RICHARD HENRY STODDARD, 1892 Deaths Jest Book is a nightmare rather than a drama, and should be judged, if one

must judge it, for what it is, not for what it might be, or should be. A law unto himself, Beddoes is the most lawless of poets. The scenes of his tragedies are laid in the land of Nowhere, and the actors therein, if not wholly mad, are certainly not sane. They live, move, and have their being in a borderland between the worlds of life and death. The prey of spasmodic emotion and unnatural passion, there is no telling what they will say or do in their fits of delirium, which are as unaccountable as violent. The specialty of the elder Beddoes was the analysis of disease; the specialty of his son was the exhibition of disease in the actors of his gloomy masquerades. (Under the Evening Lamp, p. 211) Beddoes made it difficult for those who wanted to cultivate his poetic career. He was as erratic as he was brilliant, habitually solitary, obstinate, temperamental, always passionate, and ultimately suicidal. "Mr Beddoes / (T. L.) prince of morticians" so Pound dubbed him (Canto LXXX)found his ultimate client early in 1849. After an unsuccessful attempt at suicide the year before, using a razor to sever an artery in his leg (a mutilation that soon required amputation below the knee), he prevailed with poison, ending his life at age forty-five. A poet of powerful, haunting imagination, Beddoes, like the other morbidly witty poets in our volume, is most characteristic for his defiance of easy characterization. He has been slotted, variously, as the last Elizabethan, a Jacobean scion, an eighteenth-century graveyard poet resurrected in the Romantic age, an original interpreter of the English-German vogue of "Gothic" terror, the dark rear-guard of second-generation Romanticism, a soul-mate of Baudelaire and Poe, the first modernist and, with his comic grotesqueries, a precursor of the twentieth-century theater of the absurd. "Death's Jest Book" is an apt enough genre for a career of scenes and songs devoted to ghoulishly comic effects, macabre turns of events, grotesque conjunctions, original interviews of the porous boundaries between life and death. But "Beddoes is as good a poet as he is," Christopher Ricks suggests, "because the romantic, lyrical, and assuaging things in him are as real in the best of his work as the antiromantic, harsh, and feverish things." [18] His mother was the sister of prodigious novelist Maria Edgeworth, his father, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, a Lecturer in Chemistry at Oxford until his political opinions, including support of the French Revolution and opposition to the British government, created a scandal that forced him to resign the post. Beddoes pre then became an eminent medical practitioner and scientific writer, a friend to many, including Coleridge and Southey. In 1825 Beddoes left England to study medicine in Gttingen where he eventually received his MD. He would spend most of the remainder of his life on the continent, frequently in trouble with the authorities for drunken and disorderly behaviour and for his involvement in radical political movements. He lived for a year with a Russian Jewish student named Bernhard Reich, who may be the 'loved, longlost boy' of 'Dream Pedlary'. During his last years his companion was a young baker named Konrad Degen, who later became an actor of note. A pleasant stay of seven years in Zurich ended with Beddoes' expulsion on political grounds. In June 1848 he left Degen behind in Frankfurt and returned to Switzerland, where he put up at the Cigogne Hotel in Basle; the next morning he cut open an artery in his leg with a razor, gangrene set in and the leg was amputated below the knee. Finally, on 26 January 1849, he succeeded in taking his life with poison, having written the same day to his executor, Revell Phillips: 'I am food for what I am good for - worms.' Beddoes has often been called a 'poet of fragments', most of which are embedded in unfinished Jacobean-style tragedies. Their dramatic structure has the form of quicksand, in which dazzling shreds of poetry sink or swim. His magnum opus was to have been Death's Jest Book, a kind of bottomless pit that absorbed most of his creative energies during his final years. As in all his plays, the plot is murky to the point of incomprehensibility, and the characters exist mainly to mouth Beddoes' extraordinary lines, though they do collide messily with one another. One critic has observed that they have 'the essential unity of dream characters' who meet 'in the dreamer' and are merely 'emanations of the central idea'. All this does result in a bizarre kind of theatricality, and it might be interesting to try to sit through a staged version of Death's Jest Book. Unlikelier closet dreams have made it to the boards. Death was Beddoes' main subject, both as a poet and as a medical man; he seems relaxed and happy only when writing about it. Pound (in the Pisan Cantos) mentions 'Mr Beddoes/(T.L.) prince of morticians . . . centuries hoarded/to pull up a mass of algae/(and pearls).' Any anthologist is bound to include a bit of the former (the creepy 'Oviparous Tailor', for instance) as well as some of the latter, and none can avoid 'Dream Pedlary': his most anthologized poem, it is also one of the most seamlessly beautiful lyrics in the English language.

