SOURCE: “The Brides' Tragedy and Dramatic Fragments: Jacobean Romantic,” in Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Twayne, 1985, pp. 24-50.

As we approach an examination of Beddoes's The Brides' Tragedy and other dramatic attempts, it will be useful to pause for a brief discussion of the significance of his choice of drama as a vehicle for self-expression, as well as our critical attitudes toward that choice.

“MENTAL THEATRE”

The earliest of Beddoes's reviewers and many critics since have treated The Brides' Tragedy and Death's Jest Book as drama, either in some abstract, almost Platonic sense or as an example of a neo-Elizabethan or Romantic version of the form. Such an approach is nearly impossible to avoid, despite the quite undramatic sprawl of Death's Jest Book and Beddoes's own assertion that The Brides' Tragedy was intended “exclusively for the closet” (172). In addition to his two published plays there are the host of dramatic fragments and false starts, his generally strong admiration for playwrights (especially those of the Renaissance), and his own keen observations on the stage.¹ His description of The Brides' Tragedy as a work designed to “court the reader in lieu of the spectator” (172), and his insistence in the preface that the glory of contemporary English drama exists in such productions, must be contrasted with his slightly scolding comments in a letter to Kelsall: “You are, I think, disinclined to the stage: now I confess that I think this is the highest aim of the dramatist, & I should be very desirous to get on it. To look down on it is a piece of impertinence as long as one chooses to write in the form of a play, and is generally the result of a consciousness of one's own inability to produce anything striking & affecting in that way” (640). This observation was made not in the first enthusiastic moments of playwriting but in 1829, seven years after The Brides' Tragedy had been published and at least one year after the completion of Death's Jest Book.

But unlike some Romantics, he actually makes slight distinction between closet drama and the stage; Beddoes would not agree with the American poet and critic Elder Olson in supposing that “everyone would agree that a universal and absolute condition of drama is the possibility of its being enacted.”² In fact, he would have agreed with Byron, who declared the wish to make a “regular English drama, no matter whether for the stage or not, which is not my object,—but a mental theatre.”³

Beddoes and Byron are supported in this matter by modern theorists; Kenneth Burke, for example, calls genres “strategies for living.” They are “fundamental ways of thinking about, organizing, and managing the vast, confusing swirl of life.”⁴ Northrop Frye sees genres as mythoi that shape rather than imitate life. Drama provides a specific “radical of presentation,” the rhetorical structure of which in part predetermines significance, since in literature, as in language, form helps determine meaning. Hence if “a Romantic poet gives his poem a dramatic form, he may not expect or even want any stage representation; he may think entirely in terms of print and readers; he may even believe, like many Romantics, that the stage drama is an impure form because of the limitations it puts on individual expression. Yet the poem is still being referred back to some kind of theatre, however much of a castle in the air.”⁵

Our realization of the significance of generic choice—even in the use of closet drama—is therefore an essential justification for considering Beddoes's work as drama, however unsuccessfully it may fulfill such obligations of that form as plot and characterization. Yet the problem of generic choice is for Beddoes, as for other Romantics, too complicated for the theory of genre alone to resolve. In the first place, the nature of generic determination does not, in itself, explain why the form was chosen. Equally important, the theory accounts for a general set of circumstances surrounding the work's significance; it must be made to take into account the relationship between the specific sensibility and the form.

We may start with the second issue as a means of returning to the first. Drama is, or traditionally was, a most objective form. The innumerable and unsuccessful attempts to get to the man behind Shakespeare's plays epitomize simultaneously the aesthetic distance found in drama and the common assumption that playwright and audience share values. Yet Romantic poets both wished to and were forced to explore the personal nature of truth, and the meditative lyric—that most private of public forms—was for them its chief expression. Terry Otten, in words especially relevant to Beddoes, puts one resulting difficulty perfectly: “Adopting Elizabethan dramaturgy to express modern subjective matter was too much like grafting an alien myth onto a new vision. The modern concern with the individual and the internal ‘dialogue of the mind with itself’ worked at odds with a communal drama directed to a homogeneous body of believers.”⁶

Yet Beddoes, Shelley, and other Romantics (the significant exception was Byron) did attempt to embody in Elizabethan dramaturgy a truth the grounds of which were clearly subjective.

Much modern poetry, indeed much poetry generally, has been classified by Robert Langbaum⁷ as “the poetry of experience”—that is, a poetry that does not assert propositional truth but rather explores it, does not prescribe reality but describes it. This is a poetry of process; it reflects the poet's mind in search of the significance of its own experience. Why then, in an age when such poetry emerged from the chaos of fragmented values and discredited mythologies, did Beddoes—and Byron, for that matter—elect the drama at all? The answer would appear to be found in the question; in many subtle personal ways as well as in broadly cultural ones, traditional drama had once reflected the very cosmic and cultural stability that was missing. In other words, the genre could suggest the very shape of value—a form historically associated with the testing of social norms or public myths, and with a celebration of their endurance. In this sense both tragedy and comedy had worked together to dramatize and endorse those values. Hence the more that modern culture disintegrated and writers like Beddoes imaginatively experienced that disintegration, the more nostalgia they felt for a form that seemed to receive its license from a permanently organized universe, a universe that reflected its organization in its cultural artifacts.

It is unlikely that Beddoes was aware of the ironical nature of his own commitment to the form; though he understood his failure in conventional terms he does not seem consciously to have recognized the retrospective longing in his choice. But this schizophrenia of personal experience and public form leads to the paradox of Beddoes's drama. The subjective material is forced into objective form, and whatever his self-awareness, the tension produced helps to account for the unusual energy and character of Death's Jest Book. Beddoes's contemporary George Darley, a poet and critic, was fully aware of the problem: “Subjective composition is however the natural tendency of our refined age, and on this postulate founds itself an argument I fear convincing against the probable regeneration of Acting Drama. Can we restrain that tendency? or should we, if we could? Though fatal to the drama, it may be vital to something else as desirable.”⁸ The poetry of experience was vital to Beddoes's self-expression; and though not fatal to the drama, it demands a special awareness on the part of the reader.

If Beddoes failed to understand the deeper implications of his choice, his judgment of the contemporary theater was nonetheless acute. Like other Romantics unable to escape the enormous pull of Shakespeare—“he was an incarnation of nature … he was an universe” (581)—Beddoes was all the same aware of the dangers of emulation. Only three years after The Brides' Tragedy was published and in the year he began Death's Jest Book (1825), Beddoes made a statement rare for its combination of good sense and overpowering self-irony:

Say what you will—I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow—no creeper into worm-holes—no reviser even—however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster &c are better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contemporary of ours—but they are ghosts—the worm is in their pages—& we want to see something that our great-grandsires did not know. With the greatest reverence for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we had better beget than revive—attempt to give the literature of this age an idiosyncrasy & spirit of its own; & only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with—just now the drama is a haunted ruin.

(595)

Byron, too, recognized the error in “following the old dramatists.” For him, however, the danger results from the Elizabethan ignorance of classical regularity; he chastised Shelley for using “our old dramatists as models.” He goes so far as to deny “that the English have hitherto had a drama at all.”⁹ Beddoes, for some curious reason, thought that The Cenci had been inspired by the Greeks and lamented that Shelley had not chosen Shakespeare “as his model” (578). It goes without saying that numerous critics and historians of the drama have seized upon Beddoes's “reanimation” argument as an example of Romantic myopia, which, of course, it is.¹⁰ Yet Beddoes was compelled to the drama because he believed deeply that it “ought to be the most distinguished department of our poetic literature” (624), and drawn equally to the late Elizabethans because they provided an ambience perfectly suited to his own sense of a world become sick, evil, and decayed. It is obvious that for Beddoes the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were the drama.

Beddoes's relationship to the drama is important, then, more in its broad configuration than in its specific nature. A study of his plays on purely technical grounds will take us little beyond the long-since established indictment of Romantic failure in that genre. On the other hand, the assumption that the choice of closet drama was merely superficial ignores the deeper meaning in such a decision, as well as its significance for interpretation. Failures of plot construction and character development do not remove the importance to be found in the identification of genre with myth and vision; it is in this larger sense that we should view Beddoes as a playwright.

“A VERY SAD BOYISH AFFAIR”

As he did almost all his other work, Beddoes eventually repudiated The Brides' Tragedy (637). Written when he was nineteen, the play certainly has a “boyish” quality; yet despite its excesses, the work is much more than juvenilia. The play is to Beddoes what Endymion was to Keats—both a necessary act of apprenticeship designed to marshal and mature his poetic talent and the first real articulation of his personal vision. There are signs here of his own characteristic grotesque; during the vicious storm in which Hesperus murders Floribel the “Night with giant strides stalks o'er the world, / Like a swart Cyclops, on its hideous front / One round, red, thunderswollen eye ablaze” (204). And when the protagonist finds death in the bottom of his cup—“the sugar of the draught”—we catch the characteristic sound of the later Beddoes (208).

The plot, attacked by some critics for being too loose and by others for being too academic, is consciously designed with the actual stage in mind, yet unconsciously burdened with non-dramatic intentions. It was clearly planned to observe the dramatic unities, the events occurring in a severely limited period of time and an equally restricted area of action.

Act 1 opens with a private garden meeting of Hesperus, a young nobleman, and Floribel, his secretly married wife. Although theoretically it is a joyous occasion, an ominous tone of “fickleness, and woe, and mad despair” (177) creeps in with Floribel's reported dream and with the song “Poor old pilgrim Misery.” Scene 2 reveals Orlando, another young nobleman, plotting to force Hesperus to marry his sister Olivia, so that he himself can marry the supposedly unwed Floribel. In order to “scare a rival and to gain a brother” (178) Orlando has had Hesperus's elderly and impoverished father arrested for debt; if Hesperus will agree to the wedding, Orlando will end this “show of cruelty” by freeing Lord Ernest and canceling his debt (178). In scene 3 Hesperus's father is discovered in prison, outwardly brave but ready to plead with Hesperus to comply. In the face of Lord Ernest's pathos Hesperus finds it impossible to explain his dilemma and agrees to the second marriage.

In Act 2, after an interval in scene 1 where we see Orlando with his page boy, the action shifts to the cottage of Mordred and Lenora, Floribel's high-born but impoverished parents. Floribel, ignorant of his problem, teases Hesperus. Faced with his lovely and much-loved bride, Hesperus mutters, “why let the old man die” (188), referring to Lord Ernest's prediction of his own destruction, should Hesperus fail to save him by marriage to Olivia. He leaves but returns to find Floribel giving Orlando's page an innocent kiss, having actually first torn up Orlando's letter of proposal. Hesperus, convinced she is unfaithful, repudiates her. Scene 3 finds him back in Orlando's palace, where he woos and wins Olivia, promising her true love only in the grave, however. Left alone by the troubled but acquiescent Olivia, Hesperus implies a threat to murder Floribel. Scenes 4 and 5, also located in the palace, show us first a tormented Hesperus waking from a terrible dream and fighting the desire to murder Floribel and then the troubled realization of Hesperus's deranged behavior by Lord Ernest, Orlando, Olivia, and Claudio. The concluding scene in this act occurs at a suicide's grave; first Orlando and Claudio speculate on a “self-slaughtered” parricide and then, after their departure, Hesperus soliloquizes at this “shrine of blood' (198,199), pledging himself to evil.

The five scenes in act 3 take place in Orlando's palace, Mordred and Lenora's cottage, and a dark wood. While Hesperus sits in a deep trance in the palace, Floribel broods at home on his strange behavior and gives voice to her premonition. During a terrible storm in a wood, Hesperus meets Floribel and stabs her to death. Hunters see him burying something and, as he leaves to seek his “second bride,” they linger on to discover his “hoard.” In the palace we witness Olivia's sentimental farewell to her maids. This pleasant interlude is immediately followed by a grim scene in Mordred's cottage. Just when Lenora has informed Mordred that his last wish—for Floribel to marry well—has been fulfilled, the hunters enter with Floribel's body. The already feeble Mordred dies of grief and shock.

Act 4 opens with a deeply agitated Hesperus—now far gone in evil—vowing to kill a servant whom he suspects of knowing his secret. He has fixed on Olivia as his only salvation. In scene 2 Floribel's murder is reported to the duke, who, since Hesperus has left his easily recognized dagger in her grave, orders his immediate arrest. We next observe a banquet hall in Orlando's palace, where, before the mystery of Hesperus's strange behavior can be cleared up, officers come to arrest him. The act's final scene takes place in the street before the duke's palace; we first see guards, Floribel's body, and Lenora. When this group leaves, Hesperus, his father, and Orlando arrive. The act concludes with Hesperus hoping that Olivia might not also die, since “there are enough accusers in the tomb” (225).

Like acts 1 and 4, act 5 is short. The remaining four scenes in the play take place at Mordred's cottage (where Lenora, now also deranged, believes Floribel to be only asleep), at the ducal prison, at Orlando's palace, and at the place of Hesperus's intended execution. In prison we find Hesperus condemned to die for the murder, deeply confused about death and guilt. Lenora enters and begins to curse a Hesperus now beset by “Remorse and Conscience” (227). But because Floribel has loved him and he her, Lenora extends to him her disturbed sympathy. After Olivia prepares for death in scene 3, the play concludes in a scene set at the place of execution. Hesperus, now calm and contrite, is reconciled with his father. Just before he is executed, Lenora saves him from the ax with the perfume of poisoned flowers. He dies in an agonized vision of murder coming at him with “fiery fangs.”

“DARK THOUGHTS”

One death from grief and another inevitable; two suicides; one murder—what are we to make of this body-strewn play written by a young man not yet twenty? Both Beddoes's peers and reviewers, as well as his early modern critics, thought that they had the answer. He was, in the best-known statement of this argument, “the last Elizabethan.” When Lytton Strachey¹¹ made this claim in 1907 it summarized a long-standing opinion; since then it has been frequently repeated. It is difficult to argue with several generations of critics.

Nor, up to a point, should we. Strachey, Donner, and D. W. Goode¹²—to name but three—have carefully studied and noted the parallels between Renaissance drama, especially later versions, and Beddoes's work; these critics differ mainly in their judgment of his success. Certainly a subject so thoroughly covered needs no detailed analysis here. Moreover, even the casual reader of Renaissance drama will recognize the characters, situations, and even language distinctive to that great period of English theater. Already as a schoolboy Beddoes had been immersed in the genre; like that of earlier Romantics his admiration for these playwrights was unbounded. Even his beloved Shelley, he thought, had too little followed Shakespeare “as his model” in The Cenci; close knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans was, he felt, essential for any dramatist (578).

But Beddoes's saturation in Elizabethan drama and the resulting evidence in his work should not cause us to substitute study of influence for study of specific plays. When Allardyce Nicoll in his history of the English stage dismisses The Brides' Tragedy as simply “dark thoughts culled from Jacobean drama,”¹³ he misses the point completely. Beddoes's claim that “reanimations are vampire-cold” (595) is completely serious; the irony should not blind us to the two essential characteristics of Beddoes's work that develop in this period. First, he is no mere imitator as in “The Improvisatore,” but rather feels a deep, imaginative affinity with these great predecessors in horror; in the Renaissance sense of the word he “possesses” these works. Second, The Brides' Tragedy illustrates how completely he has absorbed and modified the Romanticism of his age. The real significance of the play, despite its remarkable exploitation of Renaissance drama and its surprisingly successful blank verse, is its peculiar embodiment of late Romantic pessimism and preoccupation with death—in image, symbol, and theme.

There is, moreover, the question of source as opposed to influence. If influence accounts, at least superficially, for Beddoes's treatment of his source, the source itself is not Renaissance drama. In his preface Beddoes claims his play to be “founded upon facts” (172) and cites the ballad “Lucy” by Thomas Gillet, published in The Midland Minstreal (1822). This poem, and a slightly different prose version that Beddoes also employed, tell the supposedly true story, set in the early eighteenth century, of the secret marriage of a well-bred Oxford student to a college servant's daughter and his later murder of the girl when a better match presents itself.¹⁴ As we will see, Beddoes alters the story significantly, not only by completely changing the context but, more importantly, by providing the murderer with a very different motive. Although Donner attributes these changes to a sort of Romantic reflex action, Beddoes's alterations of the source of The Brides' Tragedy reflect—as does his special use of generic influences—the personal, if confused, nature of his theme.

And confused the play is, despite the relentless, even mechanical, logic of Hesperus's destruction of others and himself, suggested by the plot summary given earlier. Behind the bewildering though exciting mixture of melodrama, eloquence, and sentimentality, underneath the variety of motives for the murder, lies Beddoes's own ambivalence concerning death—one from which only death could free him. But since it is the theme of the play, not its action, that concerns him, and since that theme is connected with states of mind, the usual objections to the flawed dramaturgy or to a distorted reality produced by that dramaturgy have little significance. The action, in other words, is metaphorical, not sociohistorical. The work “dramatizes,” in the largest sense, Beddoes's spiritual, and hence aesthetic, predicament; the choice of drama provides an occasion for poetic eloquence and a reassuring, traditionally significant container for a radically pessimistic vision, yet resolution is not possible. In other words, the form offered Beddoes what the ballad offered Coleridge in “The Ancient Mariner,” a precious moment of closure so essential to the artist if he is to go on creating. However forced and tentative that closure was, he was never to achieve it again. For finally, the “dark thoughts” were Beddoes's own, not Jacobean, and the play looks as much toward the modern theater of the absurd as it recalls the Renaissance.

EROS AND THANATOS

The Brides' Tragedy is not a fully mature piece and we must not judge Beddoes by this work alone, even though it is his only technically complete play. However, both stylistically and thematically we have come much closer here to the view of life in Beddoes's major work. Although the deaths here may appear to be of the essentially Jacobean variety, Beddoes's peculiar obsession with all of its manifestations points ahead to Death's Jest Book and the late lyrics. But more specifically, the love story takes a characteristically ominous turn. Hesperus kills Floribel, his secret wife and first love; he then offers the alternate bride a consummation in death: “for when our souls are born then will we wed; / Our dust shall mix and grow into one stalk” (193). The metaphor of birth is neither ironic nor simply rhetorical. “Death's darts are sometimes Love's” (490), Beddoes will later argue; Thanatos and Eros join in all his major poetry and this identification becomes a central theme in Death's Jest Book. It is in the exploration of this theme that modern criticism most significantly alters and improves earlier studies of the poet.

The association of love and death can of course be found elsewhere in Romantic literature. Eric Bentley, commenting upon the Romantic element in Strindberg's plays, points out that the Romantic “rediscovered eros and agape precisely by rediscovering their ambivalence. It is the ambivalence of eros in Goethe's Werther that made the book at once a great scandal and a great event. Any eighteenth-century hack might have rhapsodized about passion; it was the closeness of passion and death, of creative love and its contrary, that Goethe put his finger on.”¹⁵

The English Romantics also touched on this theme. A classic example is John Clare's “An Invite to Eternity.” Here the woman is invited by her lover to pass through “night and dark obscurity” to the ideal world beyond: “Say maiden can thy life be led / To join the living with the dead / Then trace thy footsteps on with me / We'er wed to one eternity.” In Shelley the apotheosis of love leads essentially to its destruction in the transcendent but static state. For Keats the woman can be the demon lover, as “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” suggests; in a similar way love is distorted or destroyed in Coleridge's “Christabel.” Even in the satiric-comic mode of Byron's “Beppo” the lovers' gondola is likened to a coffin. More surprising yet are Wordsworth's “Lucy poems,” each a testament to love and death. With Poe, of course, the identification is frequently dramatized, as for example in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

In Beddoes, who like Poe is a late Romantic, the theme is more central and more overt than in other English poets. In the source of The Brides' Tragedy, for example, the murder is purely social in origin. In the ballad “Lucy” the student is inspired by “ambition” (709) and in the Oxford Herald version, after meeting an aristocratic young woman, the student again returns to Lucy but now views her “only as a bar to his ambition” (711). In the original, therefore, the story is an early version of An American Tragedy. But Beddoes rejects that motive, overtly at least, for three others: Hersperus must escape his first marriage in order to save his father; he is jealous of Floribel after seeing her kiss a page; and he suffers periodic madness. One of the conventional dramatic weaknesses of the play is the confusion these three motives produce. But the murder is actually symbolic; its significance is not to be found in plot. Hence Beddoes's argument in the preface that the play dramatizes the “contest of duties and desires” (173) inherent in Hesperus's situation represents his conscious intention (and certainly dramatic tradition) but not the play's real conflict—the clash between conventional human norms and the deeply felt sense that only in death can love be realized.

While avoiding the intentional fallacy we can yet recognize the determined manner in which Beddoes's vision leads him from the middle-class, domestic tragedy of his source to a frightening study of the demon lover, a study that makes itself felt far more significantly on the symbolic rather than the narrative level. And nowhere is that determination more pronounced than in the play's first scene. Its dramatic logic is clear; at once we recognize the fragility of the relationship between Floribel and Hesperus. They love each other deeply, and have married for love, despite the threat of displeasure by Hesperus's “austere and old … sire” (176). But there is no hint of a solution given; Hesperus lacks the will to devise their escape. And for all her love for Hesperus, Floribel cannot overcome the dismay she feels at her “sad and lonely fate / Thus to be wed to secrecy”; on her husband's face she sees only the “blank and ugly vizor of concealment” (175).

Moreover, the scene opens in growing darkness and takes place in a closed “bower of Eglantine” where “not a spark of prying light creeps in, / So closely do the sweets enfold each other” (174). This delightful privacy of love gives way to images of imprisonment, secrecy, and concealment, especially with the “tale of blood” (174) Hesperus chooses to tell Floribel. At first the story appears perfectly gratuitous, quite unnecessary to the dramatic action, and to be used simply as an excuse for Beddoes to indulge in “poesy” and Greek myth. The story tells how Zephyrus (ominously associated with the West) “once found / The baby Perfume cradled in a violet” and how after he had “bound the sweet slumberer with golden chains,” he cast the “fettered wretch” into “the bosom of a rose.” There the helpless child's “heart's blood stained” the flower, giving it its traditional color (175). Floribel, who in a lovely Keatsian passage has been previously associated with her gift to Hesperus, the “blue violet, like Pandora's eye, / When first it darkened with immortal life” (174), fails to see the story's meaning. But the reader—though probably not the theater audience—recognizes the tale for what it is, a rather Blakean parable of entrapment and death. Frye points out that Floribel, the “veiled Moon's … loveliest nymph” (174), is not a Diana as we might expect, but a Proserpine.¹⁶

Before the scene ends Floribel tells Hesperus of a waking dream she has had, a dream that starts in her world of passive, floral beauty and ends when one “who with wet downcast eyelids threw aside / The remmants of a broken heart” bid her be “’ware of love, / Of fickleness, and woe, and mad despair” (177). Hesperus's response is to sing her a song, “Poor old pilgrim Misery,” and to promise—in words now inescapably ominous—that they would soon meet “to part never more” (178). The scene, at first glance appearing cluttered and unsure, has established far more than a vague sense of apprehension appropriate to the play's future action; it has presented and developed the tone and imagery of the Eros-Thanatos theme so central to the entire work.

“NOW FOR MY SECOND BRIDE”

By the end of the first act any possible solution is gone. Hesperus can murmur, “wed / Olivia; there's damnation in the thought” (181) but he cannot bring himself to tell his father why marriage is impossible. Lord Ernest, whom critics fail to recognize as well drawn, is lost in self-pity; he cannot see the terrible effect his plea has on Hesperus. The latter, an essentially passive character, from this point on can only react. His deep pessimism springs from the frustration of impotence and a profound sense of the world gone wrong:

Why are we tied unto this wheeling globe,
Still to be racked while traitorous Hope stands by,
And heals the wounds that they may gape again?
Aye to this end the earth is made a ball,
Else crawling to brink despair would plunge
Into the infinite eternal air,
And leave its sorrows and its sins behind.

(183)

This sentiment may seem exaggerated, given his predicament and its apparent solution. But Beddoes makes Hesperus flawed, if not already spiritually defeated, from the start; other characters hint at some strangeness always recognized in him (186, 188). Moreover, the play's first scene indicates that love, the single redemptive force the work offers, can succeed only when hidden outside life. In a scene effectively juxtaposed to the grim one that precedes it, the conventional Orlando can speculate that “the universe's soul … is Love” (185), but for Hesperus love means death. Hence his murder of Floribel is a kind of consummation, or would have been had he joined her. Instead, coerced by his father and Orlando, he lives to woo Olivia. The lovemaking is both extraordinary and sudden. Olivia, long in love with Hesperus, ignores the suddenness and, though troubled by his strange appeal, yields.

