Like Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley before him, Thomas Lovell Beddoes published, before the age of twenty, a literary work of extreme horror that touches the dark underside of the Romantic imagination. Unlike The Monk and Frankenstein, however, The Brides' Tragedy has rarely been studied seriously, partly because it is a poetic drama (a genre out of favor with most scholars and critics of Romanticism), and partly because of numerous technical or expository weaknesses, especially in its handling of the motives for action and in its imbalance of dialogue and action. The few scholars who have admired and studied the drama systematically have not attempted to establish its place within Romanticism, explaining it, instead, either as a throwback to Jacobean tragedy or as an example of the death of the Romantic imagination, rather than as a work produced within, and shaped by, the Romantic situation itself.¹

In the following pages I want to approach The Brides' Tragedy historically in an attempt to show that, despite its many obvious deficiencies and its perceived marginal status among the literature of the period, it powerfully registers the conditions under which it was produced. Not only does it capture the turmoil and anxiety of a once-stable social world on the verge of historical marginalization and extinction; it painfully articulates the loneliness, fear, and dread which haunt Romantic literature particularly after 1815, when both the apocalyptic hope for a utopian society and—at the other extreme—the nostalgic desire for a return to an aristocratic and feudal world had been irrevocably dashed.² To consider The Brides' Tragedy as both a product and expression of this historical predicament is to begin to understand its important place in the literature of Romanticism, and (in a larger sense) to glimpse what scholars are beginning to learn about the gothic works of Lewis and Mary Shelley, namely that the less privileged literary forms of the period—drama and gothic fiction³—often provide an indispensable means of understanding the crises of social forms and relations that both energize and limit the Romantic imagination.⁴

Situating The Brides' Tragedy historically requires at least a brief consideration of what happened to drama as a literary form during the Romantic period. Raymond Williams's work on the history of drama provides the most important basis for addressing this issue. According to Williams, the changes in the nature of drama and particularly the historical decline of drama as an aesthetic form in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries correspond directly to the crisis of social class, which involved the overthrow of the aristocracy by industrial capitalism and the emergence of a new social order governed by the middle class. This large sociocultural transformation, Williams argues, “broke up the old forms, which rested on meanings and interests that had decayed,”⁵ weakening, or exhausting, the powerfully expressive voice that once had characterized drama in England. Since the Renaissance, drama had been one means of articulating the consciousness of an aristocratic worldview, but it could not be reformulated by artists to describe fully and effectively the new class consciousness coming to maturation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This devastation of dramatic form, however, does not render Romantic drama insignificant. In fact it opens an aesthetic space within the drama of the period where certain important historical dimensions of culture and society become accessible. Marks of social crisis are seen in the fact that, at the level of plot, Romantic drama often portrays (as Renaissance drama had done) the actions of an aristocratic class, while, at another, deeper level, it betrays (to a much greater extent than Renaissance drama) a powerfully antagonistic bourgeois consciousness that denies aristocratic authority. This conflict between an aristocratic subject matter and a bourgeois sensibility reflects one of the key features of the Romantic historical moment, the difficult struggle of one social class to overthrow and replace another. While even in its closet form Romantic drama could not be made literarily suitable for articulating the triumph of a new social order, it nonetheless discloses the tensions, anxieties, and ideological struggles surrounding that triumph. Thus, while the conflict between a dying feudalism and an emergent industrial capitalism perhaps took its toll on drama, undoing its status as a premier aesthetic form in British literary history, at the same time it made drama critical to our understanding of both social and literary history, because in this form the class struggle and many of the personal and public crises corresponding to this struggle play themselves out.⁶

The Brides' Tragedy offers an excellent example of Williams's general description of how Romantic drama attempts to formulate the conflict between aristocratic authority and a bourgeois political unconscious, capturing not only the painful transformations of social class, but also the connections between those transformations and relations of gender. In turning now to investigate the dimensions of this conflict, I bracket out, for the most part, questions of biography, psychology, and stage history (hence running the risk of duplicating the Romantic ideological tendency—seen most clearly in the critical writings of Lamb⁷—of reducing drama to literary text), not because these are unimportant, but because I want to focus on the network of social relations contained within the dramatic form, particularly on the way the drama portrays the decline of aristocracy, and the sense of loneliness, confusion, dread, and alienation accompanying that decline. The narrower concerns of biography and the larger concerns of stage history can and should be grafted on to the arguments offered here as part of the social history of drama.⁸

