An Ambivalence of Judgement and Sympathy: Introspecting Browning’s ‘Bishop’

Robert Browning’s poems have always remained an enigma as they showcase not only the problematized aspects of the protagonists ’nature, but also captures the ambivalence and dichotomy that is bound to rise in the mind of the reader regarding their changing perception of the protagonist. This paper attempts to analyse the subliminal problematics of one of the most famous dramatic monologues by Browning, ‘The Bishop orders his tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’ and bring to the forefront the problematic dynamic of the readers’ relationship with the dying Bishop in the poem.


Robert Browning's poems have always remained an enigma as they
showcase not only the problematized aspects of the protagonists 'nature, but also captures the ambivalence and dichotomy that is bound to rise in the mind of the reader regarding their changing perception of the protagonist.This paper attempts to analyse the subliminal problematics of one of the most famous dramatic monologues by Browning, 'The Bishop orders his tomb at Saint Praxed's Church' and bring to the forefront the problematic dynamic of the readers' relationship with the dying Bishop in the poem.
The key issue in Browning's poems, as Robert F. Garratt notes, is the distinct and deliberate strategy to have a character play a character in order to develop rhetoric of persuasion.In this regard, the dramatic monologue pits a character against a situation, which demands that the character fight for psychological survival.The distinguishing feature of this development is the strategy of the speaker aimed at duping or convincing his auditor of a certain image consistent with the speaker's world view.
'The Bishop Orders his Tomb' is the death-bed speech of a Renaissance bishop, not concerned with salvation of his soul, but with orders for his own costly, sumptuous tomb.Although he is supposedly a celibate bishop, it quickly becomes clear that he is addressing his sons, the product of a long-term relationship with an illicit mistress.
As many commentators have noted, Browning's poetry always commits itself to religious questions."St.Praxed's" is, of course, about a bishop's desire to convert himself eternally into living stone.He wishes "to lie through centuries, / And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, / And see God made and eaten all day long, / And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste / Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke" It might appear at first that the monologue's intention is primarily satirical.From Browning's firmly Protestant point of view, it is an examination of the decadence and worldly excess of the Roman Catholic Church in the Renaissance.
The title introduces the irony of the entire poem.Usually a bishop is a man selected for that office because he is confirmed in his spirituality.The Bishop of Browning, however, has spent his life acquiring possessions that might establish, not his spiritual, but his material eminence among men."At St. Praxed's Church" heightens the irony, because the church dedicated to a virgin martyr noted for her simplicity of life becomes the deathbed of a corrupt man and the seat of a projected splendid tomb.With a portrait of a sixteenth-century Roman Bishop, Browning may more clearly juxtapose Christian and Pagan traditions.Thus the "Jew's head" in "St Praxed's" is aligned with a "lump" of "lapis lazuli".Representations of John the Baptist's severed head had a rich tradition in the pictorial arts from the Renaissance through Browning's time.
In ordering his tomb, the organizing principle behind Browning's poem, the Bishop in effect parodies the Lord's command to Moses to build him a sanctuary: "According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle" (Exodus 25.9).
In The Bishop Orders His Tomb, our judgment is mainly historicized, because the bishop's sins are not extraordinary but the universally human venalities couched, significantly for the historian, in the predilections of the Italian Renaissance.Thus, the bishop gives vent to materialism and snobbery by planning a bigger and better tomb than his clerical rival's.This poem can be read as a portrait of the age, our moral judgment of the bishop depending upon our moral judgment of the age.
Ruskin praised the poem for its historical validity: "It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines"; but being no friend of the Renaissance, this is the spirit of the age he conceived Browning to have caught: "it's worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin." And yet for all Browning's directed satire at his St. Praxed's Bishop, the Bishop still elicits our sympathy.As Elizabeth Barrett noted after reading Browning's manuscript, "This is a wonderful poem I think and classes with those works of yours which show most power . . .most unquestionable genius in the high sense.You force your reader to sympathize positively in his glory in being buried!"The Bishop's speech seems a wonderful baroque celebration of sex, language, colour, ritual and the sensuous beauty of marble and precious stones: "Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.""And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?" The combination of villian and aesthete creates an especially strong tension in The Bishop Orders His Tomb, where the dying Renaissance bishop reveals his venality and shocking perversion of Christianity together with his undeniable taste for magnificence: "Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli, Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape, Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast . .." and again in The Laboratory where the Rococo court lady is much concerned with the colour of the poison she buys and would like "To carry pure death in an earring, a casket, A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!" Browning himself appeared to embrace something of his Bishop's "sensual" religious code as he entered his character.Browning's Bishop argues for spiritual meaning invested in physical experience.As Browning's Mr. Sludge memorably puts it: Religion's all or nothing; it's no mere smile O' contentment, sigh of aspiration, sir -No quality o' the finelier-tempered clay Like its whiteness or its lightness; rather, stuff O' the very stuff, life of life, and self of self.I tell you, men won't notice; when they do, They'll understand.(Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium,') The "sympathy" and recognized "glory" that the Bishop evokes rests ironically in his unapologetic aestheticism: his embrace of the "very stuff, life of life, and self of self."Browning uses his technique of dramatic monologue to explore -as he does elsewhere in his monologues -faith and doubt.In "Fra Lippo Lippi" we see once again Browning's sympathy for sensualism.Lippo suggests the importance of recognizing "The value and significance of flesh," to see, experience, and revise it in art.Lippo advocates "The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, / Changes, surprises".
Besides exposing and satirizing the religious corruptions, then, Browning's Bishop also underscores a sensual appeal that transcends the questions of ecclesiastical debate."Life is for action," writes Newman, "If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith."At the beginning of the poem the bishop is strong in his self-image of one who commands men: his rhetoric superb Browning indeed echoes Macaulay's portrayal of Pope Leo X with his portrayal of the Bishop of St. Praxed's Church.Like Macaulay's "lovely women . . .horses, newlydiscovered manuscripts . . .good judges of Latin compositions . . .and of statues," Browning's Bishop revels in the delight that is "the serious business" of his life: