The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XII

In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Brownings known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Brownings life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture. A single work, the complex Aristophanes Apology (1875), comprises the twelfth volume of The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Second in Brownings series of long narrative poems based on classical Greek materials, Aristophanes Apology begins as a further adventure of Brownings young Greek heroine, Balaustion (previously encountered in Balaustions Adventure, in Volume X of the present edition). In a confrontation with Aristophanes, Balaustion defends her (and Brownings) favorite tragedian, Euripides, whom Aristophanes had repeatedly satirized. Aristophanes offers an ingenious, vigorous explanation of his motives and values, but Browning ensures that Balaustion claims the higher moral and artistic ground for Euripides. To demonstrate his greatness, she reads Euripides play Herakles aloud, in Brownings own translation. Brownings understanding of this play and its author, like his view of Greek drama overall, is both idiosyncratic and strongly held. He energetically takes up artistic and philosophical issues ancient and modern through his dramatized speaker. Many interpreters have noted that the charges against Euripides are parallel to Victorian critics complaints about Brownings own works, and that the poets justification of Euripides constitutes a vehement defense of his art. As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.