The extreme self-consciousness of The Brides' Tragedy about matters of social class places it squarely in the center of Romantic bourgeois drama. Despite its plot-level attention exclusively to the aristocracy, it never escapes entirely class anxiety and even class hysteria. While class struggle is never described or even implied as the cause of disruption and then of tragedy, its traces are everywhere in the action and in the network of social relations governing those actions. Changes in consciousness, crises in ordinary social institutions, and a generally increasing aristocratic vulnerability that promotes its own demise all point to turmoil larger than any individual character and larger even than the aristocracy itself.

The most immediate indicator of the class dimension of the drama is Hesperus's father, Lord Ernest, whose changing individual situation from beginning to end marks the larger social direction of change in the drama. The opening description of Lord Ernest establishes him as an aristocrat deeply in debt to another, greater, aristocrat, the deceased father of Orlando. This description is followed immediately by the incarceration of Lord Ernest by Orlando, who uses the imprisonment to persuade Hesperus (Lord Ernest's son) to give up his claim on Floribel, whom Orlando loves. When Orlando wins his purpose, Lord Ernest is released to become adopted into the Orlando estate, his outward integrity restored but his real power lost, as his position depends entirely on the mercy of Orlando. In the final scenes of the drama, after Hesperus spoils the compromise of the house of Lord Ernest and the house of Orlando by murdering Floribel, Lord Ernest reappears in peasant dress, telling his doomed son that “Henceforth I'll live / Those bitter days that Providence decrees me / In toil and poverty” (V.iv.50-52).⁹

The decline of Lord Ernest's fortunes, and the difficulties accompanying that decline, may be seen as emblematic of the larger social and ideological deterioration of his world, of the ineluctable fragmentation and ultimate defeat of the aristocratic ruling class. All other actions and attitudes, though some are less explicitly class-bound than Lord Ernest's, are marked by class anxiety, by an attempt to preserve aristocratic hierarchy, order, and value, or by a desire to find some means of personal escape from certain class extinction—by the same needs and desires, that is, seen in the portrayal of Lord Ernest. The Duke's legal authority, Orlando's devious legal strategies, Hesperus's deranged behavior, Floribel's extreme sensitivity about money and social status: all of these, in ways that we shall see, develop within and against an exhausted feudal world that claims authority as its own even while it is unable to exercise that authority fully. Like Lord Ernest, the other characters in the drama can neither arrest nor avoid the fragmentation and death of their world, nor prevent the emergence of a new network of social beliefs, values, and relations.

To implicate all other characters—many of whom seem relatively autonomous through the course of the drama—in the same process of decline and defeat seen clearly in Lord Ernest's fortunes is not to argue that every individual character is more or less a passive carrier of invisible historical and social structures over which he or she has no control. It is simply to make the dialectical point that individual actions and choices are made within real social situations. Thus, for instance, while Lord Ernest cannot be said to cause the peculiar course of events in which he is caught, he is not entirely innocent of them, either, as his pathetic demands on his son to wed Olivia show. Nor, on the other hand, can Hesperus be viewed as the sole source of the drama's villainy (even though he certainly is not innocent), because his actions are motivated, at least in part, by the demands of his father's estate to marry Olivia. Lord Ernest and Hesperus, along with all other characters in the drama, are both agents and products; the larger social world is distilled in them even as it is partly created by them. On this view, the weight of Lord Ernest's individual history, like that of the other characters, is also the weight of social history, and it is played out both in terms of his individual needs and desires, and in terms of the sweeping network of relations undergirding his situation and that of the other characters.

