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RICHARD HENRY STODDARD, 1892

Deaths Jest Book is a nightmare rather than a drama, and should be judged, if one must judge it, for what it is, not for

what it might be, or should be. A law unto himself, Beddoes is the most lawless of poets. The scenes of his tragedies are laid

in the land of Nowhere, and the actors therein, if not wholly mad, are certainly not sane. They live, move, and have their

being in a borderland between the worlds of life and death. The prey of spasmodic emotion and unnatural passion, there is notelling what they will say or do in their fits of delirium, which are as unaccountable as violent. The specialty of the elder

Beddoes was the analysis of disease; the specialty of his son was the exhibition of disease in the actors of his gloomymasquerades. (Under the Evening Lamp, p. 211)

Beddoes made it difficult for those who wanted to cultivate his poetic career. He was as erratic as he was brilliant, habitually

solitary, obstinate, temperamental, always passionate, and ultimately suicidal. "Mr Beddoes / (T. L.) prince of morticians"

so Pound dubbed him (Canto LXXX)found his ultimate client early in 1849. After an unsuccessful attempt at suicide the

year before, using a razor to sever an artery in his leg (a mutilation that soon required amputation below the knee), he

prevailed with poison, ending his life at age forty-five. A poet of powerful, haunting imagination, Beddoes, like the othermorbidly witty poets in our volume, is most characteristic for his defiance of easy characterization. He has been slotted,

variously, as the last Elizabethan, a Jacobean scion, an eighteenth-century graveyard poet resurrected in the Romantic age, an

original interpreter of the English-German vogue of "Gothic" terror, the dark rear-guard of second-generation Romanticism, a

soul-mate of Baudelaire and Poe, the first modernist and, with his comic grotesqueries, a precursor of the twentieth-century

theater of the absurd. "Death's Jest Book" is an apt enough genre for a career of scenes and songs devoted to ghoulishly

comic effects, macabre turns of events, grotesque conjunctions, original interviews of the porous boundaries between life and

death. But "Beddoes is as good a poet as he is," Christopher Ricks suggests, "because the romantic, lyrical, and assuaging

things in him are as real in the best of his work as the antiromantic, harsh, and feverish things." [18]His mother was the sister of prodigious novelist Maria Edgeworth, his father, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, a Lecturer in Chemistry

at Oxford until his political opinions, including support of the French Revolution and opposition to the British government,created a scandal that forced him to resign the post. Beddoes pre then became an eminent medical practitioner and scientific

writer, a friend to many, including Coleridge and Southey.

In 1825 Beddoes left England to study medicine in Gttingen where he eventually received his MD. He

would spend most of the remainder of his life on the continent, frequently in trouble with the

authorities for drunken and disorderly behaviour and for his involvement in radical political

movements. He lived for a year with a Russian Jewish student named Bernhard Reich, who may be

the 'loved, longlost boy' of 'Dream Pedlary'. During his last years his companion was a young

baker named Konrad Degen, who later became an actor of note. A pleasant stay of seven years inZurich ended with Beddoes' expulsion on political grounds. In June 1848 he left Degen behind in

Frankfurt and returned to Switzerland, where he put up at the Cigogne Hotel in Basle; the next

morning he cut open an artery in his leg with a razor, gangrene set in and the leg was amputatedbelow the knee. Finally, on 26 January 1849, he succeeded in taking his life with poison, having

written the same day to his executor, Revell Phillips: 'I am food forwhat I am good for

- worms.'

Beddoes has often been called a 'poet of fragments', most of which are embedded in unfinishedJacobean-style tragedies. Their dramatic structure has the form of quicksand, in which dazzling

shreds of poetry sink or swim. His magnum opus was to have been Death's Jest Book, a kind of

bottomless pit that absorbed most of his creative energies during his final years. As in all his

plays, the plot is murky to the point of incomprehensibility, and the characters exist mainly to

mouth Beddoes' extraordinary lines, though they do collide messily with one another. One critic

has observed that they have 'the essential unity of dream characters' who meet 'in the dreamer'

and are merely 'emanations of the central idea'. All this does result in a bizarre kind of

theatricality, and it might be interesting to try to sit through a staged version of Death'sJest Book. Unlikelier closet dreams have made it to the boards.

