In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

Volume II contains Browning’s play, Strafford: An Historical Tragedy (1837), and the long poem, Sordello (1840). Strafford was Browning’s first play, based on the tragic life of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. The editors note that the play had only four performances, “undoubtedly due… to its esoteric subject and bad acting.” Sordello is a fictionalized version of the life of Sordello da Goito, a 13th century Italian troubadour. The poem itself was famously known for being “difficult.”

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

The sixth in the projected seventeen-volume work, this volume covers the second half of Men and Women (1855), perhaps Browning’s most famous collection, and the entirety of Dramatis Personae (1864), the first book Browning produced after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861.

Men and Women II contains several great dramatic poems on which Browning’s reputation still depends, including “Andrea del Sarto,” “Saul,” and “Cleon.” It also includes the more intimate and personal works “The Guardian Angel” and “One Word More,” as well as the mysterious “Women and Roses.” The Brownings‘ shared interests in Renaissance art and nineteenth-century Italian politics inform the challenging “Old Pictures in Florence.”

The publication of Dramatis Personae was a key event in the rapid rise of Browning’s fame in the 1860s, though the collection is marked by a welter of conflicting impulses that arose after the poet left Italy and his married life behind. The classic monologues “Rabbi Ben Ezra” and “Abt Vogler” are here, but beside them Browning placed the nearly surreal “Caliban upon Setebos” and the achingly self-regarding “James Lee’s Wife,” one of the volume’s handful of dramatic lyrics about betrayed or failed relationships. Also included are “A Death in the Desert,” which contributed to the intense Victorian debate about scriptural validity and religious authority; and “Mr Sludge, ’The Medium,‘” Browning’s ferocious, pyrotechnic exposé of a spiritualist fraud.

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.

Volume XIV of The Complete Works of Robert Browning records a transition in the poet’s career. With The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877), Browning ended his experiments with classical sources, creating his “transcript” — not quite a translation — of the Greek original and providing an intriguing explanation for his approach. La Saisiaz, the deeply personal expression of Browning’s shock at the sudden death of a dear friend, was published in 1878 with The Two Poets of Croisic, an extended ironic meditation on literary fame. Browning’s collection of six poems under the title Dramatic Idyls (1879) marks the poet’s return to the dramatic forms he perfected in Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, and a revival of his interest in the psychology of motives.

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.