The Poetical Works of Robert Browning Volume IX: The Ring and the Book, Books IX-XII

Hawlin and Burnett present the final volume in this three volume Oxford edition of Browning's great murder-story, The Ring and the Book, a poem which Henry James called a 'monstrous magnificence'. Browning concludes his poem with the monologues of Pope Innocent XII and of Guido in his prison-cell prior to execution, and then the witty, ironic envoi of Book XII.

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The Ring and the Book, Browning's 21,000 line epic, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. This is the third, and final, volume of the Oxford edition covering this work, comprising the monologue of Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, and then the glowing conclusion to the work as a whole: the monologues of Pope Innocent XII and of Guido in his prison-cell prior to execution, and then the witty, ironic envoi of Book XII. The commentary in this edition contains a wealth of new contextual material that illuminates Browning's work in sometimes surprising ways. The copy text of 1888-9, the final edition of Browning's lifetime, has been scrupulously examined, both in relation to compositors' errors, and Browning's own final corrections to the text: eighty-nine emendations to accidentals, and nineteen emendations to substantives, produce a text as near as possible to Browning's final intentions. Appendix A presents previously unknown source material, concerning the 'cadaver synod' of 897, from Browning's father's historical notebooks. The Afterword gives a fresh view of the real history of the Franceschini murder case, based on new research in the archives in Arezzo.