Death was Beddoes' main subject, both as a poet and as a medical man; he seems relaxed and happy

only when writing about it. Pound (in thePisan Cantos) mentions 'Mr Beddoes/(T.L.) prince

of morticians . . . centuries hoarded/to pull up a mass of algae/(and pearls).' Any anthologist

is bound to include a bit of the former (the creepy 'Oviparous Tailor', for instance) as well as

some of the latter, and none can avoid 'Dream Pedlary': his most anthologized poem, it is also

one of the most seamlessly beautiful lyrics in the English language.

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Pound evokes 'the odour of eucalyptus or sea wrack' in Beddoes; one could add those of rose,

sulphur and sandalwood to this unlikely but addictive bouquet. Edmund Gosse, whose landmark

edition of Beddoes' work appeared in 1890, got it almost right in his preface: 'At the feast of

the muses he appears bearing little except one small savoury dish, some cold preparation, we may

say, of olives and anchovies, the strangeness of which has to make up for its lack of importance.Not every palate enjoys this hors d'oeuvre, and when that is the case, Beddoes retires;

he has nothing else to give. He appeals to a few literary epicures, who, however, would deplorethe absence of this oddly flavoured dish as much as that of any more important piece de

resistance.' One should qualify that by adding that in the century since it was written, the

little band has swollen to something like a hungry horde, avid for what Pater called 'something

that exists in this world in no satisfying measure, or not at all.'

Busy with a pursuit in which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty could not disown, he shrankfrom trying to reach vague eminences in poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something in his style that

recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard as one banished from a service to which he was not adapted, but

who has still a lingering affection for the land of dreamsas yet, at least, not far enough in the journey of science to have lost

sight of the old two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character, habits and ways of thinking; and

nothing but the desperate hanker for distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set me upon

rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any means become an important or great dramatic writer, I would

have never swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had devoted their lives to literature, such as

Coleridge and Wordsworthmen beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior poetical feeling andgeniushad done so little, you must give me leave to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and should

congratulate me on having chosen Gttingen instead of Grub street for my abode...It is good to be tolerable or intolerable inany other line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian!"

Thread the nerves through the right holes,

Get out of my bones, you wormy souls.

Shut up my stomach, the ribs are full:

Muscles be steady and ready to pull.

Heart and artery merrily shake

And eyelid go up, for were going to wake. His eye must be brighterone more rub!

And pull up the nostrils! his nose was snub.

This weird little poem is called Resurrection Song. Beddoes is often remembered as the poet of Dream Pedlary, which

certainly makes an attractive anthology piece. But if we were to choose a single poem to represent his achievement,

Resurrection Song would be more challenging and a better reflection of his style. This is an extraordinary poembrief,

brilliant, and brutally comic. Once read, impossible to forget. The fashionably macabre theme is rendered with an anatomical

detachment which recalls the laboratory of Victor Frankenstein, and yet the business of resurrection is also treated asslapstick farce. Neither the corpse nor the surgeon seem to know what theyre doing, and their incompetence is spun into a

frivolous ditty which leaves the imagined reader helpless with laughter.

Beddoes wrote Resurrection Song in Germany between 1825 and 1828 for inclusion in his satirical tragedyDeaths Jest-

Book. The character Wolfram has been murdered in the first act, and here in Act III a necromantic spell is about to raise him

from the dead. But by this point Beddoes had layered the complicated scene with so much irony that he seems to have felt the

song was excessive, and ran the risk of dispelling all seriousness completely. So he cancelled it, and consigned it to the

margins ofDeaths Jest-Bookas a fragment. Its stranded status is now one of its fascinations; as postmodern readers, we are

consistently drawn to illegitimate material that has been suppressed, rejected or erased.Beddoess comic style is so effortless that its easy to overlook just how extreme a statement the poem makes. To begin with,

its placement in time: these lines dramatise in banal, everyday terms what is either a religious miracle or a story out ofscience fiction (depending on your point of view)the moment when a corpse is brought back to life. The speakers are at the

very borderline between death and life. This raises all kinds of problems: for example, does the poem participate in any

religious orthodoxy, and if so, why is it so harshly irreverent? Isnt resurrection supp supposed to happen at the end of time?

and in that case, this is a conversation we could never overhear. The song is all about the moment of transformation, and

yet seems scornful of the miracle it describes. It is therefore both highly theatrical, and cynically destructive of the theatrical

illusion. For all its charm, one begins to see why Beddoes may have considered it troublesome, and removed it from his

already over-full drama.

