SOURCE: Pettit, Alexander. “Place, Time, and Parody in The Ring and the Book.” Victorian Poetry 31, no. 1 (spring 1993): 95-106.

In the following essay, Pettit analyzes elements of parody in The Ring and the Book, with which, he contends, Browning creates a pervasive sense of disjunction and absurdity in the poem.

In The Ring and the Book, Caponsacchi and Guido experience place and time disjunctively. They inhabit a series of environments the quality of which is obscure and their relation to which is obscure as well; they are dislocated geographically and temporally, awkward guests in a city and a century the particulars of which they fail to understand, or even, at times, to recognize. I mean to analyze various ways in which Browning creates what we may imagine as a disjunction of character and context, and to argue that Browning dramatizes this disjunction by presenting his antagonists as representatives of...