The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X
With Variant Readings and Annotations

“The Ohio edition offers a virtual rare bookroom full of texts for any Browning poems where the determined critic can trace the author’s changing intentions and craft.”

Victorian Poetry

“The editorial policy of the Ohio edition has always been completeness, with the recording of all variants, changes, and corrections made by the poet himself, and these volumes continue that aim with admirable care and painstaking attention to detail.”

Journal of Browning Studies

“The Ohio [Browning] is everything a reader could wish.”

English

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 Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X contains critical editions of Balaustion’s Adventure: Including a Transcript from Euripides and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society. Both published in 1871, these two long poems take up a pair of subjects that held enduring fascination for Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: classical Greek literature and the career of Napoleon III, Emperor of France. Balaustion’s Adventure, which the poet characterized as merely a “May-month amusement,” was surprisingly successful with the reading public that paid more attention to Browning after the triumph of The Ring and the Book in 1868–69. His first poem since the publication of that masterpiece, Balaustion’s Adventure creates a charming and brave narrator who recalls in vivid detail a performance of Euripides’ play Alcestis.

Browning began a poem on Louis Napoleon in 1860, but not until after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870 did he attempt a full-scale portrait of the French emperor. As an exercise in self-justification, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau falls into a familiar sub-genre of Browning’s dramatic monologues. The most intriguing aspect of the poem lies in its biographical importance: the character and career of Napoleon III was a topic of sustained, sharp disagreement between Robert and Elizabeth Browning.

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

Allan C. Dooley and Susan E. Dooley edited Men and Women, Volume II and composed the editorial notes for Dramatis Personae, both published in Volume VI of The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Allen C. Dooley is the executive editor of the edition.   More info →