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Death's Jest Book
Initially conceived as a satirical tragedy unmasking the terror of death, this book was the counterpart of Beddoes's anatomical research. This edition presents the jest book in its early form, as Beddoes intended to publish it in 1829. The center of Beddoes's achievement, this pastiche of Renaissance tragedy is replete with treachery, murder, sorcery, and haunting and is the extravagant expression of the poet's lifelong obsession with mortality and immortality.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1829
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About the author
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
82 books13 followersThomas Lovell Beddoes was an English poet, dramatist and physician. Born in Clifton, Bristol, England, he was the son of Dr. Thomas Beddoes, a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Anna, sister of Maria Edgeworth. He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Oxford. He published in 1821 The Improvisatore, which he afterwards endeavoured to suppress. His next venture, a blank-verse drama called The Bride's Tragedy (1822), was published and well reviewed, and won for him the friendship of Barry Cornwall.
Beddoes' work shows a constant preoccupation with death. In 1824, he went to Göttingen to study medicine, motivated by his hope of discovering physical evidence of a human spirit which survives the death of the body. He was expelled, and then went to Würzburg to complete his training. He then wandered about practising his profession, and expounding democratic theories which got him into trouble. He was deported from Bavaria in 1833, and had to leave Zürich, where he had settled, in 1840.
He continued to write, but published nothing.
He led an itinerant life after leaving Switzerland, returning to England only in 1846, before going back to Germany. He became increasingly disturbed, and committed suicide by poison at Basel, in 1849, at the age of 45.
For some time before his death he had been engaged on a drama, Death's Jest Book, which was published in 1850 with a memoir by his friend, T. F. Kelsall. His Collected Poems were published in 1851.
Beddoes' work shows a constant preoccupation with death. In 1824, he went to Göttingen to study medicine, motivated by his hope of discovering physical evidence of a human spirit which survives the death of the body. He was expelled, and then went to Würzburg to complete his training. He then wandered about practising his profession, and expounding democratic theories which got him into trouble. He was deported from Bavaria in 1833, and had to leave Zürich, where he had settled, in 1840.
He continued to write, but published nothing.
He led an itinerant life after leaving Switzerland, returning to England only in 1846, before going back to Germany. He became increasingly disturbed, and committed suicide by poison at Basel, in 1849, at the age of 45.
For some time before his death he had been engaged on a drama, Death's Jest Book, which was published in 1850 with a memoir by his friend, T. F. Kelsall. His Collected Poems were published in 1851.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 5, 2021
This imitation Jacobean tragedy--written in the early 19th century by an alcoholic, death-obsessed, openly homosexual physician (who also espoused radical democratic revolution)--is unique in English literature. Even in this shorter 1829 text, the plot quickly descends into chaos, and I doubt that an effective performance text could be fashioned from it, even with a score or two of judicious cuts. Beddoes' lyrics lack the purity of 17th century song, and even much of the blank verse--particularly when it treats of quotidian matters or human love--is unremarkable and flat. Yet whenever Beddoes writes of the subjects dearest to his heart--loss, power, universal corruption, death and decay--he creates poetry of astonishing power, worthy of the concentrated majesty of Webster, The Revenger's Tragedy, or the later Shakespeare.
Here are some gobbets:
1) On what pleasures remain to a person deprived of love and friend:
Speak thou no more of love,
No more of friendship here. The world is open:
I wish you life and merriment enough
From wealth and wine, and all the dingy glory
Fame doth reward those with, whose love-spurned hearts
Hunger for goblin immortality. (DJB: I.ii.290-295)
2) A wish for the end of this corrupt world:
Be merry, ye rich fiends! Piety's dead,
and left the world a legacy to you.
Under the green-sod are your coffins packed,
So thick they break each other. The day's come
When scarce a lover, for his maiden's hair,
Can pluck a stalk whose rose draws not its hue
Out of a hate-killed heart. Nature's polluted:
There's man in every secret corner of her
Doing damned wicked deeds. Thou art old, world,
A hoary atheistic murderous star.
I wish that thou wouldst die or could be slain,
Hell-hearted bastard of the sun. (DJB: II.iii.348-359)
3) Reflecting on the fact that we are born and die alone:
Our middle life is broad,
But life and death, the turnstiles that admit us,
On earth and off it, send us one by one
A solitary walk. (DJB: IV.iv.36-39)
4) A power-mad man speaks to the heavens:
Oh you small star-mob, had I been one of you,
I would have seized the sky some moonless night
And made myself the sun. (DJB: IV.iv.189-191)
You like? There's plenty more where this comes from.
November 12, 2022
One of the highlights of English Romantic verse--a grandly macabre send-up of Jacobean drama which ends in a skeletal morris-dance of death.
July 13, 2016
I'm no scholar or expert on literature, so I'm not going to waste time on this work's merits, history, style or any other ornaments. As a casual reader, here's my opinion: loved it, would recommend!
Read within an evening, quite enjoyable. I can understand why he's not read so widely as his style is a little odd and his jokes are obviously an acquired taste, but he's entertaining just the same. A good black comedy to pass the time.