Some additional plot-level matters help to establish the historical bind that the drama articulates, and particularly the class dimension of this historical bind. Most important among these is the fact that Floribel, whom Hesperus has secretly married, is extremely anxious about her “homely breeding” (I.i.78), and what this may mean for her relationship with her new husband. She desperately desires to have this anxiety laid to rest by public acknowledgment of her marriage and by the “blessing” (I.i.79) of Hesperus's father, acts which presumably would seal the love between Hesperus and Floribel by providing their marriage with social meaning. Much later in the drama, after Hesperus thinks he has caught her in an adulterous situation, Floribel maintains that her difficulties have less to do with her husband's character than with her own socially inferior position, and her confused effort to think through this social difficulty leads her to desire at once more wealth for her own family and less for Hesperus's family. As she tells her mother:

Floribel: Dear mother, I will strive to be at ease,
          If you desire; but melancholy thoughts
          Are poor dissemblers. How I wish we owned
          The wealth we've lost.
Lenora:          Why girl, I never heard
          One such regret escape your lips before;
          Has not your Hesperus enough?
Floribel:          Too much;
          If he were even poorer than ourselves,
          I'd almost love him better. For, methinks,
          It seemed a covetous spirit urged me on,
          Craving to be received his bride. I hope
          He did not think so; if he does, I'll tell him
          I will not share his wealth.

(III.ii.28-39)

These and other comments by Floribel, though prompted and colored by intense personal anxiety, describe perfectly her understanding of the class and economic forces that both push her marriage into secrecy and drive her husband to unpredictability. And, as in the case of Lord Ernest, these forces generate (or throw into relief), without any ability to fulfill, Floribel's various personal needs and desires. The result is even further anxiety, confusion, and finally (for Floribel) death.

The class and economic realities to which Floribel's comments direct attention help to elucidate Hesperus's villainy, providing a social framework for understanding his madness. Hesperus's socially superior position demands that he secure that position by marrying upward rather than downward, and this prevents him from publicly acknowledging his relationship to Floribel. In hiding his marriage for reasons of social class and respectability, Hesperus becomes even more a victim of class demand, to the point where his personal identity is entangled in a life-or-death struggle with the class to which he belongs. And as his personal life becomes increasingly entangled in matters of estate—or, put differently, as matters of social class increasingly overwhelm personal life—he comes to see death as the only certain way of laying conflict to rest. Without denying his madness and villainy, and without attempting to justify or defend his actions, this perspective situates Hesperus in terms of the class conflict at the center of his world, insisting that personal motives are never only personal, that they are, on some level, a response to (or effect of) a social reality that encompasses and gives meaning to them.

Because the various elements and dimensions of class struggle presented in The Brides' Tragedy are, at the level of plot, connected directly to gender relations (such as the Hesperus-Floribel relationship and the Hesperus-Olivia relationship), they help to focus the structure and authority of patriarchy, and to illuminate some of the ways it is implicated in the social transformation from feudalism to capitalism. The connection between patriarchy and class in the drama can best be understood in terms of Eli Zaretsky's ideas on feminism and patriarchy in Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life. Zaretsky's aim is to connect modes of personal life to particular modes of production, and to show specifically that the rise of the bourgeoisie entailed new ways of conceiving of personal life, the family, gender relations, and so on. Two components of his argument are particularly relevant here. First, following Engels, he argues that patriarchy is directly connected to the emergence of private property in history, a phenomenon which “spelled the downfall of women”¹⁰ because it separated production within the home from production outside the home, relegating women to the former and giving men control of the latter, more rapidly developing forms of production. The household itself became converted into private property controlled by men, though the labor within it was by women. The rise of the state coincided with the emergence of private property, sealing women's subordinate role by safeguarding the relations of property.

While stressing the power of Engels's major thesis that “the oppression of women and the existence of the family [are tied together] with the economic organization of society,”¹¹ Zaretsky acknowledges that its weaknesses are its reductionism and a strong antihistorical dimension. He attempts to correct these deficiencies by developing a theory of personal life specific to the rise of the bourgoisie, retaining Engels's theory of private property, but defining it more precisely in terms of commodity production. Because his explanation of bourgeois individualism is critical to understanding gender relations in The Brides' Tragedy, I want to quote it at length:

In feudal society men and women occupied a fixed position with a stratified division of labor—they owed allegiance to a particular lord and worked on a particular plot of land instead of being free to sell their labor or property. Explicit and direct relations of authority defined people's sense of individual identity. Catholicism provided them with a common purpose outside themselves.

