Both Edmund Gosse and William Sharp deny that Browning's plays failed on the stage; at all events, with each attempt there were untoward circumstances which alone would have contributed to or even doomed a play to a short tenure.
In 1886 "Strafford" was produced in London under the auspices of the Browning Society, and the real power of the play surprised as well as deeply impressed the audiences who saw it. But "Pauline," "Paracelsus," and "Strafford" all have a peculiar element of reminiscent importance, if it may be so termed, in that they were the forerunners, the indications of the great work to come.
There is no dramatic poem of Browning's that has not passages of superb acting effects, as well as psychological fascinations for the thinker; and the future years were to touch him with new power to produce work whose dramatic power lives in imperishable significance. "Strafford" had a run of only five nights at this first time of its production; Macready received and accepted an offer to go to America, and other things happened. Browning became absorbed in his "Sordello," and suddenly, on Good Friday of 1838, he sailed for Venice, "intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes," he wrote to John Robertson, who had been introduced to Browning by Miss Martineau. On a sailing ship, bound for Trieste, the poet found himself the only passenger. It was on this voyage, while between Gibraltar and Naples, that he wrote "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." It was written on deck, penciled on the fly-leaf of Bartoli's _De' Simboli trasportati al Morale_. When Dr. Corson first visited Browning in 1881, in his London home in Warwick Crescent, Browning showed his guest this identical copy of the book, with the penciled poem on the fly-leaves, of which Dr. Corson said, in a private letter to a friend:
"One book in the library I was particularly interested in,--Bartoli's _Simboli_, or, rather, in what the poet had written in pencil on its fly-leaves, front and back, namely, 'How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.'"
Dr. Corson added that he had been so often asked as to what this "good news" was, that he put the question to Mr. Browning, who replied: