Browning believes in Pompilia's innocence and her husband's guilt.
I believe in the guilt of both, but her adultery is no crime today, though it was capital then.
Half Rome may even have been right that the child was not Guido's.
Apparently, valid legal authorities at the time differed as to whether an enraged husband might spare the courts time, the executioner trouble, and the state expense.
Nothing in the poem thus far indicates whether Guido's faults as a brutal husband, at least - Pompilia accuses him as well of licensing his brother's raping her - , were ever recognized, and beating one's wife and marital rape may not have been crimes, then, at all.
I have read the poem before and I don't recall that ever being cleared up.
I have no idea why these Brits living in Italy took so much poetical interest in Italian family violence of earlier centuries against girl children - Pompilia was married off by her parents at twelve.
Think of Shelley and The Censi.
Reading Browning.
I note that many of the crimes that Islam commits today Christendom committed only yesterday.
Thank God for the Enlightenment.
So to speak.
About her parents, they seem to me a pair of confidence tricksters.
About the law of adultery and why it more peremptorily required chastity in wives than husbands see David Hume.
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