Answer: The line is question simply means
that the Duke ordered his wife killed. Now he is looking for another wife, and
the person he is speaking to in this dramatic monologue is a representative of
the father of the young women he is arranging to marry. He is showing this
visitor his art collection, which includes a portrait of his former wife. A
nobleman of the Duke's status had the power to have people killed in the period
in which this scene occurs. It is shocking to think of a man having his wife
murdered because she was too kind and
loving, but that is what this proud selfish, wicked man did. In Dante's inferno
the poet encounters francesca da Rimini in a circle of hell reserved for
adulterers, and she and her lover, the husband's young brother paolo, tell him
how they fell in love and where murdered by Francesca's husband, also a
powerful italian nobleman. This scene was commemorated by Tchaikovsky in a
beautiful tone poem titled " Francesca da Rimini" " My Last
Duchess" by Robert Browning is the most famous of his dramatic monologues
and also the most frequently anthologized of all his poems.
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