Description:
The headnote gives the most accurate and detailed account yet presented of the poem's composition, publication, sources, and reception, making use of hitherto unpublished letters and textual material. It enables readers to understand the poem as an object of study and take pleasure in its intellectual and emotional energies.
Review Quotes:
"The labour involved in annotating the poem must have been immense; the editors' collective knowledge of Browning's oeuvre and its contexts is unparalleled, and the result is an apparatus of extraordinary detail and heaviness. . . . To read Browning in an edition of this exceptional quality--by some distance the best available guide to the poem, and in many ways the best imaginable--is to feel confident of finding an answer to almost any question of the type listed in Cook's Commentary."
--Oliver Herford, TLS