The Bride's Tragedy and Death's Jest-Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

First produced: 1822, The Bride’s Tragedy (first published, 1822); 1850, Death’s Jest-Book: Or, The Fool’s Tragedy (first published, 1850)

Type of work: Drama

The Work:

Thomas Lovell Beddoes spent his life as a perpetual medical student, even after he qualified for his degree at universities in Germany and Switzerland; he ended his life by poison at the age of forty-five. Apart from two books of juvenile poems, Beddoes published only one work in his lifetime, The Bride’s Tragedy, which became a best seller in London when he was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate at Oxford. Early success with this poetical drama suggested to him the notion of “reviving” the English drama, a desire shared by many English writers between the successes of John Dryden and William Butler Yeats or T. S. Eliot—witness the impossible verse dramas of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Hardy. The shadow of William Shakespeare and the Elizabethans stretched long across the centuries, but unlike the Elizabethans the great English poets had very little practical experience of the stage. Thus it is that Beddoes’s two most complete works are verse dramas, The Bride’s Tragedy and Death’s Jest-Book, which he completed in the four years ending in 1828 and spent the rest of his life revising.

Beddoes enjoyed a competent income all his life and suffered no attachments. He seems to have spent his years on the Continent, between 1825 and 1848, as a graduate student and a political radical; a favorable rate of exchange and the reputation of a free Englishman made him a well-known figure among students and the secret police abroad. He seems to have been fortunate in his friends, especially his literary executor, Thomas Forbes Kelsall, but to have suffered a grand dyspepsia for life, of which he was thoroughly conscious:

For death is more “a jest” than Life, you seeContempt grows quick from familiarity,         . . . Few, I know,Can bear to sit at my board when I showThe wretchedness and folly of man’s allAnd laugh myself right heartily.

Beddoes’s long self-exile is perhaps the clearest indication of his malaise and the cause of his fragmentary work. He was unable to grasp the realities of life around him. A gentleman, a student, a foreigner, he sought an effective means of communication in a totally unrealistic medium, the poetic drama. Having little to say and no way of saying it, he turned ever inward, exploring his own melancholy and recording it in an outworn medium he acquired not from the stage but from books.

For all this perversity, eccentricity, and tragedy, however, no anthology of nineteenth century English poetry can afford to omit at least two of Beddoes’s lyrics: “Old Adam, the carrion crow” from the final scene of Death’s Jest-Book and “Dream-Pedlary” from “The Ivory Gate,” the title of a collection of the poems written on the Continent. Remote as he was from the country of his speech, the events and literature of his time may have been preconditions of his unique tone, which escapes finer definition, as does that of his place in English literature. The situations of his lyrics are always slightly freakish, for it is the style that marks their individuality. Along with much conventional language there are turns in the lines that can only be crass or inspired phrasing: “And through every feather/ Leaked the wet weather. . . .” The second line is ironic and realistic. This is the effect Beddoes was always trying to bring off, a danse macabre in polka time that forces his lines to try to outdo one another, often in a succession of compounds. When inspiration fails, crassness results. These terrible alternatives are more or less described in the words of Wolfram, which introduce the lyric:

        When I am sick o’ mornings,With a horn-spoon tinkling my porridge-pot,’Tis a brave ballad: but in Bacchanal night,O’er wine, red, black, or purple-bubbling wine,That takes a man by the brain and whirls him round,By Bacchus’ lip! I like a full-voiced fellow,A craggy-throated, fat-cheeked trumpeter,A barker, a moon-howler. . . .

There is more triumph than failure of these startling effects in the last poems of “The Ivory Gate,” and the range is much larger. Beddoes can satirize Britannia from a penny: “O flattering likeness on a copper coin!/ Sit still upon your slave-raised cotton ball,/ With upright toasting fork and toothless cat.” He concludes “Silenus in Proteus” with the wit, “I taught thee then, a little tumbling one,/ To suck the goatskin oftener than the goat?” “An Unfinished Draft,” beginning “The snow falls by thousands into the sea,” shows his lyric powers, as does the striking image in “The Phantom-Wooer”: “Sweet and sweet is their poisoned note,/ The little snakes of silver throat, . . .”

