My Last Duchess

In a dramatic monologue, the poet, like an actor in a play, speaks through the voice and personality of another person. Robert Browning wrote many different dramatic monologues such as those three particular poems which are known as, “My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover and The Laboratory.” The reason why Browning wrote his poems in that particularly dialogue is because of the certain century it was produced. It was brought out during the Victorian. In that century woman where treated differently then men. It wasn’t known as discrimination. The poems I will be discussing all a murder that occurs within a marriage or a relationship. This also shows how the author will kill off his characters. In Porphyria’s Lover he includes a relationship but that is not the only poem that occurs through the stanzas.

In ‘My Last Duchess’ the speaker is the Duke who is speaking to the servant of the Count so that they can arrange another marriage for the Duke and the Counts daughter. I know this because the Duke says “The Count your master’s known munificence, Is ample warrant that no just pretence, of mine for dowry will be disallowed; though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed, at starting, is my object”. On the other hand in the poem The Laboratory is spoken by a woman who is directing her eyes to an apothecary who is a chemist helping her make her poison. We can identify this “Why not soft like the Phial’s”, a Phial is a test tube and you can make an experiment by using a test tube in a laboratory.

‘My Last Duchess’ is set in Dukes house or either a gallery, we can tell this by “That’s my last duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive, and there she stands. Will’t please you sit and look at her?” The Duke describes how people are surprised by her seductive, passionate glance, and he gets very jealous when people admire the painting. He decides to hide the portrait behind some curtains and he acts like he still owns her in the way that he would own an