Response

Barrett Browning's sonnet XXXVII describes the mind's failure to represent what it loves accurately: "Pardon, oh, pardon, that my soul should make, / Of all that strong divineness which I know / For thine and thee, an image only so / Formed of the sand, and fit to shift and break" — Barrett Browning. The counterfeit here is not malicious. It is the best the damaged mind can do — "distant years which did not take / Thy sovranty, recoiling with a blow, / Have forced my swimming brain to undergo / Their doubt and dread" — Barrett Browning. The porpoise set up in the temple-gate, "gills a-snort / And vibrant tail" — Barrett Browning — is grotesque and earnest simultaneously. The Pagan knows it is not the god. The Pagan puts it there anyway. The sonnet's apology for inadequate likeness is itself a likeness — the form standing in for a devotion it admits it cannot hold — and this recursion is where Barrett Browning's real argument lives. The counterfeit knows it is counterfeit. That knowledge is the only authentic thing about it.

Browning's 'A Likeness' works the same problem from the other direction. The speaker keeps his prints in a portfolio, fifty deep, and shows them to friends over claret — but the one that matters, "that sweet thing there, the etching" — Browning — is the one that makes his cheeks go red and his heart leap. "But hearts, after leaps, ache" — Browning. The ache is the tell. The portfolio is a system of display designed to make the private image look like one item among many, but the body betrays the system: waistcoat-strings stretching, tomato-red cheeks, the involuntary physical confession that this particular likeness is not like the others. Browning stages the counterfeit as social performance — the collector pretending all his prints are equal — and then lets the body's honest vulgarity collapse it. Barrett Browning's counterfeit is cognitive, a failure of mental representation. Browning's is social, a failure of concealment. Both poets locate the real in the moment the likeness breaks down, not in any successful resemblance.

Middleton's counterfeits in *The Changeling* — Franciscus and Antonio "slipt into these disguises" — Middleton — inside the hospital of fools and madmen — are the brutal version. They are sane men pretending madness, which is the opposite of Barrett Browning's problem (a sane mind producing an inadequate image of divinity) and the inverse of Browning's (a composed exterior failing to hide the real feeling). In Middleton, the counterfeit works. The disguise holds. And its success is what makes it sinister: the hospital cannot distinguish its real inmates from its infiltrators, which means the institution's claim to knowledge — that it can identify and contain madness — is hollow. The counterfeit that fails is a poem. The counterfeit that succeeds is a horror. What Barrett Browning and Browning both understand, and what Middleton dramatises as threat, is that likeness is most honest at the point of its own inadequacy — the porpoise in the temple, the blush over the etching, the moment the representation confesses it is not the thing.