The Exhibit: Robert Browning's The Ring and The Book and Nineteenth-Century Archaeology

This extract is taken from The Ring and the Book (1868-9), one of Robert Browning's most intricately structured poems, and at 22,021 lines, one of the longest poems in the English language. It is based on a seventeenth-century murder trial (1698) in which Guido Franceschini was tried and found guilty of the brutal murder of his wife, Pompilia, and her parents, Pietro and Violante Comparini. Browning found his primary source, The Old Yellow Book, the book of the poem's title, in a market stall in Florence in 1860.² Together with a secondary source, he used the material contained in the old book to poetically reconstruct the 'true' story behind the murder.³ His extraordinary poetic strategy was to give ten speakers the authority to present their conflicting, often violently opposed views of the facts of the case: one hears talk of different kinds of truths, each excluding the other. As such, the poem is a critique of the authority and reliability of all human interpretation, including representations of legal and historical discourse.