Pound evokes 'the odour of eucalyptus or sea wrack' in Beddoes; one could add those of rose, sulphur and sandalwood to this unlikely but addictive bouquet. Edmund Gosse, whose landmark edition of Beddoes' work appeared in 1890, got it almost right in his preface: 'At the feast of the muses he appears bearing little except one small savoury dish, some cold preparation, we may say, of olives and anchovies, the strangeness of which has to make up for its lack of importance. Not every palate enjoys this hors d'oeuvre, and when that is the case, Beddoes retires; he has nothing else to give. He appeals to a few literary epicures, who, however, would deplore the absence of this oddly flavoured dish as much as that of any more important piece de resistance.' One should qualify that by adding that in the century since it was written, the little band has swollen to something like a hungry horde, avid for what Pater called 'something that exists in this world in no satisfying measure, or not at all.' Busy with a pursuit in which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty could not disown, he shrank from trying to reach vague eminences in poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something in his style that recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard as one banished from a service to which he was not adapted, but who has still a lingering affection for the land of dreamsas yet, at least, not far enough in the journey of science to have lost sight of the old two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character, habits and ways of thinking; and nothing but the desperate hanker for distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set me upon rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any means become an important or great dramatic writer, I would have never swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had devoted their lives to literature, such as Coleridge and Wordsworthmen beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior poetical feeling and geniushad done so little, you must give me leave to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and should congratulate me on having chosen Gttingen instead of Grub street for my abode...It is good to be tolerable or intolerable in any other line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian!" Thread the nerves through the right holes, Get out of my bones, you wormy souls. Shut up my stomach, the ribs are full: Muscles be steady and ready to pull. Heart and artery merrily shake And eyelid go up, for were going to wake. His eye must be brighterone more rub! And pull up the nostrils! his nose was snub. This weird little poem is called Resurrection Song. Beddoes is often remembered as the poet of Dream Pedlary, which certainly makes an attractive anthology piece. But if we were to choose a single poem to represent his achievement, Resurrection Song would be more challenging and a better reflection of his style. This is an extraordinary poembrief, brilliant, and brutally comic. Once read, impossible to forget. The fashionably macabre theme is rendered with an anatomical detachment which recalls the laboratory of Victor Frankenstein, and yet the business of resurrection is also treated as slapstick farce. Neither the corpse nor the surgeon seem to know what theyre doing, and their incompetence is spun into a frivolous ditty which leaves the imagined reader helpless with laughter. Beddoes wrote Resurrection Song in Germany between 1825 and 1828 for inclusion in his satirical tragedy Deaths JestBook. The character Wolfram has been murdered in the first act, and here in Act III a necromantic spell is about to raise him from the dead. But by this point Beddoes had layered the complicated scene with so much irony that he seems to have felt the song was excessive, and ran the risk of dispelling all seriousness completely. So he cancelled it, and consigned it to the margins of Deaths Jest-Book as a fragment. Its stranded status is now one of its fascinations; as postmodern readers, we are consistently drawn to illegitimate material that has been suppressed, rejected or erased. Beddoess comic style is so effortless that its easy to overlook just how extreme a statement the poem makes. To begin with, its placement in time: these lines dramatise in banal, everyday terms what is either a religious miracle or a story out of science fiction (depending on your point of view)the moment when a corpse is brought back to life. The speakers are at the very borderline between death and life. This raises all kinds of problems: for example, does the poem participate in any religious orthodoxy, and if so, why is it so harshly irreverent? Isnt resurrection supp supposed to happen at the end of time? and in that case, this is a conversation we could never overhear. The song is all about the moment of transformation, and yet seems scornful of the miracle it describes. It is therefore both highly theatrical, and cynically destructive of the theatrical illusion. For all its charm, one begins to see why Beddoes may have considered it troublesome, and removed it from his already over-full drama.

