Death's Jest-Book

After early acclaim as a lyric poet and dramatist, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) began Death's Jest-Book in 1825, as he moved to Germany to study medicine. Initially conceived as a satirical tragedy unmasking the terror of death, the Jest-Book was the counterpart of Beddoe's anatomical researches. This edition presents the Jest-Book in its early form, as Beddoes intended to publish it in 1829. It is the centre of Beddoe's achievement, a pastiche Renaissance tragedy replete with treachery, murder, sorcery and haunting, the extravagant expression of the poet's lifelong obsession with mortality and immortality. The drama contains some of the most powerful blank verse by any of the British Romantics.