Death's Jest-Book is the extravagant expression of Thomas Lovell Beddoes's lifelong obsession with mortality and immortality, a surrealising of Renaissance revenge tragedy, alight with treachery, murder, sorcery and haunting. Conceived as a satirical tragedy unmasking the terror of death, it contains some of the most powerful dramatic blank verse by any of the British Romantics. After early acclaim as a lyric poet and dramatist, Beddoes (1803-49) is only now emerging from a century and a half of neglect. This is the first affordable modern edition to present the Jest-Book in its earliest...

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was an English poet and dramatist whose early play The Brides' Tragedy was highly praised. He studied medicine at the Universities of Gottingen and Wurzburg, where his involvement in radical politics led to his deportation. He spent the rest of his life in Switzerland and Germany, continuing to write but showing only occasional and fleeting interest in publication. His celebrated drama Death's Jest-Book and his Collected Poems were published posthumously. This volume, edited and with an introduction by Alan Halsey, makes available separately for the first...

Frank Laurence Lucas (1894 1967) was a renowned English author, poet and classicist, often remembered for his polemical attacks on key modernist figures such as T. S. Eliot, as well as his meticulous scholarship in the production of texts such as the four-volume Complete Works of John Webster. First published in 1932, this book contains a selection of the poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes edited by Lucas. A detailed editorial introduction is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of Beddoes and Lucas."