Resurrection Song is also a good introduction to the intricacy of Beddoess verse, with its relish of physical detail. For example, within the rattling rhythm of the couplets, there are internal rhymes and other sound effects; the echoing assonance of bones and souls (l. 2), the rhymes of steady and ready (l. 4) and Heart and artery (l. 5), the repetition of eye, parallel in adjacent lines. This accumulation of detail suggests the intricacy of mechanism, as the human body is patched up in readiness for its new life. A botched repair-job by rude mechanicals. Resurrection Song therefore holds in miniature a wealth of Beddoess eccentric gifts as the most criminally neglected writer of the British Romantic era. It has a provocative mixture of theological and anti-religious content. Despite its absurd burlesque tone, it speculates about human life, and searches for proof of an after-existence. Both the gross bodily detail, and the anatomists love of precision come direct from the dissecting rooms and Beddoess medical training at the University of Gttingen, where he boasted of his expertise with the scalpel. Its stranded status in the margins of that great dramatic shambles Deaths Jest-Book is characteristic of Beddoess habit of hitting upon his most intense images in fragments and miscellaneous pieces, free from the discipline of formal design, plot and characterisation. The poem is powerfully physical, but also undeniably metaphysical; a whole poem, but also a broken fragment of verse; tragic and farcical. It belongs in the pastiche sixteenth-century theatre, and equally in the operating theatre of nineteenth-century medicine. In all its tense contradictions, it is so much more powerfully true to Beddoes than the smooth and gorgeous lyric for which he is best remembered. Early fragments Bury him deep. So damned a work should lie Nearer the Devil than man. Make him a bed Beneath some lock-jawed hell, that never yawns With earthquake or eruption; and so deep That he may hear the devil and his wife In bed, talking secrets. AN UNFINISHED DRAFT (from The Ivory Gate) A thousand buds are breaking Their prisons silently; A thousand birds are making Their nests in leafy tree; A thousand babes are waking On woman's breast to-day; [...] Is born to man, to-day Beneath the sun of May: Whence come ye, babes of flowers, and, Children, whence come we? The snow falls by thousands into the sea; A thousand blossoms covers The forsaken forest, And on its branches hovers The lark's song thousandfold; And maidens hear from lovers A thousand secrets guessed In June's abundant breast Before and yet are blessed Whence, blossoms rich, birds bold, beloved maidens, whence come ye? The snow falls by thousands into the sea; A thousand flowers are shedding Their leaves all dead and dry;

A thousand birds are threading Their passage through the sky; A thousande mourners treading The tearful churchyard way In funeral array: Birds, whither fly ye? - whither, dead, pass ye? The snow falls by thousands into the sea. THE SECOND BROTHER Act III, Scene ii Marcello Thou dost me wrong. Lament! I'd have thee do't: The heaviest raining is the briefest shower. Death is the one condition of our life: To murmur were unjust; our buried sires Yielded their seats to us, and we shall give Our elbow-room of sunshine to our sons. From first to last the traffic must go on; Still birth for death. Shall we remonstrate then? Millions have died that we might breathe this day: The first of all might murmur, but not we. Grief is unmanly too. DEATH'S JEST BOOK Act V, Scene iii Wolfram: As I was newly dead, and sat beside My corpse, looking on it, as one who muses Gazing upon a house he was burnt out of, There came some merry children's ghosts to play At hide-and-seek in my old body's corners [. . .] He had a theory that no man should devote himself entirely to poetry unless possessed of most extraordinary powers of imagination, or unfitted, by mental or bodily weakness, for severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined "never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections with the mind, and when protoplasm was still an unknown quantity toward whose discovery science was slowly feeling its way. As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the arcana of anatomy and physiology his judgment of his own poetry grew more and more severe. The more he knew of Truth, the nearer absolute perfection must that Beauty be which would compete with her for his heart. Busy with a pursuit in which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty could not disown, he shrank from trying to reach vague eminences in poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something in his style that recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard as one banished from a service to which he was not adapted, but who has still a lingering affection for the land of