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Resurrection Song is also a good introduction to the intricacy of Beddoess verse, with its relish of physical detail. For

example, within the rattling rhythm of the couplets, there are internal rhymes and other sound effects; the echoing assonance

of bones and souls (l. 2), the rhymes of steady and ready (l. 4) and Heart and artery (l. 5), the repetition of eye,

parallel in adjacent lines. This accumulation of detail suggests the intricacy of mechanism, as the human body is patched up

in readiness for its new life. A botched repair-job by rude mechanicals.

Resurrection Song therefore holds in miniature a wealth of Beddoess eccentric gifts as the most criminally neglected writerof the British Romantic era. It has a provocative mixture of theological and anti-religious content. Despite its absurd

burlesque tone, it speculates about human life, and searches for proof of an after-existence. Both the gross bodily detail, and

the anatomists love of precision come direct from the dissecting rooms and Beddoess medical training at the University of

Gttingen, where he boasted of his expertise with the scalpel. Its stranded status in the margins of that great dramatic

shambles Deaths Jest-Book is characteristic of Beddoess habit of hitting upon his most intense images in fragments and

miscellaneous pieces, free from the discipline of formal design, plot and characterisation. The poem is powerfully physical,but also undeniably metaphysical; a whole poem, but also a broken fragment of verse; tragic and farcical. It belongs in the

pastiche sixteenth-century theatre, and equally in the operating theatre of nineteenth-century medicine. In all its tense

contradictions, it is so much more powerfully true to Beddoes than the smooth and gorgeous lyric for which he is best

remembered.

Early fragments

Bury him deep. So damned a work should lieNearer the Devil than man. Make him a bed

Beneath some lock-jawed hell, that never yawnsWith earthquake or eruption; and so deep

That he may hear the devil and his wife

In bed, talking secrets.

AN UNFINISHED DRAFT

(from The Ivory Gate)

A thousand buds are breakingTheir prisons silently;

A thousand birds are making

Their nests in leafy tree;A thousand babes are waking

On woman's breast to-day;

[...]

Is born to man, to-dayBeneath the sun of May:

Whence come ye, babes of flowers, and, Children, whence come we?

The snow falls by thousands into the sea;

A thousand blossoms covers

The forsaken forest,

And on its branches hovers

The lark's song thousandfold;And maidens hear from lovers

A thousand secrets guessedIn June's abundant breast

Before and yet are blessed -

Whence, blossoms rich, birds bold, beloved maidens, whence come ye?

The snow falls by thousands into the sea;

A thousand flowers are shedding

Their leaves all dead and dry;

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A thousand birds are threading

Their passage through the sky;

A thousande mourners treading

The tearful churchyard way

In funeral array:Birds, whither fly ye? - whither, dead, pass ye?

The snow falls by thousands into the sea.

THE SECOND BROTHER

Act III, Scene ii

Marcello

Thou dost me wrong. Lament! I'd have thee do't:The heaviest raining is the briefest shower.

Death is the one condition of our life:

To murmur were unjust; our buried sires

Yielded their seats to us, and we shall give

Our elbow-room of sunshine to our sons.

From first to last the traffic must go on;

Still birth for death. Shall we remonstrate then?

Millions have died that we might breathe this day:The first of all might murmur, but not we.

Grief is unmanly too.

DEATH'S JEST BOOK

Act V, Scene iii

Wolfram: As I was newly dead, and sat beside

My corpse, looking on it, as one who muses

Gazing upon a house he was burnt out of,

There came some merry children's ghosts to playAt hide-and-seek in my old body's corners [. . .]