I was directed to his work by Dorothy L. Sayers, who uses excerpts from this play and another of Beddoes' called The Bride's Tragedy in her work Have His Carcase. Will be reading The Bride's Tragedy soon!
Read within an evening, quite enjoyable. I can understand why he's not read so widely as his style is a little odd and his jokes are obviously an acquired taste, but he's entertaining just the same. A good black comedy to pass the time.
I was directed to his work by Dorothy L. Sayers, who uses excerpts from this play and another of Beddoes' called The Bride's Tragedy in her work Have His Carcase. Will be reading The Bride's Tragedy soon!
June 18, 2019
A bit of a mess, this text opens with the cool reflection of Paracelsus’ homunculus that practitioners of the “black arts” wonder “Where is our country?” (I.i). He then buggers off for more or less the rest of the play.
The text thereafter concerns parallel murder plots wherein lust moves former friends to turn rival and commit senseless violence. The stabbings and poisonings come mostly without warrant, and the reversals are unforeseeable.
There’s plenty of bravado and posturing along the way: “All human things die and decay around us” (I.ii); “pour thou unto the subterranean gods / Libations of thy blood: I have shed wine” (I.iii); “Death will burst the fetters” (id.); “Think’st thou I’ll live in the vile consciousness / That I have dealt so wickedly and basely, / And have of thee so like a god forgiven?” (I.iv); “I’ll pay my thanks in steel. / Thus all pardoners pardoned” (I.iv); “thou art old, world, / A hoary atheistic murderous star” (II.ii); “the dead shall dream of heaven, / embracing his damnation” (II.iii); “If you would wound your foe, / Get swords that pierce the mind” (II.iii); “is this the work of necromantic conscience?” (IV.i); and so on.
Spectres of Goethe’s Faust: “Methinks thy better self indeed hath parted” (I.ii), a “double-bodied soul they did appear” (II.iii). Some characters are drawn into hell alive, it seems—an inversion of Enoch and Elijah, or an extension of the ancient katabasis made permanent, unlike Dante.
Something also of a political revolution by court jesters, and partaking of revenge tragedy, but with zombies.
Recommended for readers made for monstrous times, those who walk on ice over the mouth of hell, and Romans in unroman times.
The text thereafter concerns parallel murder plots wherein lust moves former friends to turn rival and commit senseless violence. The stabbings and poisonings come mostly without warrant, and the reversals are unforeseeable.
There’s plenty of bravado and posturing along the way: “All human things die and decay around us” (I.ii); “pour thou unto the subterranean gods / Libations of thy blood: I have shed wine” (I.iii); “Death will burst the fetters” (id.); “Think’st thou I’ll live in the vile consciousness / That I have dealt so wickedly and basely, / And have of thee so like a god forgiven?” (I.iv); “I’ll pay my thanks in steel. / Thus all pardoners pardoned” (I.iv); “thou art old, world, / A hoary atheistic murderous star” (II.ii); “the dead shall dream of heaven, / embracing his damnation” (II.iii); “If you would wound your foe, / Get swords that pierce the mind” (II.iii); “is this the work of necromantic conscience?” (IV.i); and so on.
Spectres of Goethe’s Faust: “Methinks thy better self indeed hath parted” (I.ii), a “double-bodied soul they did appear” (II.iii). Some characters are drawn into hell alive, it seems—an inversion of Enoch and Elijah, or an extension of the ancient katabasis made permanent, unlike Dante.
Something also of a political revolution by court jesters, and partaking of revenge tragedy, but with zombies.
Recommended for readers made for monstrous times, those who walk on ice over the mouth of hell, and Romans in unroman times.
June 13, 2020
A jauntily morbid unproduceable theatrical work, a highly eccentric Elizabethan pastiche by a poet too late to be a Romantic and too early to be a Victorian. Highly prized by John Ashbery, which figures. Dense and delirious.
February 3, 2009
The best verse tragedy and comedy all rolled into one zany package. A classic for young, old, and dead.
March 29, 2013
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.
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.
September 25, 2017
With a plot involving mistaken necromancy, suicide practise kits and a host of sudden but inevitable betrayals, Death’s Jest Book does not score high in realism. However, as an amped up Jacobean tragedy seen through the eyes of a late-romantic depressive, it’s surprisingly good fun.
The version I read was the ‘fool’s tragedy’ version of 1829 (which incidentally didn’t include the poem ‘dream pedlary, which was the main reason I wanted to read it). This version tones down the poetry and songs, making the plot a fairly tight and followable affair, at least when comparing to other Jacobean tragedies - it was not less plausible then The Revenger’s Tragedy, though that may have been parody.
Aside from the wonderful whiplashes of betrayal; the changes of Isbrand from fool, to revolutionary leader, to dictator, to fool, to dead person, and the subplot where Mandrake believes he has died:- the most notable parts of this play are the sombre poetry. Whether it’s a man describing himself as a ‘murder-charged thunder cloud’, death’s scythe punctuating lives with a ‘?’, having revolutionaries described as, ‘holding the latch string of the new world’s wicket’ or a duck’s feet as having, ‘webby mud-patted toes’ - the writing is often surprising.