dreamsas yet, at least, not far enough in the journey of science to have lost sight of the old two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character, habits and ways of thinking; and nothing but the desperate hanker for distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set me upon rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any means become an important or great dramatic writer, I would have never swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had devoted their lives to literature, such as Coleridge and Wordsworthmen beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior poetical feeling and geniushad done so little, you must give me leave to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and should congratulate me on having chosen Gttingen instead of Grub street for my abode...It is good to be tolerable or intolerable in any other line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian!"

There are so many racy bits of anecdote and opinion scattered through this correspondence, so many things worth keeping for their own sakes or as throwing new light upon the character of their writer, that it is hard to choose a single specimen, but with one more extract we must strive to be content. Beddoes' friend and editor had been trying to get from him some personal details about his daily life, pursuits and fancies, which, with his usual horror of the egotistical, he flatly declined to give. "I will not venture on a psychological self-portraiture," he writes, "fearingand I believe with sufficient reasonto be betrayed into affectation, dissimulation or some other alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches are the result of mere vanitynot excepting those of St. Augustine and Rousseaufalsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his own deeds or geographer of his own mind breaks out now and then indignantly, and revenges himself on his own weakness by telling some very disagreeable truth of some other person; and then, re-established in his own good opinion, marches on cheerfully in the smooth path toward the temple of his own immortality. Yet even here, you see, I am indirectly lauding my own worship for not being persuaded to laud my own worship. How sleek, smooth-tongued, paradisaical a deluder art thou, sweet Self-conceit! Let great men give their own thoughts on their own thoughts: from such we can learn much; but let the small deer hold jaw, and remember what the philosopher says, 'Fleas are not lobsters: dn their souls!'" "Isbrand. Good-morrow, Brother Vanity! How? soul of a pickle-herring, body of a spagirical tosspot, doublet of motley, and mantle of pilgrim, how art thou transmuted! Wilt thou desert our brotherhood, fool sublimate? Shall the motley chapter no longer boast thee? Wilt thou forswear the order of the bell, and break thy vows to Momus? Have mercy on Wisdom and relent. "Mandrake. Respect the grave and sober, I pray thee. To-morrow I know thee not. In truth, I mark that our noble faculty is in its last leaf. The dry rot of prudence hath eaten the ship of fools to dust: she is no more seaworthy. The world will see its ears in a glass no longer. So we are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the feast of asses come but once a year, when all the days are foaled of one mother? O world! world ! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our grandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own fool, and the world's sign is taken down. "Isbrand. Farewell, thou great-eared mind! I mark, by thy talk, that thou commencest philosopher, and then thou art only a fellow-servant out of livery." Isbrand is the brother of the slain knight Wolfram: his foolery is but the disguise of his revenge, and thus he rails over the body of his brother: "Dead and gone! a scurvy burden to this ballad of life. There lies he, Siegfriedmy brother, mark you and I weep not, nor gnash the teeth, nor curse: and why not, Siegfried? Do you see this? So should every honest man be cold, dead, and leaden-coffined. This was one who would be constant in friendship, and the pole wanders; one who would be immortal, and the light that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago. That is constancy, that is life. O moral Nature!" The Brides' Tragedy. "a voice from the waters:" The swallow leaves her nest, The soul my weary breast; But therefore let the rain On my grave Fall pure; for why complain? Since both will come again O'er the wave. The wind dead leaves and snow Doth hurry to and fro; And once a day shall break O'er the wave, When a storm of ghosts shall shake The dead, until they wake In the grave. Its a perennial question: If there were dreams to sell,/ What would you buy? If you could pick any single possession, any future, any life, what would it be? And what would you be prepared to pay, in money or morality, for your hope of paradise?

