Michael Bradshaw

Review of the Performance of Death’s Jest-Book (NASSR, August 2003, Fordham University)

Taylor and Francis Ltd GERR041000.sgm 10.108 / 5 980410001680732 Europe Romantic Review 50-9585 (pri t)/ 74 -4657 (online) Original Article 2 04 & Francis Ltd 5 0 00June 2004 Micha Bradsh w Departme t of EnglishManchester Metropolitan UniversityGeoffrey Manton Bldg., Oxford Rd.ManchesterM15 6LLUK m.bradshaw@m u.ac.uk A stage production of this important Romantic drama had been a long time in coming. Death’s Jest-Book is Beddoes’s defining work. Conceived as a satirical investigation of human mortality in the form of an occult revenge tragedy, the Jest-Book rapidly outstripped its original purpose, to become the imaginative repository of Beddoes’s thought on physiology and psychology, as well as a vehicle for his highly informed and opinionated thesis on the native English drama. It is a troubled and fascinating text, which is currently undergoing significant theoretical reassessment. Beddoes completed the first version of Death’s Jest-Book while studying medicine in Göttingen in 1828, and sent a fair copy to England early the next year, hoping that it would be printed. After a fatal intervention by some trusted friends, who responded very negatively and recommended major revision, Beddoes lost faith in his work, and hesitated; it was never printed in his lifetime. He went on revising the drama until his suicide in 1849. Two major versions of the drama were identified by H. W. Donner, the editor of the standard Works:1 an early text, predominantly written in blank verse and prose, tragic in structure and ironic in conception; and an accumulation of later revisions, in which Beddoes amplified his satirical vision almost to the point of dissolution with a large number of fine lyrics.2 Long presumed unperformable, caught up in a general dismissiveness towards the allegedly irresolute ‘mental’ theatre of the Romantics, Beddoes’s culminating work has never before been brought to life on stage. It was entirely fitting that the ‘Placing Romanticism’ conference, with its urgent reappraisal of Romantic dramatization, should make space for this production. And for those never entirely inured to Beddoes’s ‘minor’ status, it was a thrilling endorsement of the power of his writing, and the ironic sophistication of his vision.