Death's Jest-Book

Drama. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Edited and with an introduction by Alan Halsey. This renaissance-revival comedy was first published in 1849, a year after Thomas Lovell Beddoes' death. "Beddoes called his play 'A Dithyrambic in the florid Gothic style.' Modeled on the revenge tragedies of the Jacobeans, it is sustained by a poetry of glittering surface with an ever-present undertow of death and destruction, tempered by humor deriving out of a remorseless sense of absurdity and alienation. Beddoes was certainly 'possessed by death' but death is a theme played in several keys, allowing startling reversals of common values and perspectives" -- Alan Halsey, Introduction.