Fifine at the fair is not altogether such a poem as Bishop Blougram's Apology, Caliban upon Setebos, Mr. Sludge, “The Medium,” or Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. Of Browning's recorded statements of his intentions in Fifine, none is more revealing than his remark, preserved in Domett's Diary, that it was “the most metaphysical and boldest” poem he had written since Sordello. The adjective metaphysical characterizes the method of the poem as well as its themes, certain of which were a resumption, more than thirty years later, of the philosophical preoccupations of the earlier work.

To a greater degree than in the other monologues, the casuistry of Fifine at the Fair is a detail of the dramatic situation into which the monologue is set. The epigraph which Browning placed before the poem, a fragment of a scene from Molière's Don Juan, provides an analogue for the comedy which occasions the long discursive argument. In Molière's scene, Donna Elvira reproaches Don Juan for his faithlessness and sarcastically supplies him with a defense, an avowal of deathless devotion to her. Fifine at the Fair is its unnamed hero's rationalization to his wife, Elvire, of his interest in Fifine, a gypsy dancer whom they see at the Fair, and the main line of his defense is that proposed by Donna Elvira in the epigraph. Almost from the beginning of the poem, however, the defense strains against its dramatic limits, as the speakerdigresses on truth and error, good and evil, art and nature, to develop a relativistic philosophy of human knowledge, of moral principle, and of artistic judgment—“abstruser themes” he calls them midway in the poem, recognizing his own shift in emphasis. His philosophy of relativism, with its underlying sensationalism, provides justification for his interest in Fifine, and the sophistry of his special pleading for the truth of opinions that are convenient to his will is an extension of the hypocrisy of his avowals to Elvire. The monologuist develops both his philosophic themes and his account of the situation which gives rise to them in a highly metaphoric language which is wholly unlike the dialectical arguments of Browning's more typical casuists.