Conscience lapsaire et science du lapsus dans « Fra Lippo Lippi » de Robert Browning

« Fra Lippo Lippi » (Men and Women, 1855) is one of the most dramatic monologues by Robert Browing. In this poem, the Italian monk and Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi is caught by the watch in the small hours of the night in a red-light district in Florence. Lippo pleads guilty in an ambiguous way. Although he acknowledges his past and present misdemeanours, he nevertheless endeavours to shift the blame from his shoulders in a self-justificatory speech aimed at subverting social and religious norms. He stages a paradoxical rhetoric of spontaneity, occasionally bursting into song, extemporizing in fictive dialogues making a series of linguistic slips such as euphemisms, re-readings of selected Biblical quotations, and carefully-handled Freudian slips, all devoted to debunking the arguments of his ideological opponents embodied by the Prior of his convent through a masterful use of irony.