He had a theory that no man should devote himself entirely to poetry unless possessed of most extraordinary powers ofimagination, or unfitted, by mental or bodily weakness, for severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the

dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy as the fitting and inevitable result of combined

physiological and psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined "never to listen to any

metaphysician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and French

scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections withthe mind, and when protoplasm was still an unknown quantity toward whose discovery science was slowly feeling its way.

As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the arcana of anatomy and physiology his judgment of his own poetry grew more

and more severe. The more he knew of Truth, the nearer absolute perfection must that Beauty be which would compete with

her for his heart. Busy with a pursuit in which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty could not

disown, he shrank from trying to reach vague eminences in poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something

in his style that recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard as one banished from a service to which he was not

adapted, but who has still a lingering affection for the land of dreamsas yet, at least, not far enough in the journey of

science to have lost sight of the old two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character, habits and ways ofthinking; and nothing but the desperate hanker for distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set

me upon rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any means become an important or great dramatic writer,I would have never swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had devoted their lives to literature, such

as Coleridge and Wordsworthmen beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior poetical feeling

and geniushad done so little, you must give me leave to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and

should congratulate me on having chosen Gttingen instead of Grub street for my abode...It is good to be tolerable or

intolerable in any other line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a quintessential pot of the smallest ale

Parnassian!"

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There are so many racy bits of anecdote and opinion scattered through this correspondence, so many things worth keeping for

their own sakes or as throwing new light upon the character of their writer, that it is hard to choose a single specimen, but

with one more extract we must strive to be content. Beddoes' friend and editor had been trying to get from him some personal

details about his daily life, pursuits and fancies, which, with his usual horror of the egotistical, he flatly declined to give. "I

will not venture on a psychological self-portraiture," he writes, "fearingand I believe with sufficient reasonto be betrayedinto affectation, dissimulation or some other alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches are the result

of mere vanitynot excepting those of St. Augustine and Rousseaufalsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Halfashamed and half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his own deeds or geographer of his own

mind breaks out now and then indignantly, and revenges himself on his own weakness by telling some very disagreeable

truth of some other person; and then, re-established in his own good opinion, marches on cheerfully in the smooth path

toward the temple of his own immortality. Yet even here, you see, I am indirectly lauding my own worship for not being

persuaded to laud my own worship. How sleek, smooth-tongued, paradisaical a deluder art thou, sweet Self-conceit! Let great

men give their own thoughts on their own thoughts: from such we can learn much; but let the small deer hold jaw, andremember what the philosopher says, 'Fleas are not lobsters: dn their souls!'"

"Isbrand. Good-morrow, Brother Vanity! How? soul of a pickle-herring, body of a spagirical tosspot, doublet of motley, and

mantle of pilgrim, how art thou transmuted! Wilt thou desert our brotherhood, fool sublimate? Shall the motley chapter no

longer boast thee? Wilt thou forswear the order of the bell, and break thy vows to Momus? Have mercy on Wisdom and

relent.

"Mandrake. Respect the grave and sober, I pray thee. To-morrow I know thee not. In truth, I mark that our noble faculty is in

its last leaf. The dry rot of prudence hath eaten the ship of fools to dust: she is no more seaworthy. The world will see its ears

in a glass no longer. So we are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the feast of asses come but once a year,when all the days are foaled of one mother? O world! world ! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and now,

thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall ourgrandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own fool, and the world's sign is

taken down.

"Isbrand. Farewell, thou great-eared mind! I mark, by thy talk, that thou commencest philosopher, and then thou art only a

fellow-servant out of livery."

Isbrand is the brother of the slain knight Wolfram: his foolery is but the disguise of his revenge, and thus he rails over the

body of his brother: "Dead and gone! a scurvy burden to this ballad of life. There lies he, Siegfriedmy brother, mark you

and I weep not, nor gnash the teeth, nor curse: and why not, Siegfried? Do you see this? So should every honest man be

cold, dead, and leaden-coffined. This was one who would be constant in friendship, and the pole wanders; one who would beimmortal, and the light that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw window, undulated from its star

hundreds of years ago. That is constancy, that is life. O moral Nature!"

