication, a cost-efficient operation through Kelley's Wedgestone Press, has also been splendid: handsome, spacious, beautifully illustrated volumes that recall fine academic editions of an earlier decade. The generous inclusion of reprints of all contemporary reviews of the time period at the end of each volume has been a bonus that has already proven of great value in critical and reception studies, where we can all substitute our own appraisal of what the critics of the age said for the inherited, usually reductive and anecdotal, wisdom about Robert's reception.

With all this, the student of Robert may be nonetheless not a little disappointed to find how little of him has appeared in the seven volumes so far, where he is outwritten by his spouse-to-be far more than seven to one (volumes 6 and 7, June 1842 to October 1843 have, respectively, 19 and 7 letters to and from Robert and 147 and 225 to and from Elizabeth). Doubtless the Robert Browning scholar would have been better served for the early period, before the convergence of the twain, by one separate (and rather slim) volume, though already in volumes 6 and 7 some references to each other and different perspectives on contemporary events—for instance, Elizabeth's interesting comments on Macready's damning Robert's new play A Blot—show the eventual advantage of full com bined publication when they do couple. On the face of it, there were also few major additions to Browning's record for this period, perhaps mainly the letters to Ripert-Monclar that had been in Professor Purdy's private collection. Browning has been on the whole very successful in covering his early tracks. Yet just because of the scarcity of information on his early life, we should be doubly appreciative of the comprehensive method that has presumably brought virtually every scrap there is to proper publication. To take the most recent volumes again as examples, 9 of the 16 by Robert in volume 6, and 3 of the 6 in volume 7 were previously unpublished. If most of the new letters are, as typically with Robert, brief, unrevealing, embarrassed, or all three, they also often provide important new details for what are otherwise entirely blank months in the record or, sometimes, offer new perspectives—as the letter in volume 6 showing Robert asking Macready to help him divide A Blot into three acts from five and planning to revise the play "while the printers have it in hand"! The editors' inclusion of a further section of supporting documents is also helpful, but here probably they will find their record less definitive; I also thought the biographical sketches, often of well-known folk, usually unnecessary, though they might interest the casual reader, if there are any, of these volumes.

Complementary to this excellent, ongoing work have been Ian Jack's collection of letters to James T. Fields, Browning's American publisher (HLQ 45:185-199), and Michael Meredith's handsome book, More Than Friend (1985), publishing the letters to his affluent American Friend in his autumn years, Katharine de Kay Bronson. Meredith annotated these interesting letters carefully and also provided a graceful and informative introduction; I must say I was skeptical of his attractive thesis, that an autumn friendship was also more: an Indian Summer passion. The mystery of Browning's late romantic life would seem to be other than we naturally think: not who was he with after Elizabeth but why was he generally still with her (love, guilt, convenience, habit?). Daniel Karlin's edition of Robert and Elizabeth's Courtship Correspondence (1989) is an attractive selection, about one half of the letters in the full, monumental Elvan Kintner edition and a good deal less than that in bulk. It is a reader's edition, focusing on the love tale to the exclusion of much of the literary and other gossip. I am not sure why the text had to be re-edited: annotation is itself useful, giving the common reader much of the helpful perspective and analysis provided in Karlin's earlier fine book on the letters. Finally, Mark Samuels Lasner (BIS 15:79-88) ably provided the context for his discovery of Browning's interesting first letter to Rossetti in William Allingham's commonplace book.

As for manuscripts other than letters, Craig Turner well edited the odd journal of Browning's envious and rather untrustworthy cousin in The Poet Robert Browning and his Kinsfolk by his Cousin Cyrus Mason (1983). Turner impressively eschewed overplaying his material, giving us an objective and critical view of this document which, brought out otherwise, could have generated any number of new Browning myths, those hydra things. Another odd but interesting set of documents, the acting versions of Strafford, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, and Colombe's Birthday, published in facsimile, without apparatus, and too quietly in a Salzburg series by James Hogg (from the Lord Chamberlain's collection in the British Library), is now available from Longwood (U.S.A.) along with Hogg's companion volume summarizing criticism of Browning's plays. The edition complements Anneliese Meidl's (BIS 12:163-188) report of the Strafford text.

