Robert Browning's dramatic poem "His Last Duchess" leaves little doubt that its narrator, a duke of palpably tyrannical and possessive temperament, murdered his young wife himself or had her slain by servants. Her crime: a joyous and spontaneous nature that took pleasure, as any young woman might, in the myriad diversions of social life. Although the duke's fierce jealousy is aroused by the fact that
she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
he seems most incensed that she's no more impressed by the gift of his noble lineage in marriage than by the simple yet tangible gifts of other men. The haughtiness of this self-styled esthete won't permit him to even attempt to 'correct' supposed defects of hers that "disgust me."
and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse--
E'en than would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop.
Browning suggests the madness that lies beneath the duke's controlled surface in his belief that his wife treated him no differently from other men and implies his desire for a total monopoly of her attention.
Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.
With her death, the duke is in complete control of the image of his wife. No other man can view her likeness without his permission. Yet, he seems more than a bit concerned that the emissary of the wealthy count, whose daughter and dowry he hopes to gain, might be able to grasp the terrible truth in the evocative painting of Fra Pandolf.
The duke did not kill the duchess himself, but he had her killed. He tells the envoy who has come to arrange another marriage that
I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.
The smiles stopping altogether indicates that due to the duke's commands, the duchess was killed. We know from his account that she was not the type of person to stop smiling while alive: she had a natural exuberance and love of life and people. Certainly, too, she cannot be alive if he is trying to remarry.
The duke, as he states in his dramatic monologue, simply couldn't bear that the duchess was kind and attentive to people other than himself. He prefers her as the static art object she is in the portrait rather than as the living person she was, a young woman he could never quite control.
That would certainly appear to be the case. The count is going to marry his daughter off to the duke and has sent an emissary to negotiate the impending nuptials. The duke shows the emissary a picture of his late wife, the duchess. As he discusses the painting, the full extent of the duke's loathing for his late wife becomes disturbingly clear. One of the things the duke hated about his wife was the way that she was so easily pleased, shamelessly flirting with every man who set eyes on her:
She had A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast, The dropping of the daylight in the West, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She rode with round the terrace—all and each Would draw from her alike the approving speech
An even worse offense, in the duke's eyes, is the fact that his late wife seemed to place trivial gifts from other men on the same level as the ancient noble title he'd graciously bestowed upon her by marriage:
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody’s gift.
The duchess flashed her sweet smile indiscriminately in all directions. But that all changed for good when the duke put his foot down and started giving her orders. Then she stopped smiling altogether. The rather frightening implication is that the duke was somehow responsible for the duchess's death. What's even more chilling about the duke's rant against the last duchess is that we're not even sure if any of her behavior was real or imagined. It's difficult to shake off the sense that this was all in the duke's mind— that in his unhinged, jealous state he mistook his wife's pleasant demeanor with other men as evidence of serial infidelity.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43768/my-last-duchess
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