In Beddoes poem, a peddler sets out all the possibilities that might be in store for us. For me, the scene is straight out of a Ray Bradbury short story or the TV series The Twilight Zone. I can imagine walking through a perfectly ordinary marketplace, with people noisily hawking flowers and fruit, jewellery and clothes, greeting cards and cut-price DVDsand suddenly stumbling across a stall with a distinct difference. How would we react? Perhaps wed pick a few of the dreams up, gingerly sensing if they felt rightwhether they were ripe or rotten, selfish or good. Would we trust the mans practised patter? Perhaps, with a wink, hed give us a special two-for-one offer: fame and happiness. How could we refuse? (But maybe theyd cancel each other out) The term peddler is somewhat ambiguous. We talk, with a slight element of suspicion, of salesmen peddling their products, knowing how easily we can be fooled. The coat we thought suited us so well in the shop turns out to have been a complete hallucination. Too embarrassed to take it back, we fling it to the back of the wardrobe with a shudder. What would we give the peddler in return for our chosen dream? A passing bell sounds a funereal note. And indeed, some people do die for an ideal, whether honorable or treacherous. Others merely give a light sigh and that sound, so quiet and soft, betrays a whole lifetime of disappointment. The rose-leaf shaken from Lifes fresh crown could be a symbol of love and rewardor the very second the glory of existence begins to darken and fade. I mentioned The Twilight Zone and yet the dream-pedlary is a reality we live with every day. Nowadays we call it advertising. Billions of messages call and cry for our attention, bombarding us with potential visions, turning us into creatures of insatiable wants. In fact, we have very few basic needsbeyond food, shelter, and love. In the second stanza, Beddoes describes his own dream. It is of a cottage lone and still: a hope for rural simplicity. This might seem a rather sad, dejected idyll, and yet for Beddoes it would be place to recover from melancholic stasis. It is a place of solitude amid the bustle and clamor

of lifetranquillity amid the frustration of activity going nowhere. The image of bowers nigh evokes a rich stream of tradition within British poetry of the arbor, the orchard, as a place of replenishment and solace. The world is here in shadow, but this is not negative or depressive. The woes of the mind going round and round in a circle are brought to a haltand disappear. The shadow, by excluding distraction, returns us to ourselves. It gives us the courage just to be. From darkness emerges light. From the shadowy twining of trees comes a pearl. This is the final beautiful outcome of that slow, incremental process of intellectual and emotional refinement called life. We see this precious fire in the eyes of our grandparents, who have weathered hardship and misery, met it, and have attained imperishable wisdom. Stylistically, the poem creates a magical atmosphere through its short, musical and rhythmically varied lines, pinned into place by just three rhymes in each stanza. I particularly like the way the rhyme at the end of the first stanza dramatically builds up to the refrain and central thought of the poem: What would you buy? Do we even know the answer? Have we succumbed to all the second-hand dreams clamoring for our attention, in the vain hope that one day they will be ours? Have we exchanged our true future for somebody elses? It is only when we are alone and still that we have any chance of finding outand of finding that elusive pearl. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (18031849) was a poet and playwright. An inveterate dreamer, unable to bring his literary plans to fruition, he eventually died by his own hand. Beddoes' philosophical take on life in the *hope-wish-dream scheme* becomes apparent of his own due to some personal loss. This humbled him and dwindles his hopes and dreams to a minimum of wanting better health, physically or/and mentally, while wagering the trust or hope of the life after death -be it resurrecting or mortal end with no hope to go on after. I'm sad due to his last two stanzas being rather despondant, and unsure of the yank it has on him. It divides his desires and beliefs and probably resolves to the latter of where the soul goes, but not without continuing with the 'hopeful' thread of a DREAM. Thus....leaving an interpretation open to the reader. "If there were dreams to sell," if indeed the dream-pedlar could bring us the dreams of our desire, how well we know what we would choose; the faces that we would summon in our sleep, the paths that our feet should tread, the familiar rooms known to us long ago, in which we would find ourselves again - if we could buy. Is there any key that will open the doors of dreaming at our will? Any secret which would give us the power of choice or control over the activities of our sleeping hours? Elusive phantom-like things our dreams are, evading the memory which would hold them fast, refusing often to come at our bidding, however great our longing may be; but although this is true, and although we may never find any magic word of power that

will give us perfect mastery over them, yet I am sure that there are some simple secrets, some methods that can be learned, by means of which we may in some measure command them, and that, more than we yet realise, the control of our dreams lies within our power. Moylan focuses on Beddoess writing on death, arguing that Beddoess reflections on the paradoxical nature of death and the afterlife tend to serve the purpose of effacing or displacing crucial topics. Foremost among these, Moylan singles out the repression of desire, a splitting of effect and idea, that leads to repeated patterns of tragic love in Deaths Jest-Book. Rather than using its thinly disguised homosexual encounters as a key to the text, however, Moylan highlights the disruptive quality of desire, destructive or monstrous, as it is transformed into dramatic substitutions and reversals. Moylan finds this desire associated with states outside categorization or meaning and thus linked to the fool Homunculus Mandrake, himself an appearance from beyond the symbolic order. Both are analyzed with relation to the Lacanian second death, describing the termination of the relation of the self to the symbolic order that simultaneously allows the self to stay in contact with the fantasmatic kernel of its being. Moylan regards this refusal of closure in the dramatized identity formations, the poetic form, and in Beddoess self-establishment as poet as crucial for the resistance to his reception, emphasizing, however, that the process of effacement casts its own spell. Like his father, Beddoes studied anatomy and physiology. His poetry often treats of anatomical subjects, and there is one called Resurrection Song, which may allude to the notorious resurrection men, the body snatchers Burke and Hare whose shocking murder trial in 1828 led to Burke's sentencing to be hanged and dissected. So many students wanted to take part, there was a riot in which the windows of the dissecting room were smashed. Some students are known to have taken souvenirs of Burke's skin and had it made into book-covers. Bs Deaths Jest Book and Freuds The uncanny come out of the same struggle to come to terms with the death drive. Ultimately, however, Deaths Jest Book arrives at Lacans rereading of the death drive in The Ethics of psychoanalysis. Here, Lacan eventually identifies Freuds death drive as the unsymbolizable void of the Real. For Lacan, the Real is paradoxically that ineffable, impossible thing beyond the experiential reality of the symbolic order and the impenetrable kernel around which it is constructed.In the same way, Death in Deaths Jest Book is both beyond individual life and material history, and, at the same time, functions as the centre around which the individual psyche is formed. Precisely in its paradoxical role as ineffable, non-material, outside of time, and the essential truth of the psyche, death is the basis of sociopolitical reality as it is constructed in Deaths Jest Book. Rather than the life affirming leap beyond history conveyed in Prometheus Unbound, revolution in Deaths Jest Book reveals historys essence as the compulsive return to death, understood as the ahistorical void of the Real. Christopher Moylan claims that in the spring of 1827, Beddoes gave his late evenings to dissecting corpses in the hope of finding the bone of luz, associated in various Talmudic sources with the resurrection of the dead. Bs interest in the luz is preserved in Deaths Jest Book. Despite his early optimism, a letter written to Kelsall in April 1827 suggests that Bs literary and scientific attempts to establish a principle of life have failed to materialize and thus dispel the power of death. B tells Kelsall that I am now so thoroughly penetrate with the conviction of the absurdity and unsatisfactory nature of human life that I search with avidity for every shadow of a proof or probability of an after existence, both in the material and immaterial nature of man. His search for a principle of human life has become a search for an after existence. The search for what gives life meaning, that which will somehow dispel or justify its absurdity and unsatisfactory nature, depends upon positing an after existence that both exceeds life itself and yet can be empirically verified and discursively articulated as lifes most essential, internal component. The truly impossible dimension of Beddoes project becomes clear, insofar as the after existence that must ground life is simultaneously the a priori condition of its possibility and paradoxically beyond its scope.

Despairing of achieving his goal of finding an enduring principle of life within the body, Beddoes recognizes the fantasmatic nature of the desire for a doctrine of immortality as a common structural principle in religion, philosophy, and empirical science, in their attempt to repress death. This realization allows Beddoes to reconstruct his therapeutic purpose for his play into a recognizably psychoanalytic reading of death as the central force that drives both the human subject and history. Man appears to have found out this secret (that of the doctrine of immortality) for himself, and it is certainly the best part of religion and philosophy, the only truth worth demonstrating: an anxious question full of hope and fear and promise, for wh. Nature appears to have appointed one solution Death. By suggesting that the secret of immortality is Death, Beddoes renders life itself an uncanny fantasm. Teresa de Lauretis: Freuds figuration of an unconscious death drive...conveys the sense and the force of something in human reality that resists discursive articulation as well as political diplomacy, an otherness that haunts the dream of a common world. Beddoes play offers a living semiotic display of Lacans rereading of the death drive, thus conveying the critique of ideology as a structural principle that underwrites both the feudal order and the possibility of a post revolutionary republic in Deaths Jest Book. If revolution hides its uncanniness the structure of repetition that is the death drive Deaths Jest Book compulsively adumbrates its void. Death and his Sweetheart: Revolution and Return in Deaths Jest Book by David M Baulch Biographer Donner suggests that B suffered all his life from a skeleton complex. Suspects that his father encouraged him to play with animal bones and dissected cadavers. Personal trauma in Dream of Dying? Introduction to The Brides' Tragedy By David Baulch I. The Un-known author of The Brides' Tragedy 1. To fully appreciate The Brides' Tragedy in its early nineteenth-century context is to catch a glimpse of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes of 1823, when reviewers identified him as a promising, if immature, playwright and a powerfully imaginative poet. Within his own life, Beddoes's potential was never realized in print much beyond this brief recognition at eighteen. Despite a number of attempts to produce subsequent dramas to follow the humble success of The Brides' Tragedy, Beddoes himself never offered another volume of his work to the British public. 2. The purpose of this edition of The Brides' Tragedy is to help to return critical attention to the brief moment when Beddoes seemed poised to become a major voice in what might have been a "third generation" of British romanticism. Contemporary students of British Romanticism may be aware of Thomas Lovell Beddoes as a writer of brief lyric poems, songs exhumed from the bodies of his dramas, and for the bizarre, sprawling Death's Jest Book. Thus, after slightly more than a century and a half, Beddoes's contemporary reputation rests largely upon texts that had no impact on the literary culture of his day. 3. Dream of Dying Shivering in fever, weak, and parched to sand, My ears, those entrances of word-dressed thoughts, My pictured eyes, and my assuring touch, Fell from me, and my body turned me forth From its beloved abode: then I was dead; 5 And in my grave beside my corpse I sat, In vain attempting to return: meantime There came the untimely spectres of two babes, And played in my abandoned body's ruins; They went away; and, one by one, by snakes 10 My limbs were swallowed; and, at last, I sat With only one, blue-eyed, curled round my ribs,

Eating the last remainder of my heart, And hissing to himself. O sleep, thou fiend! Thou blackness of the night! how sad and frightful Are these thy dreams!

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