In some of the play's strangest lines, Hesperus defines the nature of their mutual realization:

Then thou shalt be mine own; but not till death.
We'll let this life burn out, no matter how;
For when our souls are born then will we wed;
Our dust shall mix and grow into one stalk,
Our breaths shall make one perfume in one bud,
Our blushes meet each other in a rose,
Our sweeter voices swell some sky-bird's throat
With the same warbling, dwell in some soft pipe,
Or bubble up along some sainted spring's
Musical course, and in the mountain trees
Slumber our deeper tones, by tempests waked:
We will be music, spring, and all fair things
The while our spirits make a sweeter union
Than melody and perfume in the air.
Wait then, if thou dost love me.

(192-93)

Something in this passage reminds us of John Donne—for instance the line “our dust shall mix.” But we are actually much closer to Shelley; the “sweeter union,” like other hints of consummation in the play, is sexless. Hesperus celebrates the briefest passage of time, for it will bring their union closer: “Joy, my love, / We're nearer to our bridal sheets of lead / Than when your brother left us here just now” (193). However, Beddoes gives no indication as to how death can be more than an escape into stasis. Olivia, essentially more spiritually healthy than Hesperus, knows that “it is not good / Thus to spurn life,” but asks, “what's to live without my Hesperus? … I'll be nothing rather” (194). It is Hesperus himself who, despite his conviction of death's release, asks the obvious, though unanswerable, question:

And do those cherries ripen for the worms,
Those blue enchantments beam to light the tomb?
Was that articulate harmony, (Love uses
Because he seems both Love and Innocence
When he sings to it,) that summer of sweet breath
Created but to perish and so make
The deads' home loveliest?

(194)

But Beddoes has no answer.

The entire issue remains unclear. Floribel's mother, Lenora, recognizing the “loathed blessing of a cursed existence,” asks “where thinkest our spirits go?” A minor character can answer only with pretty rumor:

                    Madam, I know not;
Some say they hang like music in the air,
Some that they lie ingirt by cloudy curtains;
Or 'mong the stars.

(222)

In a similar way Olivia's maid, facing the impending death of her mistress, hopes to persuade herself that this “intercourse / Of disembodied minds is no conjecture, / No fiction of romance” (231). Overwrought by Floribel's murder Lenora must “search about for Comfort,” and though others may call him death, “Comfort is his name” (223).

In the play's final act Olivia can sincerely repudiate man's conventional fear and horror at the thought of dying:

                    Death! thou silly girl,
There's no such thing; 'tis but a goblin word,
Which bad men conjure from their reeking sins
To haunt their slumbers; 'tis a life indeed.

(230)

But exactly what kind of “life”? At first it appears to be vaguely Christian, and that is the sentiment Olivia no doubt wishes to convey:

These bodies are the vile and drossy seeds,
Whence, placed again within their kindred earth,
Springs Immortality, the glorious plant
Branching above the skies. What is there here
To shrink from?

(230)

However, death immediately becomes not a door to immortality but a welcome oblivion:

          Though your idle legends tell
How cruelly he treats the prostrate world;
Yet, unto me this shadowy potentate
Comes soft and soothing as an infant's sleep,
And kisses out my being.

(230)

The “shadow potentate” who, in that marvelous clause “kisses out my being,” is Eros-Thanatos—the gods of love and death become one. The imagery, and hence the implication, is even clearer in Floribel's speech in the third act:

Come so to me, sweet death, and I will wreath thee
An amorous chaplet for thy paly brows;
And on an odoured bank of wan white buds
In thy fair arms
I'll lie, and taste thy cool delicious, breath,
And sleep, and sleep, and sleep.

(202)

Again the erotic becomes the static; love-as-death is not sexual passion, not ecstasy—only relief. At least in The Brides' Tragedy, love is not, as one critic has argued, “the force that keeps death from being the end.”¹⁷ Rather, the lover has, to use Keats's words, to its “high requiem become a sod.”

Near the play's conclusion Hesperus, demon wooer of both women, admits that all he knows of death is “that 'twill come” (232). Perhaps “our minds share not corporeal sleep, / But go among the past and future,” or possibly “inspire another [life] in some waking world” only to die yet again (233). But unlike other characters Hesperus is a murderer; beset by the “hounds of Lucifer” he feels “Remorse and Conscience too” (227). Although his final lines exhibit some of the spirit of Bryon's Manfred, who, though dying, can still repudiate external control, the ending more nearly reminds us of Dr. Faustus. Hesperus now associates death with punishment, although the play, only vaguely Christian, is ambiguous in this regard. Life may be our “ailment,” as he earlier argues, but at least for Hesperus death is no cure. And if some cosmic law finally claims him, even a static consummation of love in death is impossible.

Eleanor Wilner, in her interesting analysis of Hesperus, extends the love-death theme considerably. Recognizing the extremely passive nature of Beddoes's women, she sees Hesperus's murder of Floribel as a perversely self-saving act; wishing to live himself he seduces others to death. “The killing of Floribel is the killing of tenderness in himself,” a tenderness he “seems to equate with a passive and helpless femininity.” For Wilner, death in Beddoes's world is a “purely male force.”¹⁸ Critics have long noted the passive nature of his female characters, it is true, and not only does Hesperus murder Floribel, he also brings about the deaths of her mother and, inevitably, Olivia. Yet Wilner's argument presumes a far more active Hesperus than the play offers us. He actually shares the female passivity; action is thrust upon him and he reacts in desperation to the ever-tightening trap that is his life. If, as Wilner implies, he defines life through death, then he does so with no sense of possible escape. As evidence for her view she cites his final words—“I'm not dead yet.” But like his entire final speech, this line suggests a theatrical, rather than an actual, assertion of will.

But if we reject Wilner's contention that murder for Hesperus dramatizes a perverse version of Romantic individualism, we cannot so easily dismiss the opposite idea. The Romantic longing for fusion with the infinite may, as in the case of Shelley's “Adonais,” take the form of a death wish. Certainly the death wish is frequently encountered in Beddoes's poetry, and we are reminded again and again that such a wish proved to be more than literary for him. But in Shelley death fractures life, which, “like a dome of many-colored glass / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” Therefore one does not merely “seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb”; rather one seeks to join with what Wordsworth calls the “active universe.”¹⁹ In The Brides' Tragedy death is simply the great void, and it brings nonbeing, not non-identity.