The Brides' Tragedy.

"a voice from the waters:"

The swallow leaves her nest,

The soul my weary breast;

But therefore let the rainOn my grave

Fall pure; for why complain?

Since both will come again

O'er the wave.

The wind dead leaves and snow

Doth hurry to and fro;

And once a day shall break

O'er the wave,When a storm of ghosts shall shake

The dead, until they wakeIn the grave.

Its a perennial question: If there were

dreams to sell,/ What would you buy? If

you could pick any single possession, any

future, any life, what would it be? And what

would you be prepared to pay, in money or

morality, for your hope of paradise?

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In Beddoes poem, a peddler sets out all

the possibilities that might be in store for

us. For me, the scene is straight out of a

Ray Bradbury short story or the TV series

The Twilight Zone. I can imagine walkingthrough a perfectly ordinary marketplace,

with people noisily hawking flowersand fruit, jewellery and clothes, greeting

cards and cut-price DVDsand suddenly

stumbling across a stall with a distinct difference.

How would we react? Perhaps wed pick

a few of the dreams up, gingerly sensing

if they felt rightwhether they were ripeor rotten, selfish or good. Would we trust

the mans practised patter? Perhaps, with

a wink, hed give us a special two-for-one

offer: fame and happiness. How could we

refuse? (But maybe theyd cancel each

other out)

The term peddler is somewhat ambiguous.

We talk, with a slight element ofsuspicion, of salesmen peddling their

products, knowing how easily we can befooled. The coat we thought suited us so

well in the shop turns out to have been a

complete hallucination. Too embarrassed

to take it back, we fling it to the back of

the wardrobe with a shudder.

What would we give the peddler in return

for our chosen dream? A passing

bell sounds a funereal note. And indeed,some people do die for an ideal, whether

honorable or treacherous. Others merely

give a light sigh and that sound, so quietand soft, betrays a whole lifetime of disappointment.

The rose-leaf shaken from

Lifes fresh crown could be a symbol of

love and rewardor the very second the

glory of existence begins to darken andfade.

I mentioned The Twilight Zone and

yet the dream-pedlary is a reality we live

with every day. Nowadays we call it advertising.

Billions of messages call and

cry for our attention, bombarding us with

potential visions, turning us into creatures

of insatiable wants. In fact, we have veryfew basic needsbeyond food, shelter,

and love.In the second stanza, Beddoes describes

his own dream. It is of a cottage lone

and still: a hope for rural simplicity. This

might seem a rather sad, dejected idyll,

and yet for Beddoes it would be place to

recover from melancholic stasis. It is a

place of solitude amid the bustle and clamor

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of lifetranquillity amid the frustration

of activity going nowhere. The image of

bowers nigh evokes a rich stream of tradition

within British poetry of the arbor,

the orchard, as a place of replenishmentand solace.

The world is here in shadow, but this isnot negative or depressive. The woes of

the mind going round and round in a circle

are brought to a haltand disappear. The

shadow, by excluding distraction, returns

us to ourselves. It gives us the courage just

to be.From darkness emerges light. From the

shadowy twining of trees comes a pearl.

This is the final beautiful outcome of that

slow, incremental process of intellectual

and emotional refinement called life. We

see this precious fire in the eyes of our

grandparents, who have weathered hardship

and misery, met it, and have attainedimperishable wisdom.

Stylistically, the poem creates a magicalatmosphere through its short, musical

and rhythmically varied lines, pinned into

place by just three rhymes in each stanza.

I particularly like the way the rhyme at the

end of the first stanza dramatically builds

up to the refrain and central thought of the

poem: What would you buy?

Do we even know the answer? Have wesuccumbed to all the second-hand dreams

clamoring for our attention, in the vain

hope that one day they will be ours? Havewe exchanged our true future for somebody

elses? It is only when we are alone

and still that we have any chance of finding

outand of finding that elusive pearl.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (18031849)

was a poet and playwright. An inveterate

dreamer, unable to bring his literary

plans to fruition, he eventually died by his

own hand.

