1535.

The Monthly Repository, with its Unitarian tendency, would have been favourable to this satire on extreme Protestantism.

Song from Pippa Passes (‘The year’s at the spring’)

Published 1841. Pippa Passes is a drama set in Asolo, a small town in north-east Italy which Browning visited in 1838. The concluding two lines express Pippa’s innocence, not Browning’s facile optimism, as the dramatic context makes clear (Pippa sings the song outside a room where, unknown to her, a woman and her lover are closeted together after killing the woman’s husband).

Scene from Pippa Passes (‘There goes a swallow to Venice …’)

The speakers, according to the stage direction, are ‘poor girls’, i.e., prostitutes, whiling away the time before nightfall. 22. deuzans Variety of apple said to keep two years (from French ‘deux ans’); junetings jennetings, a variety of early apple; leather-coats russet apples with rough skins.

My Last Duchess

Published Dramatic Lyrics, 1842. The Duke of Ferrara is speaking to an envoy negotiating his next marriage. The characters and story are not historical, but meant to be typical of the period of the Italian Renaissance.

Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Published Dramatic Lyrics, 1842. 10. Sake tibi Latin greeting. 14. oak-galls Growths on oak leaves, used in the manufacture of ink. 16. Swine’s Snout Botanically, the dandelion; insultingly, Brother Lawrence. 39. the Arian Follower of Anus, fourth-century heretic who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. 49. Galatians St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. The ‘great text’ is imaginary. 56. Manichee Follower of the Manichean heresy, a dualist (believing that good and evil are of equal power in the universe). 60. Belial’s gripe Belial is one of the names of the Devil. ‘Belial came next, than whom a spirit more lewd / Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love / Vice for itself’ (Milton, Paradise Lost I 490–92). 64. sieve Basket. 70. Hy, Zy, Hine Opening words of a magic spell, interrupted by the bell for vespers. 71–2. Plena gratiâ / Ave, Virgo ‘Hail, Virgin [Mary] full of grace’ (Latin).

The Pied Piper of Hamelin; A Child’s Story

Published Dramatic Lyrics, 1842. ‘W.