We have earlier discussed the generic considerations in Beddoes' work; a word must yet be said concerning its designation as tragedy. In his preface to the play Beddoes defines its theme as the “contest of duties and desires” (173). Nine years later in 1831 he defines the “pivot of all tragedy” as the “struggle between the will of man and the moral law of necessity, who awaits inevitably his past actions” (651), actually an elaboration of his earlier comment on the play.

Essentially, then, Beddoes articulates one version of the classic definition. But while it is possible that some Romantic dramas approach tragedy in this sense, it is clear that The Brides' Tragedy does not. The play fails to dramatize the conflict between free will and necessity; Hesperus is a passive, emotionally disoriented (although not insane, as other characters and some critics assume) spiritual bankrupt whose only solution is to negate life. Hence the play cannot validate human strength and dignity, as various kinds of Western tragedies do; rather, it forces us to recognize the already “dark and troubled” vision of its young author.²⁰ The Romantics, and Beddoes was no exception, often associated tragedy with pathos, melodrama, or simply “serious” drama. But beneath the convention lurks Beddoes's deep, if as yet latent, pessimism.

DRAMATIC FRAGMENTS: “THIS ARABY OF WORDS”

During the three years following the publication of The Brides' Tragedy in 1822, Beddoes behaved like a developing dramatist, not like a future medical student and man of science. He produced numerous dramatic fragments, including major portions of two plays, and his letters frequently contain discussions of contemporary and Renaissance drama.²¹ His letters (and the earliest extant come from this period) make numerous reference to “a hopeless confusion of new ‘first acts,’” as one critic has complained.²² The release and encouragement produced by the publication of The Brides' Tragedy made possible a rich creative period, especially when one considers his active role as a student, his trip to Italy, and his preparations for Germany. Concerning these dramatic projects he was characteristically self-effacing, but his enthusiasm is clear.²³

Not surprisingly, these “plays” provide a kind of microcosm of Beddoes's career: they are largely fragmentary, they offer extrinsic interest as well as intrinsic value, and they vary widely in quality. Taken as a whole they show Beddoes groping inevitably—although at times almost blindly—toward the gigantic Death's Jest Book. In addition to some lyrics to which we will return in chapter 5, the group consists of four clusters of increasingly longer and more coherent works. The Last Man (1823-25) involves fragments only, tantalizing though some of them are. Love's Arrow Poisoned (1823-25), except for some fragments, exists in a short prose draft. Torrismond (1824) consists of one very full first act. Finally, The Second Brother (1824-25) is finished through three acts and part of a fourth; it also includes fragments.

As it exists, Love's Arrow Poisoned is only a collection of materials for a play: lines, speeches, and images. No plot can be discerned, but the work was apparently meant to include apparent incest, attempted regicide, the personal conflict of father and son, mistaken identity, revenge, and suicide. It would have involved “struggles of fear, remorse & ambition” (521), Beddoes tells us. Character types and names appear which will reappear in later fragments and in Death's Jest Book, especially the sinister Ziba, “born in an old ruined century / Three or four doors above the one we live in” (255). By the second fragment it is clear that, as in The Brides' Tragedy, love can be realized only in death, “for not externally this love can live, / But in the soul” since “the bower I spoke of is in Paradise” (254, 257). In both style and vision Beddoes has moved beyond The Brides' Tragedy. This globe has become a “fat, unwholesome star, / The bald fool-planet, that has men upon it, / And they nickname it ‘world’ … this humpy bastard of the sun” (261). The man who inhabits this star was created by the faultfinder, the satirist of the universe:

                    Dost know
That Momus picked a burnt-out comet up
From Vulcan's floor, and stuck a man upon it;
Then, having laught, he flung the wick away,
And let the insect feed on planet oil:—
What was't? Man and his ball.

(261)

These lines spoken by Erminia generally represent the satiric tone of the work and specifically establish, in the final fragment, an attack on a nature—“hell-wombed witch”—the very antithesis of Wordsworth's (263).

In the one completed act of Torrismond a son is repudiated by his stern father, setting the son's mind on death and power. Torrismond, “whose veins are stretched by passion's hottest wine” and who “ranges and riots headlong through the world” (268), appears to his father as only a vicious wastrel. Yet like Prince Hal he loves his father, and riots only that he might quell his longing for some redeeming love. Far from being debauched, Torrismond is “not at home / In this December world, with men of ice, / Cold sirs and madams” (271). Like one of Byron's heroes he knows the “curse / Of being for a little world too great, / Demanding more than nature has to give.” In the central scene of the piece Torrismond meets Veronica in a secluded, moonlit garden, and discovers her deep and idealized love for him. Since he suddenly recognizes his own love in return, redemption should follow. But as in The Brides' Tragedy, love seems to thrive only in the “azure secrecy of night” (277), and at any rate Melchior, a courtier nursing some ambiguous wrong, poisons his father against him. All crises in Beddoes's work end in death; the break between father and son leaves Torrismond “cool as an ice-drop in a dead man's eye, / For winter is the season of the tomb, / And that's my country now” (282). The wish to be unborn—a frequent motif in all of Beddoes's major work—is Torrismond's response to his father's distorted view of his character:

Tear all my life out of the universe,
Take off my youth, unwrap me of my years,
And hunt me up the dark and broken past
Into my mother's womb; there unbeget me;
For 'till I'm in thy veins and unbegun,
Or to the food returned which made the blood
That did make me, no possible lie can ever
Unroot my feet to thee.

(283)

If he could but “die to the root” he could deny all validity of life. For a spiritual exile like Torrismond, the “mighty labour is to die,” but in dying “we'll drive in a chariot to our graves, / Wheel'd with big thunder, o'er the heads of men” (283). The act ends with Torrismond's negative will to power.

