The Old Yellow Book: Source of Robert Browning's the Ring and the Book (Classic Reprint)

Robert Browning

1kg Limited, 2016 - Social Science - 390 pages

Excerpt from The Old Yellow Book: Source of Robert Browning's the Ring and the Book

The Old Yellow Book is the record of the court procedure of those seven intervening weeks, and shows us the whole legal battle fought to save Guido, while Rome looked on with the fascinated interest which has always attended the great murder tu'als. It includes the lawyers' arguments for and against the accused, together with a part of the evidence brought into court, and some additional miscellaneous data on the case. All this had evidently been assembled by the Florentine lawyer, Cencini, to whom certain letters included are addressed. He seems to have been interested in the case as a precedent on an important and much disputed point of law, whether and when a husband may kill an adulterous Wife. Cencini may also have had some professional relation with the Franceschini family at Arezzo. At any rate, he set the material in order, provided title-page and index, and a transcript of the record in a criminal case against Pompilia in the Tuscan courts (pp. 5 and bound it securely in the vellum cover which conveyed it to the poet's hands more than a century and a half later.

Whatever meaning this volume may have as a legal pre cedent, it had for Browning, and has for the lay reader, a deep human interest as the incomplete record of a sordid series of intrigues for certain properties, ending at last in a fearful crime.

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About the author

Robert Browning was the son of a well-to-do clerk in the Bank of England. He was educated by private tutors and from his own reading in his father's library and elsewhere. Browning's first publication was Pauline (1833). The work made no stir at all. The following year Browning went to St. Petersburg and from there to Italy. On his return to England in 1835 he published Paracelsus, a dramatic poem based on the life of the fifteenth-century magician and alchemist. Browning next attempted a play. Strafford was the first of the poet's dramatic failures; it ran only five nights at Covent Garden in 1836. An obscure and difficult poem, Sordello, appeared in 1840. It did a great deal toward giving Browning a reputation for being unintelligible and for limiting the circles of his readers. The most important event in Browning's life occurred in 1846, when he married Elizabeth Barrett. The marriage brought a new lightness and openness of voice to Browning's verse during the next 21 years, resulting in the great dramatic monologues of Men and Women in 1855 and the epic The Ring and the Book in 1867. It is not that these are the most beautiful poems of the Victorian Age, but they are the most perceptive; they reveal more clearly the men and women who speak the monologues, and the poet who conceived them, than any comparable works of the century. In the last two decades of his life Browning produced only a few great poems but much were grotesque and fantastic. He turned, too, to translations and transcriptions from the Greek tragedies; in spite of some powerful passages, these were not highly successful Robert Browning died in Italy in 1889. His body lies in Westminster Abbey.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Old Yellow Book: Source of Robert Browning's the Ring and the Book (Classic Reprint)
• Author: Robert Browning
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: 1kg Limited, 2016
• ISBN: 1334135142, 9781334135149
• Length: 390 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Criminology