So much new information, very much including investigation in the 1970s of two separate records of Browning's revisions of the first ten volumes of his 1888-1889 The Poetical Works (the Dykes Campbell copies in the British Library and a list for volumes 4-10 at Brown) and useful commentary on Browning's publishing practices by Ian Jack (BIS 15:161-175) and Michael Meredith (SBHC 13:97-107), have improved, or are still improving, all three new editions of Browning's work. After the fiasco of the first four volumes of the Ohio Browning we have had a rare corroboration of Milton's faith that truth would not be put to the worse in a fair grapple with falsehood. We now have three acceptable versions of truth about texts of Browning's works and a fourth announced as on its way. The only completed text was that in the Penguin/Yale series of The Poems (1981) begun by John Pettigrew and finished by Thomas J. Collins. The two-volume text, which has already become accepted as the current usable scholarly edition for classes and most students, accepted Browning's last wishes as known by the volumes of The Poetical Works emended by his authoritative corrections for the second impression of the first ten volumes. The editors have implicitly followed Morse Peckham's persuasive argument, made by his edition of Sordello (1977), that editors must scrutinize the final text for printers' errors introduced in successive editions or even the poet's own repeated mistakes. There are corrections indicated, though perhaps fewer than one would suspect to be there. Annotation was a particular strength, with Pettigrew's pithy and often witty definitions throwing added salt in the wounds the original Ohio volumes received in reviews of their long, pedantic notes or identifications of Venice. The weakness of this edition was mainly outside the editors' control: Penguin/Yale had already issued Richard Altick's The Ring and the Book in the series; Altick's interesting reprint of the first edition is not compatible with the editorial principles of the Collins-Pettigrew edition nor does it pretend to full annotation. Penguin/Yale also did not find room for the plays; as part of plans to base a concordance on the edition, the plays now have appeared in a separate volume published by Garland (1988) and edited by Collins and Richard J. Shroyer. This is a compatible scholarly text, though again one suspects more errors than are found (Oxford found eleven needing emendation to Collins and Shroyer's six). They have not used some manuscript variants for A Blot and Colombe's Birthday on the view that these are not in direct descent; but Oxford does use them profitably. The annotation was competent, though neither as full or incisive as Penguin/Yale. The brief history of criticism of the plays is a helpful summary essay. The edition will serve its immediate purpose but is not likely to have the practical use of the Penguin/Yale text, which rightly has been having its day while the two editions in progress are slowly appearing.

Ohio has in fact got its act together and come out with a competent volume 5 (1981) of its Complete Works as well as two very useful volumes, 7 (1985) and 8 (1988) of three planned on The Ring and the Book, which has no other full modern edition. (Volume 6, despite some notices to the contrary, has not yet appeared.) Ohio now incorporates manuscript variants and has a good argument for its only slightly different choice of copy-text. (They use the second, 1889, impression of The Poetical Works for volumes 1-10 rather than 1888 as Penguin/Yale and Oxford, with the updated rationale that Browning's actual changes may amount to more than the two records of changes Penguin/Yale and Oxford use and that the later text is reliable because the plates were changed only where Browning called for changes.) They are now especially suspicious of the copy-text as one that may carry forward or create error. Volume 8 emends the text in twenty-two places and restores lost line breaks accurately. The texts in my examinations were very accurate, unlike the earlier volumes, and annotation was far better focused than before and yet often generous and well researched.

