+1 MrPedantic  [More info] Hello Clare That's a very good point about Fra Pandolf. Why not post what you think are examples of alliteration and onomatopoeia, and we'll check them for you? MrP MrPedantic Joined on Tue, Oct 12 2004 Veteran Member 12,705 ...opella forensis / adducit febris...

	+1 MrPedantic  [More info] Hello Guest I would read Webster's 'Duchess of Malfi' and 'White Devil', if you're not already familiar with them. It would help too if you looked through Kyd's 'Spanish Tragedy'. These will give you some clues as to Browning's context. MrP MrPedantic

	+1 aphonic  [More info] I am also doing a research paper on this poem, but I just have one seemingly simple question that I just can't figure out! Why does the Duke keep calling the Count's agent 'sir'? The Duke knows he is superior to this man, and at every turn trys to point it out. Please help! aphonic Joined on Thu, Feb 17 2005 New Member 01

	+1 MrPedantic  [More info] Hello aphonic, welcome to English Forums! In Western Europe, at the time the poem is set, it was customary to address anyone who wasn't a member of the 'lower classes' as 'sir', out of courtesy. It didn't have the modern English sense of 'addressing a superior'. Cf. the use of 'monsieur' in modern French. (Perhaps the Duke would also have addressed someone else's servants as 'sir'. Extreme politeness is sometimes a symptom of a sense of extreme superiority!) MrP MrPedantic

	+1 MrPedantic  [More info] Hello Guest 1) Browning is known for his 'dramatic monologues'. It's not quite true to say that he introduced the form; other C19 poets wrote monologues too (cf. Tennyson's Ulysses, for instance). But you could say that Browning made the form his speciality. His DMs often have a silent interlocutor (in this case, the Count's agent); in most of them the narrator 'unwittingly' reveals more about himself than he 'realizes'. (I use inverted commas because these are of course imaginary monologues.) Many of Browning's DMs are quite long. My Last Duchess is significant because: a) it's an early example (written c. 1842); b) it uses all the techniques that would later be associated with the form; c) it is short enough to retain a class's attention for 40 minutes, and is thus ideal for teachers and professors to use as an example of Browning's work; d) it is a densely packed text and thus lends itself to the kind of exhaustive analysis teachers and professors enjoy. 2) There are some comments about this on the first page of this thread. One way of understanding these lines might be to imagine someone speaking them to you, and then to imagine how you would react. 3) Again, there are some comments about the statue elsewhere on this thread. Good luck! Feel free to post any more questions. MrP MrPedantic