For Donner, Torrismond is essentially complete in one act; “as it stands, it conforms with the Aristotelian canon.”²⁴ He also notes the major improvements in characterization, in dialogue, and in poetry: “phrasing, diction, and blank verse alike mark the formation of the mature style.”²⁵ Indeed, he praises the work extravagantly, invoking Aeschylus and arguing that the garden scene has “all the grace and artifice of a tune by Mozart.”²⁶ Unquestionably Torrismond is, even unfinished, an improvement in its particulars over The Brides' Tragedy. But it is not finished—only stopped—and there is no hint as to how the plot could be resolved.

The Second Brother, longest of these experiments, succeeds no better—despite the bulk. It grinds to a halt just as a grave-digging scene commences; even Shakespeare-as-muse cannot push the play beyond its wormy impasse. Here Torrismond has matured into Orazio, and the father-son conflict has become a conflict between brothers. The new situation retains the sense of tragic waste in familial struggles, and widens the political theme only latent in Torrismond. Orazio, the brother of the ruling Duke of Ferrara, is like Torrismond a pleasure-seeker, even a sybarite. And like the earlier protagonist, he is more than that. But he has put aside Valeria, his loving wife, and slipped into deep self-gratification; he is a failed Torrismond. He calls himself the “Lord of Love” (287), but he identifies even more strongly with Dionysus. We first see him coming through the street

Wrapt like Bacchus, in the hide
Of a specked panther, with his dancing nymphs,
And torches bright and many, as his slaves
Had gathered up the fragments of the sun
That fell just now. Hark! here his music comes.

(286)

The description is no accident:

From tower and hill, by trump and cannon's voice,
Have I proclaimed myself a deity's son:
Not Alexander's father, Ammon old,
But ivied Bacchus do I call my sire.
Hymn it once more.

(286)

His taste and behavior remind us of Byron's protagonist in Sardanapalus; like him he seems to hide much behind his apparently single-minded commitment to pleasure.

As the play begins Marcello, the long-absent second brother of the duke and his heir apparent, returns unrecognized to Ferrara. He thrusts himself in front of Orazio's procession; the meeting, as one critic has put it, “is in the tonality of death confronting life, the skeleton or death's head at the scene of festivity.”²⁷ Marcello demands alms as the beggar he appears to be. Orazio, however, not only denies his appeal but—recoiling instinctively—utters a repudiation of the missing brother: “I would deny, outswear, and overreach, / And pass him with contempt, as I do you” (289). This gratuitous insult sets in motion the play's action. As Orazio banquets with his followers, his long-abandoned wife, Valeria (a married version of Torrismond's Veronica), enters and is reunited with her husband. At the very moment when his empty life is redeemed through the renewal of his love and the requital of hers, Valeria's father—and his creditor—comes to turn him out of his palace and rob him of his wife. He learns that his brother the duke has died and that Marcello, still in rags, has assumed the throne.

All of this happens in the first crowded act. The remaining two acts show the development of Marcello's revenge and his transformation into the tyrant who becomes death-as-sovereign. Orazio is imprisoned, Ferrara's other nobles are spurned, and the stage is set for some kind of gothic confrontation in the cathedral vault at midnight.

The macabre scene that was to have followed is only vaguely implied; it probably would have included murder and a faked resurrection of Valeria, who Orazio has been led to believe is dead. But it is difficult to see how Beddoes could have completed the play. Three acts have brought us only to the point at which the one act of Torrismond ended, essentially to Marcello's argument that “Death is the one condition of our life” (313). As projected, the vault scene could mean nothing to Beddoes; for though the pretended victory over death might fool Orazio, it could never fool the author. If imagination were to provide an answer to the eternal question of death, the answer had to be convincing.

There is a rather frenzied quality about the piece, suggesting Beddoes's lack of sureness about his materials and his theme. And while the power of language and poetry in Torrismond is extended, the dramatic “realism” of that work is starting to be displaced by Gothic distortion of situations and speech. This distortion is not simply the result of literary imitation (as it is in his juvenilia) but rather a sign of what is for him the breakdown of the barriers between life and death, a breakdown that will affect the character of Death's Jest Book. Something of that quality is embodied in Marcello's lines alluded to above:

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.

(313)

However, Beddoes does murmur; more than that, he will make his major creative effort one huge “jest” against an absurd reality that in these lines Marcello accepts so calmly.

TOWARD DEATH'S JEST BOOK

“I do not intend to finish that 2nd Brother you saw but am thinking of a very Gothic-styled tragedy for w^h I have a jewel of a name—Death's Jest Book” (604). Thus in the failure of The Second Brother lies the origin of his great work; as he had so often done before, Beddoes will start over yet again.

Examination of The Brides' Tragedy and the dramatic fragments reveals, despite the apparent completeness of the published play, an author groping for a creative fulfillment that continues to be elusive. For Beddoes the drama remains compelling; each new start represents a recommitment to the dramatic shape of value and experience. He appears to think—or try to think—in acts. But the dramatic impulse is impeded by conventional theatrical assumptions and, more significantly, by his inability to define theme clearly—to realize his vision. In The Brides' Tragedy and in the fragments Beddoes swerves back and forth between concern for plot and his still largely undefined sense of the world.

But from the perspective of Death's Jest Book we can recognize the general direction, however confusedly, in which his imagination is moving in these works. On an obvious level, we see characters like Ziba in Torrismond and Melchior in The Second Brother emerge again in the major work. More important, however, is the way in which the dramatic impulse gradually comes to assume a “satiric” form. Ermina's impassioned speech in Love's Arrow Poisoned, to which we referred earlier, argues that man is the product of Momus, the god of ridicule. Gradually Beddoes assumes the perspective of the lonely cosmic outcast who—created by the god of jest—assumes the satiric function himself, almost in self-defense.

This is not to argue that The Brides' Tragedy or the fragments are satires. Nor is the satiric impulse like that found in Dryden, or even Blake, a poet with whom he has some affinity. Rather, the satiric element, if not the tone—latent here but powerful in Death's Jest Book—reminds us of the revolt against a world conceived as absurd, a conception found in Byron and in later nonsatiric writers. It is indicative of Beddoes's remarkable modernity that he should have come to recognize the inescapably problematic nature of human existence, and that his reaction would be, in Wilner's words, the “creation of an essentially absurdist world—grotesque, self-parodying, nihilistic.”²⁸ If Wilner's last term seems an exaggeration, we need only recall the hopelessness in all these pieces: Hesperus, Floribel, and Olivia inhabit a world barren of spiritual growth; Torrismond, his father, and his lover can only be betrayed; Orazio must be destroyed by a man who returns, almost as from the dead, in a totally unreasonable distortion of probability. Moreover, even the best life can be no more than “a brief parenthesis in chaos” (248).

