The Ring and the Book
In Rome in 1698 a penniless nobleman stands accused of hiring four men to butcher his teenage wife and the couple who raised her, and pleads that she had run from him with a priest. Twelve speakers take the case in turn — the gossip of each half of the city, the accused, the priest, the dying girl, two vain advocates and at last an old Pope reading the depositions by candlelight — so that the same few days are told over and over from inside different heads. Browning built it out of a scrapbook of depositions and pamphlets from the actual trial, which he bought for a lira off a Florence market stall in 1860.
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