Beddoes' philosophical take on life in the *hope-wish-dream scheme* becomes apparent of his own due to some personal

loss. This humbled him and dwindles his hopes and dreams to a minimum of wanting better health, physically or/and

mentally, while wagering the trust or hope of the life after death -be it resurrecting or mortal end with no hope to go on after.

I'm sad due to his last two stanzas being rather despondant, and unsure of the yank it has on him. It divides his desires andbeliefs and probably resolves to the latter of where the soul goes, but not without continuing with the 'hopeful' thread of a

DREAM. Thus....leaving an interpretation open to the reader.

"If there were dreams to sell," if indeed the dream-pedlar could bring us the dreams of our desire, how well we know what we

would choose; the faces that we would summon in our sleep, the paths that our feet should tread, the familiar rooms known to

us long ago, in which we would find ourselves again - if we could buy. Is there any key that will open the doors of dreaming

at our will? Any secret which would give us the power of choice or control over the activities of our sleeping hours? Elusive

phantom-like things our dreams are, evading the memory which would hold them fast, refusing often to come at our bidding,

however great our longing may be; but although this is true, and although we may never find any magic word of power that

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will give us perfect mastery over them, yet I am sure that there are some simple secrets, some methods that can be learned, by

means of which we may in some measure command them, and that, more than we yet realise, the control of our dreams lies

within our power.

Moylan focuses on Beddoess writing on death, arguing that Beddoess reflections on the paradoxicalnature of death and the afterlife tend to serve the purpose of effacing or displacing

crucial topics. Foremost among these, Moylan singles out the repression of desire, asplitting of effect and idea, that leads to repeated patterns of tragic love inDeaths

Jest-Book. Rather than using its thinly disguised homosexual encounters as a key to

the text, however, Moylan highlights the disruptive quality of desire, destructive

or monstrous, as it is transformed into dramatic substitutions and reversals.

Moylan finds this desire associated with states outside categorization or meaning

and thus linked to the fool Homunculus Mandrake, himself an appearance frombeyond the symbolic order. Both are analyzed with relation to the Lacanian second

death, describing the termination of the relation of the self to the symbolic order

that simultaneously allows the self to stay in contact with the fantasmatic kernel

of its being. Moylan regards this refusal of closure in the dramatized identity formations, the poetic form, and in Beddoess

self-establishment as poet as crucial

for the resistance to his reception, emphasizing, however, that the process of

effacement casts its own spell.

Like his father, Beddoes studied anatomy and physiology. His poetry often treats of anatomical subjects,

and there is one calledResurrection Song, which may allude to the notoriousresurrection men, the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare whose shocking murder trial in 1828 led to Burke's sentencing to be hanged

and dissected. So many students wanted to take part, there was a riot in which the windows of the

dissecting room were smashed. Some students are known to have taken souvenirs ofBurke's skin and had

it made into book-covers.

Bs Deaths Jest Book and Freuds The uncanny come out of the same struggle to come to terms with the

death drive. Ultimately, however, Deaths Jest Book arrives at Lacans rereading of the death drive in The

Ethics of psychoanalysis. Here, Lacan eventually identifies Freuds death drive as the unsymbolizable voidof the Real. For Lacan, the Real is paradoxically that ineffable, impossible thing beyond the experiential

reality of the symbolic order and the impenetrable kernel around which it is constructed.In the same way,

Death in Deaths Jest Book is both beyond individual life and material history, and, at the same time,functions as the centre around which the individual psyche is formed. Precisely in its paradoxical role as

ineffable, non-material, outside of time, and the essential truth of the psyche, death is the basis of socio-

political reality as it is constructed in Deaths Jest Book. Rather than the life affirming leap beyond history

conveyed in Prometheus Unbound, revolution in Deaths Jest Book reveals historys essence as the

compulsive return to death, understood as the ahistorical void of the Real.

Christopher Moylan claims that in the spring of 1827, Beddoes gave his late evenings to dissecting corpses

in the hope of finding the bone ofluz, associated in various Talmudic sources with the resurrection of the

dead. Bs interest in the luz is preserved in Deaths Jest Book.