Private property freed the early bourgeoisie from a fixed social role within the feudal order. On the basis of private property, the bourgeoisie has defined individual rights throughout history. … The bourgeoisie has consistently defended the right of individuals to rise and fall within the marketplace through their own efforts, rather than on the basis of birth; the bourgeoisie originated the idea of a necessary contradiction between the individual and society.¹²

With this new conception of the individual emerged a new conception of gender relations, one which involved the connection for the first time in history between marriage and sexual love, and at the same time a view of the family as a refuge from the conflict and sordidness of public life. Both of these features of bourgeois gender relations figure prominently in The Brides' Tragedy, and they conflict violently in the drama with the aristocratic world that they challenge. The complicated struggle of these new relations to find authority and shape in a world where feudal patriarchy is not yet dead is displayed powerfully in Hesperus's different relationships with Floribel and Olivia, the two women whom he marries.

Like Orlando, who also is young and wishes to marry, Hesperus sees the impoverished Floribel in idyllic terms, telling her, for instance, in the beginning of the drama that “the veiled Moon's mild eye / Has long been seeking for her loveliest nymph” (I.i.20-21). (Orlando's comment to Claudio in the following scene is almost identical, referring to Floribel as “my goddess, / The Dian of our forests,” I.ii.18-19.) Floribel can take on this sort of pure value for the young aristocrats who desire her precisely because she does not belong to the aristocracy, which, as we have seen, is characterized by exhaustion and decay. In fact, her desirability as an object of love and as a repository of value for Hesperus increases in proportion to his ability to imagine her as independent not only of the aristocracy but of all social exchange. For him, she is, as Zaretsky says of the bourgeois family, a refuge from the threat facing his social class, a threat seen most emphatically in the infighting between his family and that of Orlando, for instance in the fact that Lord Ernest is deeply in debt to Orlando's father, and also in the fact that Orlando employs devious, legalistic strategies to win Floribel away from Hesperus. Whatever her real situation—which is made clear in her own anxieties about money and status—her constructed significance for Hesperus is that she inhabits and even constitutes a private and innocent realm more meaningful than the world of daily life that he inhabits.

The burden of innocence that Floribel is made to carry becomes evident not only in the scene where Hesperus catches her kissing Orlando's page but also in the description of his initial mad confusion over whether or not to murder her.¹³ This brilliant scene takes place in an apartment of Orlando's palace, decorated with beautiful tapestries stitched with pictures out of feudal history. Produced by female labor (“she, whose needle limned so cunningly, / Sleeps and dreams not,” II.iv.39-40), the tapestries tell stories of men whose hands have been gloriously dipped in human blood. These stories in cloth radically divide Hesperus from himself, promoting in him a desire to shed blood, which presumably would give him a place alongside the heroes whose stories are sewn into the tapestries, while at the same time making him even more committed to preserving the vision of purity and innocence that Floribel represents to him. As this fit of madness passes, and he suppresses his violent urges, he states emphatically to himself, “I tell thee Floribel / Shall never bleed” (II.iv.68-69). This comment, though on the surface level expressing an abhorrence of violence, carries within it the full weight of Hesperus's confusion, as well as the confusion of his world. The literal meaning here, that he will not for jealousy spill Floribel's blood, is bound up with larger cultural definitions of women as pure repositories for masculine desire, definitions which do not allow women the simple human functions of menstruating and consummating sexual relations. This contradiction between woman as ideal and woman as human being cannot be logically resolved, and it comes back repeatedly to haunt Hesperus, eventually overwhelming him to the point where he comes to believe that it can be laid to rest only by murder—by spilling blood despite his abhorrence of it.