Similarly, it is the lyrics in the verse dramas that are now best remembered. The larger effect Beddoes was trying for by constructing plot, character, and situation never quite comes off; the fault mainly lies in the plots of the dramas together with their settings and the distrait emotions of the speakers. The two brides of The Bride’s Tragedy are Floribel and Olivia; the latter’s brother, Orlando, has forced Floribel’s wooer, Hesperus, to promise marriage to Olivia so that Orlando himself can wed Floribel. Hesperus decides that both shall be the “brides” of death. In act 3, he stabs Floribel when she keeps his tryst; as Olivia is preparing for her wedding to Hesperus his deed is discovered, and the duke orders his arrest at the marriage feast. When he is condemned to die, Olivia dies, too, and Floribel’s mother (having poisoned Hesperus with the scent of flowers at the place of execution) precedes Hesperus to the grave in a general holocaust that includes the fathers of Floribel and Hesperus. Most of the action takes place offstage, the characters making the most of the marvelous situations, such as a suicide’s grave, for verbal arias that furiously imitate the clotted passages of witty exchange in the Elizabethan play. The play is effective from moment to moment, but as a whole it is impossible. Much the same can be said for Death’s Jest-Book or “The Fool’s Tragedy.” Wolfram goes to the Holy Land to rescue Duke Melveric from the Saracens. The two fight over the love of Sibylla, and Melveric kills Wolfram, whose body is returned to Grussau accompanied by the duke, in the disguise of a friar, and Sibylla. There the duke finds his two sons, Adalmar and Athulf, plotting rebellion against the duke’s governor, Thorwald, and fighting each other for the love of Thorwald’s daughter. The rebellion is led by Isbrand, Wolfram’s vengeful brother, who has substituted a clown, Mandrake, for Wolfram’s corpse, so that when the duke, despairing of his present troubles, asks his African slave to raise the dead, first Mandrake, then Wolfram come from the sepulchre. The wedding of Adalmar and Thorwald’s daughter is planned. Isbrand agrees to marry Sibylla; Athulf appears to commit suicide by drinking poison as the musicians, come to lead Thorwald’s daughter to her marriage, sing the beautiful song, “We have bathed, where none have seen us.” The scene ends with Athulf killing Adalmar. In the fifth act, the events are quite complicated, for the ghost of Wolfram is seeking revenge and the conspirators have decided to kill Isbrand. Sibylla dies but Athulf does not. The conspiracy first succeeds and then is overthrown. In the end, the duke loses both his sons, resigns his crown to Thorwald, and makes a marvelous final exit, going into the sepulchre with Wolfram. The play is saturated with echoes of Shakespeare, both in the language (“O Arab, Arab! Thou dost sell true drugs”) and in the situation of a duke in disguise, and but for Beddoes’s obvious gravity the situation would amount to a parody. Many of the situations and passages play on death, but apart from a soliloquy by Isbrand, the “Fool” of the subtitle, they do little more than weave around the subject. The soliloquy in act 5, scene 1, begins:

  How I despiseAll you mere men of muscle! It was everMy study to find out a way to godhead,And on reflection soon I found that firstI was but half created; that a powerWas wanting in my soul to be its soul,And this was mine to make.

This passage carries the ring of reality and makes it clear that Isbrand is a persona for Beddoes, one of the rare moments when he speaks recognizable truth. In the “Lines Written in Switzerland,” after a passage that plays with the notion of truth, Beddoes again speaks out in what may well be his epitaph:

Not in the popular playhouse, or full throngOf opera-gazers longing for deceit; . . .May verse like this e’er hope an eye to feed on’t.But if there be, who, having laid the lovedWhere they may drop a tear in roses’ cups,With half their hearts inhabit other worlds; . . .Such may perchance, with favorable mind,Follow my thought along its mountainous path.

Bibliography

Allard, James Robert. “The Body’s Laws: Flesh, Souls, and Transgression in Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book.” In Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Allard examines how English Romantic poetry was influenced by the professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century. He focuses on the “poet-physician,” a hybrid character appearing in the work of Beddoes and other medically trained poets.

Berns, Ute, and Michael Bradshaw, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Collection of thirteen essays providing a range of interpretations of Beddoes’s work. The majority of essays analyze Death’s Jest-Book, discussing its representation of the body and the state, performing genres, and nineteenth century medical theories and placing the drama within the context of German revolutionary discourse. Another essay compares The Bride’s Tragedy to the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

Bradshaw, Michael. Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001. Describes how the concept of resurrection influenced Beddoes’s work. Bradshaw examines Beddoes’s relationship to Renaissance and contemporary Romantic poets, the influence of his medical training on his work, his search for immortality, and the fragmentation of his writing.

Donner, H. W. Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1935. Extensive critical examination of the writer’s career that includes lengthy chapters on both The Bride’s Tragedy and Death’s Jest-Book. Discusses technical merits, sources, and themes for each verse drama.

Ford, Mark. “The Prince of Morticians: Thomas Lovell Beddoes.” In A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews. London: Waywiser, 2005. Ford, a twenty-first century British poet, discusses the work of Beddoes.

Frye, Northrop. “Yorick: The Romantic Macabre.” In A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968. Extensive analysis of Death’s Jest-Book, establishing its place in the Romantic canon and discussing Beddoes’s handling of themes common to Romantic writers.

Snow, Royall H. Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Eccentric and Poet. New York: Covici, Friede, 1928. Scholarly investigation of the writer’s life and works. Includes chapters on The Bride’s Tragedy and Death’s Jest-Book. Points out Beddoes’s problem in meeting the requirements of the stage in both works, but acknowledges the author’s ability to create powerful scenes.

Thompson, James R. Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Introductory survey of the writer that contains a chapter on each play. Describes The Bride’s Tragedy as a derivative of Jacobean drama. Claims that Death’s Jest-Book is a satiric danse macabre. Explains why Beddoes chose drama as a form of artistic expression.

Wilner, Eleanor. Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Though somewhat eccentric in approach, this study provides significant insights into Beddoes’s works and shows how his dramas may serve to counter typical notions of the Romantics’ apocalyptic vision.