The Lady Carlisle of the same play—­a creature in the main of Browning’s imagination—­had the play been Elizabethan or Jacobean would have followed her lord in a page’s dress, have lived on half a smile a day, and perhaps have succeeded in dying languishingly and happily upon his sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards—­and as such effective—­than a Shakespearian piece of nature.  The theatrical limbo to which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ultimately troop, is capacious.

In Browning’s dramatic scene of 1853, In a Balcony, he created with unqualified success “a very woman” in the enamoured Queen, whose heart at fifty years beats only more wildly and desperately than a girl’s.[30] The young lovers, Constance and Norbert, are a highly meritorious pair, who express their passion in excellent and eloquent periods; we have seen their like before, and since.  But the Queen, with her unslaked thirst for the visionary wells under the palm-trees, who finds herself still amid the burning sands, is an original and tragic figure—­a royal Mlle. de Lespinasse, and crowned with fiery and immitigable pain.  Although she has returned the “glare” of Constance with the glare of “a panther,” the Queen is large-hearted.  The guards, it is true, arrive as the curtain falls; but those readers who have wasted their tender emotion on a couple of afflicted prisoners or decapitated young persons, whom mother Nature can easily replace, are mistaken.  If the Queen does not die that night, she will rise next morning after sleepless hours, haggard, not fifty but eighty years old, and her passion will, heroically slay itself in an act of generosity.[31] Little more, however, than a situation is represented in this dramatic scene.  Of Browning’s full-length portraits of women in the dramas, the finest piece of work is the portrait of the happiest woman—­the play-Duchess of Juliers, no longer Duchess, but ever

    Our lady of dear Ravestein.

Colombe is no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered.  Even the too fortunate Valence—­all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too fortunate—­will for ever be finding her anew.

In the development of his dramatic style Browning more and more lost sight of the theatre and its requirements; his stage became more and more a stage of the mind. Strafford, his first play, is the work of a novice, who has little of the instinct for theatrical effect, but who sets his brain to invent striking tableaux, to prepare surprises, to exhibit impressive attitudes, to calculate—­not always successfully—­the angle of a speech, so that it may with due impact reach the pit.  The opening scene expounds the situation.  In the second Wentworth and Pym confront each other; the King surprises them; Wentworth lets fall the hand of Pym, as the stage tradition requires; as Wentworth withdraws the Queen enters to unmake what he has made, and the scene closes with a tableau expressing the sentimental weakness of Charles: