It has sometimes been said that the style of Browning is essentially undramatic, that Pompilia, Guido, and the lawyers all talk in the same way, that is, like Browning.  As a matter of fact nothing is more remarkable than the variety of style, the cunning adjustment of language and of rhythm to the requirements of every speaker.  From the general construction of the rhythm to the mere similies and figures of speech employed in passing, each monologue is absolutely individual, and, though each monologue contains a highly finished portrait of the character whose name it bears, these portraits, so far from being disconnected or independent, are linked together in as close an interdependence as the personages of a regularly constructed drama.  The effect of the reiterated story, told in some new fashion by each new teller of it, has been compared with that of a great fugue, blending, with the threads of its crossing and recrossing voices, a single web of harmony.  The “theme” is Pompilia; around her the whole action circles.  As, in Pippa Passes, the mere passing of an innocent child, her unconscious influence on those on whom her song breaks in at a moment of crisis, draws together the threads of many stories, so Pompilia, with hardly more consciousness of herself, makes and unmakes the lives and characters of those about her.  The same sweet rectitude and purity of nature serve to call out the latent malignity of Guido and the slumbering chivalry of Caponsacchi.  Without her, the one might have remained a “petit maitre priestling;” the other merely a soured, cross-grained, impecunious country squire:  Rome would have had no tragedy to talk about, nor we this book to read.  It is in Pompilia that all the threads of action meet:  she is the heroine, as neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero.

The story of The Ring and the Book, like those of so many of the greatest works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, comes to us from Italy.  Unlike Shakespeare’s, however, but like one at least of Webster’s two masterpieces, it is no legend, but the true story of a Roman murder-case, found (in all its main facts and outlines) in a square old yellow book, small-quarto size, part print, part manuscript, which Browning picked up for eightpence on a second-hand stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo at Florence, one day in June, 1865.  The book was entitled (in Latin which Browning thus translates):—­

      “A Roman murder-case: 
      Position of the entire criminal cause
      Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman,
      With certain Four the cut-throats in his pay,
      Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death
      By heading or hanging as befitted ranks,
      At Rome on February Twenty Two,
      Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety Eight: 
      Wherein it is disputed if, and when,
      Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet ’scape
      The customary forfeit.”