The relationship between Olivia and Hesperus both duplicates and departs from the Floribel-Hesperus relationship, as it is defined first by the demands of aristocratic patriarchy, while at the same time it is pressured by, and ultimately responds to, the challenge of bourgeois gender relations. Unlike Floribel, Olivia is of the aristocracy, and thus faces personal life in quite a different way from her unknown rival. Her relationship with Hesperus is determined entirely by the demands of the estate rather than by love, and within this context she cannot represent a feminine ideal, as Floribel does, but rather appears as socially real: she serves the estate rather than subjective masculine desire. The question facing her and Hesperus in marriage is not whether they love one another in the beginning, but rather whether they can learn regard for one another while serving to unite two aristocratic houses, thus preserving the power and status of their families. What that regard entails is seen clearly when Orlando tells Hesperus, in an emphatic articulation of aristocratic patriarchal values: “School her [Olivia], sir, in the arts of compliment, / You'll find her an apt learner” (II.iii.17-18). While both Hesperus and Olivia accept the responsibility placed on them by their families, neither initiates the relationship, and neither is entirely comfortable with it: they do not seek out one another's company (as Hesperus and Floribel had done when they met secretly at great risk) but rather simply assume their positions within a prearranged social order.

If their marriage unites two houses of the aristocracy, it does not allay the tensions and anxieties pervading the aristocratic world, nor even assure survival of that world. In fact, the arranged marriage, even as it is being set in motion and socially authorized, is subject to disturbing and dismantling ideological and emotional processes that suggest the demise of the aristocracy, rather than its perpetuation. This is seen not only in the early stages of the courtship, when Hesperus's reflections on marriage and love (because of his secret relationship with Floribel) are overwhelmed by thoughts of death (II.ii.39-147), but more importantly in the fact that Hesperus, once forced into marriage to Olivia, attempts to recreate exactly the relationship that existed between him and Floribel by converting Olivia into a repository of emotional support apart from society. In lines that recall Keats's Lamia, he remarks: “Olivia / I'll tell thee how we'll 'scape these prying eyes; / We'll build a wall between us and the world” (IV.iii.65-67). While the immediate meaning of this comment is doubtless determined by his guilt and confusion over Floribel, at the same time it carries much greater significance, expressing the emergence of a bourgeois individualist ideology within an aristocratic framework, an ideology that positions marriage against the public world and at the same time proclaims masculine authority to seek comfort in a privatized and idealized feminine world.

If Hesperus's comments display a bourgeois reconception of gender relations that marks the endurance of masculine authority in the passage of social power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, the semilesbian exchanges between Olivia and her maidservants capture the dread, loneliness, and physical hardship that befall women as a result of that authority, and show, further, that, from a feminist perspective, there is relatively little difference between feudal patriarchy and bourgeois patriarchy. Shortly before the wedding, for instance, in describing her affection for Violet, Olivia remarks:

                                        Gentle maid,
I'll not be sad; yet, little Violet,
How long I've worn thy beauty next my heart,
Aye, in my very thoughts, where thou hast shed
Perpetual summer: how long shared thy being:
Like two leaves of a bud, we've grown together,
And needs must bleed at parting.

(III.iv.14-20)

This mournful statement of separation is also a statement of submission to masculine power, and it acknowledges the sexual sacrifice that is made to that power, a sacrifice which destroys the sexual innocence that Olivia once had enjoyed in the company of other females. The blood which she knows must flow as she enters sexual union with a man is also the blood of her personal liberty. As she says to her nurse of her impending marriage:

                                        'tis the funeral of that Olivia
You nursed and knew; an hour and she's no more,
No more the mistress of her own resolves,
The free partaker of earth's airs and pleasures.

