The Browning Version Literary Elements

Drama/One act play

English

The home of a British schoolteacher somewhere in the south of England early on a July evening.

Although the play features no narration or direct address to the audience, the emotional perspective of the narrative is unquestionably directed toward audience identification and sympathy with Andrew Crocker-Harris.

The overall mood is somewhat elegiac, but avoids drifting into sentimentality through tonal changes toward Andrew that are by turns sarcastic, ironic, bitter, and empathetic.

Protagonist: Andrew Crocker-Harris. Antagonist: Mille Crocker-Harris.

The major conflict which underlies all the various narrative streams driving the narrative forward is the corrosively dysfunctional, emotionally sado-masochistic Crocker-Harris marriage.

Just after Andrew tells Dr. Frobisher over the phone that he holds the “opinion that occasionally an anti–climax can be surprisingly effective” the play itself proceeds to demonstrate just that opinion by climaxing anticlimactically with a powerfully underplayed scene suggesting that Millie has figurative committed suicide just as much as she had figuratively killed her husband.

The plot of Agamemnon, the tragedy by Aeschylus which gives the play its title as well as the book which Taplow gifts Andrew features characters and a literal plot which foreshadows its figurative working out in this play.

The final scene of the play showing Millie and Andrew sitting down to dinner is a devastatingly understated exhibition of the marital suffering which Millie has unwittingly doomed herself to for potentially the next three to four decades through her evil behavior.

The students’ nickname for Andrew “the Himmler of the lower fifth” is an allusion to the authoritarian nature of one of Hitler’s closest lieutenants and one of the architects of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler.

Imagery via dialogue is used throughout to implicate Andrew as being dead. He is described by himself and other characters variously as being “dead” and a “corpse” as well as Millie being “out to kill” him to which Andrew replies that would be goal “she fulfilled…long ago.”

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The three main characters are drawn in figurative parallel to their counterparts in the Aeschylus tragedy Agamemnon: Andrew/Agamemnon, Millie/Clytemnestra, Frank/Aegisthus.

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The opening scene of the play is unusual, especially for a one-act play, in that extensive stage directions are used to describe actions of Taplow upon first entering the home of his instructor and thinking he is alone and unseen when, in fact, he is actually being silently spied upon by Frank.