Brugière, Bernard <br/><br/>
A Misunderstood Poem by Robert Browning: “Aristophanes’ Apology” 

 -  2004.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> This study is first intended to rehabilitate the longest and the most unjustly neglected of Browning’s dramatic monologues, one of his most accomplished and revealing works: Aristophanes’ Apology. It is true that the reader is confronted at the start with different kinds of difficulties: Browning’s recondite scholarship, his use of numberless intertextual echoes between this monologue and the plays of Aristophanes and Euripides, the complexity of the time-scheme and the inextricably-embedded levels of enunciation. Built on a series of dualities and oppositions (comedy and tragedy, Aristophanes’ conservative social ethos and Euripides’ progressive one), the work offers an implicit parallel between the ideological, moral and religious crises of 5th-century Athens (B.C.) and Victorian England. Browning’s language is here represented at its most vivid and most inventive and his imagery explores different areas of sensibility and sex in a most uninhibited manner. Trying to hold in dialectical tension the arguments of Aristophanes and Balaustion, his heroine and speaker, the poet aims at an all-inclusive vision reconciling the paradoxes and ambivalences of experience.