(III.iv.33-36)

Following as they do immediately upon the scene of Floribel's murder—a scene which ironically had concluded with the sound of wedding bells (III.iii.194-97)—these exchanges disturbingly show the disempowerment of the feminine that is entailed in the sexual reality of marriage under patriarchy, whether patriarchy is feudal or bourgeois in construction.¹⁴

Another dimension of patriarchy that The Brides' Tragedy captures, one that is less explicitly centered on questions of sex and gender—though it includes them—involves the relations between fathers and sons, and the struggle between them for social authority. At the level of plot alone, the importance of fathers is suggested in the frequent references to the fact that Orlando's father is dead, in the portrayal of Hesperus's father as powerless, and in the portrayal of Floribel's father as near death through most of the drama, finally dying when he learns of his daughter's murder. These references focus the demise of a once-powerful social order—specifically of aristocratic, or feudal, patriarchy—and also describe the opening of an ideological space which allows the reconceptualization of personal life in individualist terms. With the death or disempowerment of all of the fathers in the drama, the sons and daughters seek new arrangements of power and gender relations, and these arrangements are consistently shaded by bourgeois power relations and ideological assumptions. For instance, Orlando engages in deceptive and legalistic strategies to secure the hand of Floribel, whom he describes and envisions in terms identical to Hesperus (see, for instance, I.ii.6-27), even at the very moment he would secure his public power by forcing Hesperus to wed Olivia. His plan denies the father-rights of Lord Ernest, while establishing his own personal authority. Hesperus, too, attempts to circumvent the authority of his father and Floribel's father by secretly marrying Floribel, thus asserting his own power against theirs. These actions of the sons are entangled both with love and private need, and, at the deepest levels, with the reality of money—Lord Ernest is indebted to Orlando's father, and Floribel's family is plagued by poverty, having lost the money it once had. Over against the demands of the estate, ruled by fathers, Hesperus and Orlando alike attempt to establish their individual authority, which at the same time would enable them to fulfill their personal desires.

It is clear that the transformations I am tracing here do not involve in any way the emergence of women as figures of social authority, or even as figures who enjoy real freedom. Nonetheless, Orlando and Hesperus do not represent the simple duplication of patriarchy in a new generation; rather, they represent the production and emergence of bourgeois patriarchy that displaces feudal patriarchy. This is seen not only in the characterization of their personal desires, noted above, but more importantly in the changing forms of social life charted through the drama. The feudal world of the fathers, for example, like the inchoate bourgeois world of the sons, recognizes public life as masculine and the private sphere as feminine, but in the world of the sons a political distinction is made between the public and private domains that is not made under feudalism. In the feudal world, women were simply property, and, at the level of aristocracy, their marriages were arranged for the purpose of securing or extending the estate; in this respect, there was no distinction between the home and the state. In the bourgeois world, however, the state and the family came to be conceptualized as distinctive categories, and women became part of what Zillah Eisenstein calls “a whole culture of privacy, intimacy, and individualism”¹⁵ exemplified clearly, in The Brides' Tragedy, in the distinction between Hesperus's and Orlando's attitudes toward Floribel, on one hand, and the attitudes of Lord Ernest and Mordred toward marriage, on the other. In the world that Hesperus and Orlando would construct, in short, women are not liberated, but rather are oppressed in new and different ways.

In addition to class and patriarchy, other issues in The Brides' Tragedy could be sketched to elaborate the struggle of bourgeois social relations to be born. Further exploration of Orlando's use of the law, for instance, of Lenora's obsession with death, of Hesperus's madness, of the full significance and role of money: all of these, no less than the issues considered above, point toward a deep structure of bourgeois social life at the center of the drama that destabilizes and overwhelms the aristocratic and feudal relations reflected on its surface. The ideological and political struggles surrounding such matters, more than simply Beddoes's limitations as a dramatist, help to explain the formal and aesthetic shortcomings of the work, while at the same time pointing toward its larger significance for literary and social history.

Moreover, the essential structure of ideas and assumptions in The Brides' Tragedy—its expression of inchoate bourgeois needs and desires against a weakening aristocratic framework of authority—constitutes its particular Romantic significance and locates it among other dramas of the period, which, for all their differences, share an inability to escape the political unconscious of bourgeois social relations. Indeed, one of the defining features of Romantic drama, to which it has been the aim of this paper to call attention, is that it is a literary form that would look to a past world and ideology for its governing values, while in fact it is shaped and vitalized by a contradictory world and ideology. The various portrayals of this contradiction within Romantic drama are often aesthetically crippling (as they are in The Brides' Tragedy), and yet they give Romantic drama its particular and crucial importance. Romantic drama is a literary form in crisis, and investigation of the many dimensions of that crisis is necessary if we are to understand fully the processes whereby feudal aesthetic, political, and ideological authority were destroyed by bourgeois social relations.

