Dramatis Personae, like Men and Women (which it followed after an interval of nine years) is a collection of dramatic monologues, in each of which it is attempted to delineate a single character or a single mood by setting the “imaginary person” in some revealing situation.  Of the two possible methods, speech and soliloquy, Browning for the most part prefers the former.  In Dramatis Personae, however, he recurs, rather more frequently than usual, to the latter; and the situations imaged are usually suggestive rather than explicit, more incomplete and indirect than those in the Men and Women.  As an ingenious critic said, shortly after the volume was published, “Mr Browning lets us overhear a part of the drama, generally a soliloquy, and we must infer the rest.  Had he to give the story of Hamlet, he would probably embody it in three stanzas, the first beginning, ’O that this too too solid flesh would melt!’ the second ‘To be or not to be, that is the question;’ and the third, ‘Look here upon this picture, and on that!’ From these disjointed utterances the reader would have to construct the story.”  Here our critic’s clever ingenuity carries him a little too far; but there is some truth in his definition or description of the special manner which characterises such poems as Too Late, or The Worst of It.  But not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the style and versification, have undergone a change during the long-silent years which lie between Men and Women and Dramatis Personae.  The first note of change, of the change which makes us speak of earlier and later work, is here sounded.  From 1833 up to 1855 forms a single period of steady development, of gradual and unswerving ascent. Dramatis Personae stands on the border line between this period and another, the “later period,” which more decisively begins with The Ring and the Book.  Still, the first note of divergence is certainly sounded here.  I might point to the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than of mediaeval and foreign life.

The larger part of the volume consists of dramatic monologues.  Three only are in blank verse; the greater number in varied lyric measures.  The first of these, and the longest, James Lee, as it was first called, James Lee’s Wife[36] as it is now more appropriately named, is a Lieder Kreis, or cycle of songs, nine in number, which reveal, in “tragic hints,” not by means of a connected narrative, the history of an unhappy marriage.  There is nothing in it of heroic action or suffering; it is one of those old stories always new which are always tragic to one at least of the actors in them, and which may be tragic or trivial