1. Robert Browning (1812-89)

2. His poetry: dramatic monologues 1.taking fancy to Renaissance Italy; 2. dramatic monologues (his contribution to English poetry) in which he places his characters before the reader at some revealing moments of their life and let them speak for themselves, “telling the story from the inside”.

3. My Last Duchess A jealous tyrant Duke shows to the match- maker a picture of his late wife drawn by a monk artist, which caught her smile that brought about her death.

4. My Last Duchess My Last Duchess. Character analysis: The duke cruel, despotic,jealous, hypocritical, selfish, arrow- minded; The duchess gentle, kind, beautiful, noble-minded,democratic; The agent clever, silver-tongued,eloquent.

5. My Last Duchess Discrepancy between the duke’s opinion and the reader’s opinon of himself and of his late wife: In his own opion, he is powerful, noble, benevolent,but he is despotic and cruel. He thought his late wife was frivolous,but the reader knows that she was noble- minde and the duke is selfish and jealous.

6. My Last Duchess Form of the poem 1.dramatic monologue: a type of poems in which a character, at some critical moment,addresses an identifiable but silent audience, thereby unwittingly revealing his or her real personality.

7. My Last Duchess Form of the poem 2.This poem is in something like heroic couplet as far as the meter and rhyme scheme is concerned.