Notes

1. For studies pursuing one or both lines of argument, see Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 51-55; James R. Thompson, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Boston: Twayne, 1985), pp. 24-41; Lytton Strachey, “The Last Elizabethan,” in Books and Characters, French & English (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), pp. 235-65; and Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. edn. (New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 428-34. While these conventional explanations may help to clarify certain isolated psychological or literary historical matters, at the same time they run the risk of distorting literary history in their attempt to find a suitable vocabulary for discussing the drama. To identify The Brides' Tragedy primarily in terms of Jacobean tragedy, for instance, is to forget that the central feature of most Jacobean tragedies is the destructive power of lust; in The Brides' Tragedy this is not the case. Hesperus's murder of Floribel is encouraged not at all by lust but rather by jealousy in conjunction with the incarceration of Herperus's father and by the larger domestic and social situations flowing from these. Moreover, the argument that Beddoes's obsession with death in the drama represents the end of Romanticism is confusing when we consider that earlier Romantic works—for instance, The Monk, or even the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, both written in the 1790s—are as extreme in their portrayal of these matters as The Brides' Tragedy, and that works written in the later nineteenth century—for instance, Thomson's “City of Dreadful Night” (1874) and Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1898)—are equally given to physical violence and existential despair. If the work signals the demise of Romanticism, it is for reasons other than those most often cited.

2. For a discussion of this dark side of the Romantic imagination, from a psychological perspective, see Edward E. Bostetter's important work, The Romantic Ventriloquists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, rev. edn. (Seattle and London: Univ. of Washington Press, 1975).

3. While he does not approach The Brides' Tragedy in the same terms used in the present study, Horace Gregory, in “The Gothic Imagination and the Survival of Thomas Lovell Beddoes,” offers an excellent discussion of Beddoes and the Gothic. See The Dying Gladiators and Other Essays (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), pp. 81-95.

4. For an excellent historical assessment of Beddoes along lines different from my own, see Eleanor Wilner, Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 73-106. For a general discussion of Romanticism in historical context that has been influential here, see Robert Sayre and Michael Lowy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” NGC 32 (1984):42-92.

5. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), p. 264.

6. As Raymond Williams states it: “This exceptional class consciousness, though leading in the short run to little significant drama … is a clear sign of a new social order.” See Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 164.

7. Note for instance Lamb's remark on the plays of Shakespeare that they “are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any dramatist whatever … [T]he practice of stage representation reduces everything to a controversy of elocution.” See “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” in The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: Modern Library, 1935) pp. 291-92.

8. For an excellent history of the stage during the Romantic period (without mention of Beddoes, however) see the chapter entitled “Shakespeare and Tragedy: The View from Drury Lane,” in John Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978) pp. 165-95.

9. All quotations from The Brides' Tragedy are taken from H.W. Donner, ed., Plays and Poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950). Act, scene, and line numbers are cited parenthetically in the text.

10. Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, (1976; rev. edn., New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 70.

11. Zaretsky, p. 71.

12. Zaretsky, p. 40.

13. It should be noted that Hesperus's jealousy when he catches Floribel kissing Orlando's page is created as much by the patriarchal pressure from his father to wed Olivia as by his selfish and bourgeois desire to possess Floribel absolutely apart from the world.

14. This disempowerment, while enduring from feudalism to capitalism, gets redefined in ways that Olivia cannot here see. As suggested in the above descriptions of Hesperus, the isolation of the woman from female companionship involves at the same time her conversion into an ideal of pure value divorced from the world, a conversion which secures the individual subjectivity and power of men.

15. Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1981), p. 25. My general arguments here regarding the distinctions between feudal and bourgeois patriarchy draw very heavily on Eisenstein, epecially pages 14-49. I wish to thank Professor Terence A. Hoagwood for his excellent and helpful critical reading of an earlier draft of this essay.