Overview

This chapter explores the use of poetry in drama, and will focus mainly but notsolely on Shakespearean and Renaissance drama, giving particular attention tothe use of blank verse as a medium for soliloquy, on subsequent developments inRomantic poetry where the extended exploration of thought in long speeches leadsto the emergence of the ‘dramatic poem’ (the subtitle ofByron’s Manfred) and on later attempts, notably that ofYeats, to revive the form of verse drama. The possibility of definitionaloverlap between this chapter and those on lyric and dramatic monologue isevident; indeed, it is embraced, in the spirit of this book’sunderstanding of the fluidity of generic categories. All three forms seek toexpress a speaker’s thought and feelings, with greater or lesser degreesof detachment.

‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense’;‘But do not let us quarrel any more, / No, my Lucrezia’;‘O world, thy slippery turns!’ The three openings come from alyric, a dramatic monologue, a soliloquy. All three speak from the subjectposition of the ‘I’; Keats calls up a complex emotional state of‘drowsy numbness’ that involves, as the cunningly positioned verb‘pains’ brings out, a state of intensified awareness that borderson suffering; Robert Browning uses a measured pentameter that sidles into thesoul of his ‘Faultless Painter’ (see the poem’s subtitle)to evoke Andrea del Sarto’s internalised sense of failure andself-thwarted constraint; Shakespeare gives Coriolanus a generalised idiomappropriate to a man whose moments of greatest understanding (as at the climaxwhen he holds his mother’s hands and is persuaded by her not to burnRome) seem to take place in silence. Each genre is in living contact with theothers.