[UFA]≫ Download Death Jest Book Fyfield Books Thomas Lovell Beddoes Michael Bradshaw 9781857545999 Books

Death Jest Book Fyfield Books Thomas Lovell Beddoes Michael Bradshaw 9781857545999 Books

Download As PDF : Death Jest Book Fyfield Books Thomas Lovell Beddoes Michael Bradshaw 9781857545999 Books

Death Jest Book Fyfield Books Thomas Lovell Beddoes Michael Bradshaw 9781857545999 Books

A few scraps of Beddoes are worth far more than the output of most poets. In syntax he refused to bind his creativity, people cling "iviliy," a murdered brother is committed to "Abel's grave" (p. 81, 98) Beddoes writes of death, romance, madness, nature, and the supernatural with a freewheeling vividness that reaches the heights of beauty and grotesquerie.

This poetical tragedy brings to mind the grimness of Webster in its verve and relish in life's beauties and conflicts.The plot is full of treachery, and if you'd rather not be informed as to what's coming, just skip the plot summary on page xvi of the excellent introduction. There is deft metaphor, pensive monologues peeling the character's motives bare. Gods, ghosts, and faeries appear or are alluded to.

The plot was difficult for me to follow at points, but another reading or two would cure that. What's easy to enjoy is being lost in the world Beddoes has created, where characters consider being vs. living (p. 117), or nature as a symbol and simile for humans as spring flowers are messages from the "far fairer and more lovely" world of the dead (p. 110). As a sample, near the end of the play, a ghost returned to the world interacts with the living, here commenting on a song just finished:

Good melody! If this be a good melody,
I have at home, fattening in my stye,
A sow that grunts above the nightingale.
Why this will serve for those, who feed their veins
With crust, and cheese of dandelion's milk,
And the pure Rhine. When I am sick o' mornings,
With a horn-spoon tinkling in my porridge-pot,
'Tis a brave ballad: but in Bacchanal night,
O'er wine red, black, or purple-bubbling wine,
That takes a man by the brain and whirls him round,
By Bacchus' lip! I like a full-voiced fellow,
A craggy-throated, fat-cheeked trumpeter,
A barker, a moon-howler, who could sing
Thus, as I heard the snaky mermaids sing
In Phlegethon, that hydrophobic river,
One May-morning in Hell.

Then immediately we are treated to one of Beddoes' more celebrated lyrics, "Old Adam, the carrion crow" whose nest is "Cleopatra's scull" (p. 114-5).

Beddoes obsessively revised Death's Jest Book, making it less stage-able, filling it with songs, "the tragic structure fading to the point of dissolution," as the editor puts it (p. xx). This is the 1829 version, a version Beddoes for a time considered completed, suffused with the spirit of his studies of medicine and anatomy in Göttingen which he pursued simultaneously with composing this play.

Contrast this version with an edition compiled as Beddoes left it at his death, Death's Jest-book: New Edition of the Later Text Established by H.W.Donner by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2003-05-31). Also consider the works of Beddoes' most devoted scholar, H. W. Donner, and this, The Ivory Gate the poet's last verses, gathered and published in another handsome, slender volume.


Tags : Death's Jest Book (Fyfield Books) [Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Michael Bradshaw] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV>Initially conceived as a satirical tragedy unmasking the terror of death, this book was the counterpart of Beddoe's anatomical research. This edition presents the jest book in its early form,Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Michael Bradshaw,Death's Jest Book (Fyfield Books),Carcanet Press Ltd.,1857545990,Drama,European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Death;Drama.,Satire.,Tragedies.,19TH CENTURY ENGLISH DRAMA,DRAMA European English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Death,English,GENERAL,Great BritainBritish Isles,LITERARY CRITICISM Drama,Non-Fiction,Plays,Plays Drama,Plays, playscripts,Poetry European English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Poetry anthologies: from c 1900 -,PoetryEuropean - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,SATIRE AND HUMOR,Satire,ScholarlyUndergraduate,Tragedies

Death Jest Book Fyfield Books Thomas Lovell Beddoes Michael Bradshaw 9781857545999 Books Reviews

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.
This item was a gift. Receiver very happy. Book in great shape.
This is a play, not a sequence of poems and it is very good although at points a little confusing. I think Beddoes with this play and his poems and fragments is very appropriate reading around Hallowe'en time because of his thematic applications. Not a great poet, in my view, but one who is worth reading.
A few scraps of Beddoes are worth far more than the output of most poets. In syntax he refused to bind his creativity, people cling "iviliy," a murdered brother is committed to "Abel's grave" (p. 81, 98) Beddoes writes of death, romance, madness, nature, and the supernatural with a freewheeling vividness that reaches the heights of beauty and grotesquerie.

This poetical tragedy brings to mind the grimness of Webster in its verve and relish in life's beauties and conflicts.The plot is full of treachery, and if you'd rather not be informed as to what's coming, just skip the plot summary on page xvi of the excellent introduction. There is deft metaphor, pensive monologues peeling the character's motives bare. Gods, ghosts, and faeries appear or are alluded to.

The plot was difficult for me to follow at points, but another reading or two would cure that. What's easy to enjoy is being lost in the world Beddoes has created, where characters consider being vs. living (p. 117), or nature as a symbol and simile for humans as spring flowers are messages from the "far fairer and more lovely" world of the dead (p. 110). As a sample, near the end of the play, a ghost returned to the world interacts with the living, here commenting on a song just finished

Good melody! If this be a good melody,
I have at home, fattening in my stye,
A sow that grunts above the nightingale.
Why this will serve for those, who feed their veins
With crust, and cheese of dandelion's milk,
And the pure Rhine. When I am sick o' mornings,
With a horn-spoon tinkling in my porridge-pot,
'Tis a brave ballad but in Bacchanal night,
O'er wine red, black, or purple-bubbling wine,
That takes a man by the brain and whirls him round,
By Bacchus' lip! I like a full-voiced fellow,
A craggy-throated, fat-cheeked trumpeter,
A barker, a moon-howler, who could sing
Thus, as I heard the snaky mermaids sing
In Phlegethon, that hydrophobic river,
One May-morning in Hell.

Then immediately we are treated to one of Beddoes' more celebrated lyrics, "Old Adam, the carrion crow" whose nest is "Cleopatra's scull" (p. 114-5).

Beddoes obsessively revised Death's Jest Book, making it less stage-able, filling it with songs, "the tragic structure fading to the point of dissolution," as the editor puts it (p. xx). This is the 1829 version, a version Beddoes for a time considered completed, suffused with the spirit of his studies of medicine and anatomy in Göttingen which he pursued simultaneously with composing this play.

Contrast this version with an edition compiled as Beddoes left it at his death, Death's Jest-book New Edition of the Later Text Established by H.W.Donner by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2003-05-31). Also consider the works of Beddoes' most devoted scholar, H. W. Donner, and this, The Ivory Gate the poet's last verses, gathered and published in another handsome, slender volume.