The special value of the Ohio text was in fact one of its features that first provoked most vehement criticism. By providing a record of all the variants, now from manuscript through earlier collected editions to final copy-text, Ohio gave each reader a way of establishing Browning's text at any point in its, and his, career. The implicit challenge to notions of an author as a solid thing existing at only one point in time, when his definitive text was created by his fiat for all time, so troubling in the early 1970s, now seems reasonable enough (pace, Professor Crowder). For different critical purposes we require or prefer different texts. Browning did not generally rewrite his texts as remarkably as a Wordsworth or a Yeats; but he did continuously innovate (as the original Ohio editors rightly noted). For our practical purposes we may have good reason to prefer the earlier Pauline or the manuscript of Paracelsus, the first edition of Dramatic Lyrics (as George Bornstein has argued in an essay in Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat, 1986), or, as John Woolford's recent book interestingly suggests, even to go back to the reordering Browning himself imposed on his dramatic monologues when he collected his works in the 1860s. Ohio gives us the kit to build the text we need: guarantee not valid if not used cautiously and wisely.

The Ohio editors plan—someday—to return to those early volumes and correct. Meanwhile Ian Jack and his associates have published three of the excellent volumes in his projected The Poetical Works. The copy-text was the same as that chosen by Penguin/Yale and it has been especially carefully scrutinized for errors by comparison to manuscripts and revises, wherever available, as well as earlier editions. Jack did not give full variants but he usefully indicated those that seem most important and clearly marked his own emendations. In the case of Pauline and Paracelsus, he published the earlier versions (Pauline, 1833, and the manuscript of Paracelsus). We were not given everything we might want or need; rather, and this is true throughout Jack's edition, we were given the editor's personal but well-seasoned and judicious choices of what seems especially important. (I might say I would have welcomed more parallel texts, say of the first Dramatic Lyrics or Pippa Passes, in volume 3.) Oxford's glory has been its scholarly introductions and annotations. Here Jack has made especially good use of the full biographical record available in the letters, published and unpublished. The introductions really update and replace DeVane on most issues relating to the works published. The notes are especially strong in providing a literary context for Browning, a particularly difficult task for a poet so concerned not to sound like his predecessors. And Jack has not been afraid to befriend the reader and help him through cruxes in meaning, especially in his fine notes on Sordello. Each of the three editions of Browning has notes with different emphases worth consulting. Jack's are, however, generally fuller than Penguin/Yale and better focused than Ohio.

In sum, I think we have great reason to be pleased with the development of all three editions. Penguin/Yale is already available as a very respectable text for the serious student, a great improvement over what we had in general use before, with sharp and lively notes. Ohio, back on its feet, offers an acceptable scholarly text, full annotation, and a unique library-in-one of Browning's different texts. Its The Ring and the Book is immediately useful as the only scholarly text. Oxford is on its way to being the most authoritative and reliable single text, the choice for critical work and the most helpful compilation of information on a poem. If this were not plenty already, we have plans announced by Woolford and Karlin for another text, in the Longman's Annotated English Poets series, that will feature publication of poems in their first printed form, a rival text, in effect, to that of all three other editions.

On this note, with such plenty of good editions on or in hand and promise of a rejuvenated, younger Browning to come, I will end this review. With all the controversy in our current critical, and even editing, worlds Browning has not been neglected. Our criticism has shown him as an especially interesting test case for many of the current critical approaches, or for their opponents. The good of this is of course that we are taking the problem of reading and understanding Browning seriously; we are challenging former readings and approaches, which go dead in any case with mere repetition; or we are being challenged to defend our positions, exhibiting the rationale behind our customary procedures. Major work in editing Browning has both made important new information and texts available and helped us to rethink more carefully our relation to those texts. Put all this in the time capsule and see what it will look like—important or minor—another centenary from now. The level of activity, even the amount of disagreement and excitement over it, assures me that Browning at least will survive for another hundred years.

Abbreviated Journal Titles

AUMLA

—Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association

BIS

—Browning Institute Studies (later VLC)

BSN

—Browning Society Notes

CI

—Critical Inquiry

ELH

—English Literary History

HLQ

—Huntington Library Quarterly

JNT

—Journal of Narrative Technique

MLR

—Modern Language Review

MP

—Modern Philology

SBHC

—Studies in Browning and His Circle

SEL

—Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

TLS

—Times Literary Supplement

VLC

—Victorian Literature and Culture (formerly BIS)

VP

—Victorian Poetry

VS

—Victorian Studies

YULG

—Yale University Library Gazette