They have not the qualities which fit them for representation, but they have those which fit them for thoughtful and quiet reading.

No one thinks much of the separate personalities; our chief interest is in following Browning's imagination as it invents new phases of his subject, and plays like a sword in sunlight, in and out of these phases.

As poems of the soul in severe straits, made under a quasi-dramatic form, they reach a high excellence, but all that we like best in them, when we follow them as situations of the soul, we should most dislike when represented on the stage.
* * * * * _Strafford_ is, naturally, the most immature of the dramas, written while he was still writing _Paracelsus_, and when he was very young.

It is strange to compare the greater part of its prosaic verse with the rich poetic verse of _Paracelsus_; and this further illustrates how much a poet suffers when he writes in a form which is not in his genius.
There are only a very few passages in _Strafford_ which resemble poetry until we come to the fifth Act, where Browning passes from the jerky, allusive but rhythmical prose of the previous acts into that talk between Strafford and his children which has poetic charm, clearness and grace.

The change does not last long, and when Hollis, Charles and Lady Carlisle, followed by Pym, come in, the whole Act is in confusion.
Nothing is clear, except absence of the clearness required for a drama.
But the previous Acts are even more obscure; not indeed for their readers, but for hearers in a theatre who--since they are hurried on at once to new matter--are forced to take in on the instant what the dramatist means.