Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #518439 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

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Customer Reviews

A "plum pudding" of a poem...
Unlike at least one of the reviews posted here, this review is not for scholars who are debating about specific issues within Beddoes' crticism, but for readers who may not be familiar with the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Simply put, if you enjoy the darker verse of Shelley, and love the mad soliloquies of Hamlet--but wish that they would go on much longer, and that every major character in a play would have them--then "Death's Jest Book" is for you!

Northrop Frye said it best when he referred to "Death's Jest Book," Thomas Lovell Beddoes' masterpiece, as a "plum pudding" of a poem. Notice that Frye refers to "DJB" as a "poem" as opposed to a play. It is a play only in the loosest sense of the closet drama, as the major characters tend to be lost within their own personal agendas and gloomy experiences. For this reason, Northrop Frye goes on to suggest that "DJB" prefigures modern "absurdist" plays in its chaotic "plot," which stems from characters being "driven into complications of incident by their passions as helplessly as inanimate objects" ("Yorick: The Romantic Macabre").

As a lover of poetry, while the above is interesting to me, what attracts me far more to Beddoes' work is the finely wrought poetry itself. Take, for example, these lines from Act I, Scene I. The misanthropic Isbrand, the poem's chief villain, upon seeing departing sailors singing, growls

The idiot merriment of thoughtless men!
How the fish laugh at them, that swim and toy
About the ruined ship, wrecked deep below,
Whose pilot's skeleton, all full of sea weeds,
Leans on his anchor, grinning like their Hope.

The poem is simply filled with passages like this, grim jewels that have largely been overshadowed by the works of "major" Romantic poets. Whether or not they all cohere into a successful play is questionable, but that they are moving lines of poetry from a unique voice is undeniable.

Cheers to Michael Bradshaw, the editor--who is also a major Beddoes' critic--and to the publisher, for making this original version of the poem so readily available again! For many years, Beddoes poetry lived seemingly only in the mustier shelves of university libraries. Now, at the dawn of the new millenium, his apocalyptic writings are resurfacing...
I encourage savvy readers to welcome him.

A Great Play at the Mercy of a Bad Editor
I don't intend to write a lengthy review since the first reviewer has already done a good job of that - I merely wish to comment on some of the unfortunate opinions and views of the editor, Mr Bradshaw, in the introduction to this latest edition of Death's Jest Book. My main complaint is this: precisely what does the "area of enquiry, " namely, "that of gender and sexuality" (p. xxv) have to do with a work that is ostensibly devoid of any material on, or treatment of the subject being inquired into? The text reprinted in this volume dates from 1829, well before the era of literary deconstruction and poltiticization in the late 20th century; so one can say without presumption that the editor Mr Bradshaw and his fellow acedemians are taking liberties with an early 19th century work that resists late 20th century academic impositions, namely the categories of gender and sexuality. The subject of Beddoes' "sexuality" would only be as (if not more)important as any other more visable thematic or schematic dimension in his writings to those whose main interest lie in performing the banal baptizimal ritual know as "homosexualizing" yet another long dead writer. It would seem that the absurd and unfounded practice of uncovering "encoded homoerotic narratives" and tracking down any hint or trace of so-called "gender and sexuality" are the only hermenutic innovations that the present editor can suggest. I daresay that phrases like, "the presence of same-sex desire in a text can interrogate and subvert hitherto accepted norms of literary style and genre" are not only altogether meaningless, but pointless additions for those who are not fully indoctrinated into the postmodern/deconstruction school of suspicion and paranoia. What pre-requisite knowledge of history or literature does one require in order to go about such researches? Absolutely none, since any knowledge of history or literature would "subvert" any such "paradigm" as the meaningless sniffing-out and detection of "gender and sexuality" in works that have far more serious business to accomplish than taking the obsessions usually confined to teenage diaries and acting as though something more serious then we can imagine is going on. Ironically, it seems that there is no more expedient way to rid a book of all of its native tones and shades of sensuality, mystery, charm - in short, everything pleasurable and aesthetic - than to quibble over whether Beddoes, Melville, or Baudelaire were fully practicing homosexuals, part time practicioners, or just dabblers in the stuff. Have any such "discoveries" ever made the reading of your favorite poem, novel, or play any more rewarding or enjoyable or illuminating? What sort of addition is the supposed fact that "Beddoes was probably gay" supposed to make in anybody's mind as they read Death's Jest Book? Besides, if you, dear reader, can find any trace of "encoded homoerotic narratives" in this play, I suppose you deserve an award; I have been through the book in school, and on my own several times, and I must own that to say I have detected anything of that nature (whatever its nature) would be nonsense. I find it curious that Mr Bradshaw calls the application of "queer theory" and the relentless project of detecting "encoded homoerotic narratives," "just a few of the more established methods of reading the text." How is this possible since Mr Donner, the only scholar and biographer of Beddoes in the 20th century (and decidedly not an implacable hunter of homosexuals and other embedded and encoded gibberish) ceased publishing on Beddoes in the 1950's; and after Mr Donner, there was almost nothing published on Beddoes until roughly a decade ago? So much for the so-called "established methods" that in chronological reality have no predecessors or parentage in literary studies, ancient or modern... Beddoes is one of my favorites, and I would recommend that if anyone is interested in Beddoes, the bibliography in Mr Bradshaw's book is far more useful than any single word in the introduction (most of which, if it has any merit, is merely a re-hashing of Mr Donner's opinions anyway); Mr Donner is really the only authority on Beddoes' works, and deserves the credit for establishing the only approaches to Beddoes' writings that have yielded anything in the way of insights and approaches. His book, "Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet" has an excellent background on that species of drama in the 19th century known as the "Elizabethan revival;" without some knowledge of that loose aggrate of 19th century writers there can be no solid understanding of Beddoes' writings - this is the sort of background Mr Bradshaw ought to spend his time rehearsing in his introduction, and cease trying to "come out" with anything novel in the way of how Beddoes might be better understood by a generation that has no interest in poetry or drama anyway. Even if you sex-up Beddoes and his books, I doubt this would add one person to his readership, or lengthen his fame by one day; such efforts to produce a "Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Extreeeem!!!!" is, if not childishly impudent, rather more deliberately grotesque than any of the graveyard imagery in his plays and poems.