Despite his early optimism, a letter written to Kelsall in April 1827 suggests that Bs literary and scientific

attempts to establish a principle of life have failed to materialize and thus dispel the power of death. B tells

Kelsall that I am now so thoroughly penetrate with the conviction of the absurdity and unsatisfactorynature of human life that I search with avidity for every shadow of a proof or probability of an after

existence, both in the material and immaterial nature of man. His search for a principle of human life hasbecome a search for an after existence. The search for what gives life meaning, that which will somehow

dispel or justify its absurdity and unsatisfactory nature, depends upon positing an after existence that

both exceeds life itself and yet can be empirically verified and discursively articulated as lifes most

essential, internal component. The truly impossible dimension of Beddoes project becomes clear, insofar

as the after existence that must ground life is simultaneously the a priori condition of its possibility and

paradoxically beyond its scope.

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Despairing of achieving his goal of finding an enduring principle of life within the body, Beddoes

recognizes the fantasmatic nature of the desire for a doctrine of immortality as a common structural

principle in religion, philosophy, and empirical science, in their attempt to repress death. This realization

allows Beddoes to reconstruct his therapeutic purpose for his play into a recognizably psychoanalytic

reading of death as the central force that drives both the human subject and history.

Man appears to have found out this secret (that of the doctrine of immortality) for himself, and it iscertainly the best part of religion and philosophy, the only truth worth demonstrating: an anxious

question full of hope and fear and promise, for wh. Nature appears to have appointed one solution

Death.

By suggesting that the secret of immortality is Death, Beddoes renders life itself an uncanny fantasm.

Teresa de Lauretis: Freuds figuration of an unconscious death drive...conveys the sense and the force of

something in human reality that resists discursive articulation as well as political diplomacy, an otherness

that haunts the dream of a common world.

Beddoes play offers a living semiotic display of Lacans rereading of the death drive, thus conveying the

critique of ideology as a structural principle that underwrites both the feudal order and the possibility of a

post revolutionary republic in Deaths Jest Book. If revolution hides its uncanniness the structure of

repetition that is the death drive Deaths Jest Book compulsively adumbrates its void.

Death and his Sweetheart: Revolution and Return in Deaths Jest Book by David M Baulch

Biographer Donner suggests that B suffered all his life from a skeleton complex. Suspects that his father

encouraged him to play with animal bones and dissected cadavers. Personal trauma in Dream of Dying?

Introduction to The Brides' Tragedy

By David Baulch

I. The Un-known author ofThe Brides' Tragedy

1. To fully appreciate The Brides' Tragedy in its early nineteenth-century context is to catch a glimpse of theThomas Lovell Beddoes of 1823, when reviewers identified him as a promising, if immature, playwright and a powerfully

imaginative poet. Within his own life, Beddoes's potential was never realized in print much beyond this brief recognition at

eighteen. Despite a number of attempts to produce subsequent dramas to follow the humble success ofThe Brides' Tragedy,Beddoes himself never offered another volume of his work to the British public.

2. The purpose of this edition ofThe Brides' Tragedy is to help to return critical attention to the brief momentwhen Beddoes seemed poised to become a major voice in what might have been a "third generation" of British romanticism.Contemporary students of British Romanticism may be aware of Thomas Lovell Beddoes as a writer of brief lyric poems,

songs exhumed from the bodies of his dramas, and for the bizarre, sprawlingDeath's Jest Book. Thus, after slightly morethan a century and a half, Beddoes's contemporary reputation rests largely upon texts that had no impact on the literary

culture of his day.

3.

Dream of Dying

Shivering in fever, weak, and parched to sand,

My ears, those entrances of word-dressed thoughts,

My pictured eyes, and my assuring touch,

Fell from me, and my body turned me forthFrom its beloved abode: then I was dead; 5

And in my grave beside my corpse I sat,

In vain attempting to return: meantime

There came the untimely spectres of two babes,

And played in my abandoned body's ruins;

They went away; and, one by one, by snakes 10

My limbs were swallowed; and, at last, I sat

With only one, blue-eyed, curled round my ribs,

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Eating the last remainder of my heart,

And hissing to himself. O sleep, thou fiend!

Thou blackness of the night! how sad and frightful 15

Are these thy dreams!

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