I particularly liked the discussion of how we may love a soul, but we love the soul through their body and no matter how much we should be pleased about the soul’s ascension into heaven (if we blow that way) we can’t separate soul and body utterly.
I can’t imagine a performance of the play, though I dark cartoon may work wonderfully.. maybe stop motion.
The version I read was the ‘fool’s tragedy’ version of 1829 (which incidentally didn’t include the poem ‘dream pedlary, which was the main reason I wanted to read it). This version tones down the poetry and songs, making the plot a fairly tight and followable affair, at least when comparing to other Jacobean tragedies - it was not less plausible then The Revenger’s Tragedy, though that may have been parody.
Aside from the wonderful whiplashes of betrayal; the changes of Isbrand from fool, to revolutionary leader, to dictator, to fool, to dead person, and the subplot where Mandrake believes he has died:- the most notable parts of this play are the sombre poetry. Whether it’s a man describing himself as a ‘murder-charged thunder cloud’, death’s scythe punctuating lives with a ‘?’, having revolutionaries described as, ‘holding the latch string of the new world’s wicket’ or a duck’s feet as having, ‘webby mud-patted toes’ - the writing is often surprising.
I particularly liked the discussion of how we may love a soul, but we love the soul through their body and no matter how much we should be pleased about the soul’s ascension into heaven (if we blow that way) we can’t separate soul and body utterly.
I can’t imagine a performance of the play, though I dark cartoon may work wonderfully.. maybe stop motion.
August 13, 2012
Beddoes is best known for great little fragments of poetry, and DJB was never published in his life-time, existing in various versions as he changed it to accommodate his friends' critques. This reprints his original version, before his friends got hold of it. I used this as a textbook in my British Romantics class, and I couldn't be happier. Of course, as always, Beddoes has great snatches of poetry, but I think it holds together as a narrative play better than one might suspect. After reading dramas by Shelley and Byron, I found Beddoes much better in terms of having a stageable plot, and though some characters (especially the females) tend to blend together, a few are quite inventive. Homunculus Mandrake is a great comic foil for the serious moments, and Isbrand is an inspired creation: a jester who transforms himself into a tragic revenge figure. Best of all is the way each character's distinct view of death clearly provides the rationale for his or her decision-making and philosophy. Beddoes is in my opinion the best Romantic poet you've never heard of, and DJB is his masterpiece.
May 6, 2024
had some ravishing conversations around this one. newfound appreciation for myth
February 5, 2019
Death hath his dimples everywhere;
Love only on the cheek, which is to me most fair
Basically in agreement with y'all, though it is not death alone that seems to interest him. The play doesn't really cohere, alas; would that there were more.
Love only on the cheek, which is to me most fair
Basically in agreement with y'all, though it is not death alone that seems to interest him. The play doesn't really cohere, alas; would that there were more.
January 5, 2026
okay i’m still kind of confused after the book but that lowkey feels correct. it’s a play and i don’t really read plays. first off basically everyone dies?? like i’m not even joking, it felt like 90% of the characters were gone by the end. people stabbing themselves, stabbing their brothers, drinking poison and then still getting stabbed anyway by their brother (a different set of brothers doing this stabbing btw) like?? every character was making the most dramatic possible decision at all times also the names did NOT help. half the time i was like who is this?? and why are they named that?? i fully thought isbrand was a girl in my head for a good chunk of the play and then realised nope. he's a knight and hanging with a bunch of dudes. pretty sure he’s a man. i think. the names feel very gothic-fairytale-biblical-made-up-on-purpose, which is cool and defo makes sense for the time it was written but IM CONFUSED (one of the sets of brothers were named "adalmar and athulf"??? i could not tell you which is which). wolfram was a very pretty name for a not so pretty character. ok this is now where i write the positives which literally made the confusion worth the read. beddoes writes SO pretty. even when i had no idea what was going on, the language was carrying. especially near the end when the jester just starts breaking out into these random but hella hip poems?? like everyone is dying left and right and he’s just casually spitting these strange, catchy, and unironically iconic lines. andddd the book was also lowkey funny. i know “jest” is literally in the title but i wasn’t ready. “‘tis warm, though it’s stony— / my chickens so bony” is permanently lodged in my brain and shall be quoted at random. and calling death “a bony man” like he’s just some guy?? AND the l’envoi??? every book should end with one. i am definitely a sucker for pretty words so FOUR STARS!
April 10, 2025
brilliant pastiche/parody but magically tender at times; flowers are "brief visitors to us [that] rise yearly from the neighbourhood of the dead, to show us how far fairer and more lovely their world is."
January 16, 2021
Witty, melancholic and at times utterly charming.
November 14, 2025
Exceptionally beautiful and a true tragedy. Also a near infallible work when under the scrutinizing eye of the formal analyst. Just magical and beautiful
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews