Representation and Truth: Law and Equity in Robert Browning's 'The Ring and the Book'

“Representation and Truth: Law and Equity in Robert Browning's ‘The Ring and the Book’” argues for Browning's ability to engage himself with contextual Victorian legal matters (continuing debates about the limitations of Equity, divorce, murder and capital punishment), issues central to the Victorian period (see S. Petch), whilst recurring to a historiographic poem which is apparently both temporally and geographically removed but clearly linked to Browning’s England. Specifically, the paper draws a parallel between the Courts of conscience (Equity Courts presided by the Lord Chancellor) and the Catholic Canon Law courts of Italy presided by the Pope and their common forms of ‘discretionary justice’. Equity’s right of adjudication, based on its ‘arbitrariness’, had already been heavily disputed (J. Bentham) and still was heavily disputed (by J.S. Mill, and in many Parliamentary debates) in Browning’s times. All this brought in what has been called the “Bentham and Austin’s positivist legal agenda”, which led to the union of the two courts (Common Law and Equity Courts) ordered by the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875. Browning engages himself though indirectly with these issues, by demonstrating the provisional i.e. cultural, gender, regional, and historically determined notions of truth rather than referring to a putative truth’s essentialism which, as he points out, could, at that point, be found in fideistic terms only. Accordingly, Browning takes thus sides with the rational party. This standpoint is also applied both stylistically and formalistically to the poem itself: issues such as representation and truth – the structure of the poem as a juxtaposition of nine relativistic versions of the selfsame facts (the murder) which all vie and contend their plausibility – make 'The Ring' and the Book a prototype model work and an implicit statement for what has become a truism in much contemporary postmodernist fiction.