While there are some conventional aspects of satire here—in his letters and poetry Beddoes clearly scorns the “cold sirs and madams”—and while one also finds Manfred-like posturing, the vital element is a serious revolt against the absurdity of an existence hedged around by death. Marcello is, at moments, a spokesman for this view, a view formed by the realization of the tentative and constantly imperiled condition of life:

Each minute of man's safety he does walk
A bridge no thicker than his frozen breath
O'er a precipitous and craggy danger
Yawning to death.

(310)

The result of such a realization is a growing desire to destroy death itself; for even while identifying death with love, Beddoes's imagination searches for a way to subvert it. And if one cannot “kill” death, one can be “mad and merry” at his “jovial feast among the worms” (206):

          But while you still are living,
What say you to some frolic merriment?
There are two grassy mounds beside the church,
My husband and my daughter; let us go
And sit beside them, and learn silence there;
Even with such guests we'll hold our revelry
O'er bitter recollections: there's no anguish,
No fear, no sorrow, no calamity,
In the deathful catalogue of human pains,
But we will jest upon 't, and laugh and sing:
Let pitiful wretches whine for consolation,
Thank heaven we despair.

(228)

The “frolic merriment,” the “revelry,” the ability to “jest upon 't”—all prepare us for his “very Gothic-styled” play, indeed his “fool's tragedy.”

In the works discussed in this chapter we find that Beddoes's “Araby of words” ranges from the precious (“full of beeish truth”), through the crisp and trenchant (“I've given myself, like alms unto an idiot, / To be for nothing squandered”), to the rough and grotesque (“be his sop-oracles, and suck yellow truth / Out of the nipple of his jingling pouch”).²⁹ But it is the latter tone that foreshadows Death's Jest Book. Here is Marcello as the spectator of death confronting Orazio, whom he likens to love:

Let us shake hands; I tell thee, brother skeleton,
We're but a pair of puddings for the dinner
Of Lady worm; you served in silks and gems,
I garnished with plain rags. Have I unlocked thee?

(288)

It is not surprising to find this example in the last of the fragments; in Death's Jest Book, which he is now to begin, the grotesque and satirical will become the dominant tone.

When Beddoes left for Germany in July 1825 the personal isolation he would there assume was, in a sense, symbolic of the social and cosmic alienation he had already come to feel.³⁰ Whether or not his mother's death played any major role in his darkened vision is unclear; what is obvious is that at twenty-two years old he had none of the youthful optimism warranted by his age, success, and promise. More significantly, instead of the law, which it had apparently been his intention to pursue, he now chose not only his father's medical profession, but the life of the scientist in general. Such a choice reflects a deliberate and major shift; though he might dabble in poetry he would now trust reason over imagination, “prefer Anatomy &c to poetry” (618). While this new dedication partly reveals a lack of self-confidence—“I never cd have been the real thing as a writer” (618)—it chiefly reflects an increasingly desperate attempt to find an alternative avenue to truth.

His faith in the scalpel and microscope seems to have been real enough—at first. He felt, and tried unsuccessfully to explain in his letters, an important conjunction between anatomy and poetry. He chided Kelsall for “having anticipated a regular M.D. to arise” from his ashes after his “reduction in the crucible of German philosophy” (610-11). He now felt that the secret of life and death—the two were for him identical—could be found only by a thinker willing to try all the doors of Keats's “Chamber of Maiden Thought.” He was, therefore, “determined never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist & physiologist of the first rank” (612). In the dissecting room and at his writing table the body—flesh, organs, and especially bones—obsesses his mind. And in Beddoes's Janus-faced search for the bone of Luz, Death's Jest Book is born.

Notes

1. In 1824 Beddoes had been “turning over old plays in the Brit: Museum” and was contemplating the editing of “another volume of specimens.” Works, 592.

2. Elder Olson, Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961), 9.

3. Letters and Journals, in The Works of Lord Byron, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1898-1904), 5:347. For an interesting observation on “mental theatre” in contrast to the actual stage, see Thomas Hardy's preface to The Dynasts. He concludes by noting that “whether mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life, is a … question not without interest.” The Dynasts (London: Macmillan, 1958), 1:x.

4. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1959), 39.

5. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 247.

6. Terry Otten, The Deserted Stage: The Search for Dramatic Form in Nineteenth-Century England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), 7-8. Otten is of course quoting a famous line in Matthew Arnold's preface to his 1853 “Poems,” an essay designed as his opening attack on Romanticism.

7. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Random House, 1957).

8. Quoted by Claude Colleer Abbott in The Life and Letters of George Darley, Poet and Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 219.

9. Letters and Journals, 5:217, 268.

10. Donner points out that these observations were made while Beddoes was at work on The Second Brother, where he was, indeed, “trying to modernize traditional material,” not simply imitate that material. See 167.

11. See note 4, Preface, above.

12. “Thomas Lovell Beddoes: A Critical Study of His Major Work,” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1968).

13. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1955), 4:201.

14. For the full title and a detailed account see Donner, Beddoes, 84-86.

15. Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), 163.

16. Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York, 1968), 53. Flora was, interestingly enough, Zephyrus's wife.

17. Goode, “Beddoes,” 45.

18. Eleanor Wilmer, Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (Baltimore, 1975), 88, 81.

19. Percy B. Shelley, Adonais, ll. 462-63, 458; The Prelude (1850), 2, l. 254.

20. This apt expression is found in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, December 1823, and is quoted by Snow, Beddoes, 45.

21. It was in 1825 that Beddoes made his trenchant observations on dramatic “reanimations.”

22. Snow, Beddoes, 52.

23. See Works, 580, 586, 594, 601.

24. Donner, Beddoes, 145.

25. Ibid., 149.

26. Ibid., 152.

27. Frye, English Romanticism, 55.

28. Wilmer, Gathering the Winds, 74.

29. Works, 269, 274, 275, 267.

30. “I feel myself in a measure alone in the world & likely to remain so … I fear I am a non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable person.” Works, 610.