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7-493: The play consists of only one scene. The characters are two women: a "Mrs. X", who speaks, and a "Miss. Y", who is silent, an example of a dramatic monologue . It was adapted into a 1952 opera by composer Hugo Weisgall and there have been numerous film and television adaptations of the work. It has also been expanded and adapted into a forty-minute English-language zarzuela with a Madrid setting by Derek Barnes (2010), with text by Christopher Webber . This article on

14-460: A dramatic monologue vaguely reminiscent of Browning's work. Some American poets have also written poems in the genre—famous examples include Edgar Allan Poe 's " The Raven ". Post-Victorian examples include William Butler Yeats 's The Gift of Harun al-Rashid , Elizabeth Bishop 's Crusoe in England , and T.S. Eliot 's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Gerontion . A major study of

21-425: A play from the 1880s is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Dramatic monologue Dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character. M.H. Abrams notes the following three features of the dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry: One of the most important influences on the development of the dramatic monologue is romantic poetry . However,

28-414: A specific setting. The conversation poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge are perhaps a better precedent. The genre was also developed by Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon , beginning in the latter's case with her long poem The Improvisatrice . The novel and plays have also been important influences on the dramatic monologue, particularly as a means of characterization. Dramatic monologues are

35-573: A way of expressing the views of a character and offering the audience greater insight into that character's feelings. Dramatic monologues can also be used in novels to tell stories, as in Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein , and to implicate the audience in moral judgements, as in Albert Camus ' The Fall and Mohsin Hamid 's The Reluctant Fundamentalist . The Victorian period represented

42-663: The high point of the dramatic monologue in English poetry. Other Victorian poets also used the form. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote several, including Jenny and The Blessed Damozel ; Christina Rossetti wrote a number, including The Convent Threshold. Augusta Webster 's A Castaway, Circe , and The Happiest Girl in the World , Amy Levy 's Xantippe and A Minor Poet, and Felicia Hemans 's Arabella Stuart and Properzia Rossi are all exemplars of this technique. Algernon Charles Swinburne 's Hymn to Proserpine has been called

49-466: The long, personal lyrics typical of the Romantic period are not dramatic monologues, in the sense that they do not, for the most part, imply a concentrated narrative. Poems such as William Wordsworth 's Tintern Abbey and Percy Bysshe Shelley 's Mont Blanc , to name two famous examples, offered a model of close psychological observation and philosophical or pseudo-philosophical inquiry described in

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