Resurrection Songs by Michael Bradshaw

Author:Michael Bradshaw [Bradshaw, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, Writing, Poetry, General, European, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351794060
Google: VH10DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-24T03:42:38+00:00

Chapter 3

Resurrection Songs: Beddoes and the Body

Tragic heroes have to die because in the spectacular kingdom death is in die body. There is no 'merely' or metaphorically ethical death which does not at the same time entail the extinction of the body, and even its complete and austere destruction. (Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body)1

Some one seems to be putting himself together there {Death's Jest-Book, III.iii.599-600)

The ghost of a body (1)

In October 1826 Beddoes wrote from Göttingen to his friend Thomas Forbes Kelsall, telling of his affairs and commenting on the state of literature both in Germany and Britain. Of the state of contemporary tragedy, he has this to say:

Here is a Dr. Raupach who lays a tragedy or two in the year - mostly windeggs - but he's the best of the folks about Melpomene's sepulcre in Germany. Schiller, you know, took her out of the critical pickle she lies in & made a few lucky galvanic experiments with her, so that the people thought she was alive when she was only kicking, (p. 621)2

The once august muse of tragedy is currently suffering the indignity of having her limbs electrified in the modern age's crude attempts to reproduce her art. Beddoes had previously alluded to the illness of Melpomene in a letter to Procter (3 March 1824, p. 581), criticizing George Darley's poor credentials for being her 'physician'. But this passage goes further: her tomb is not treated as a shrine, or even as a sick-bed, but a laboratory. Under the artificial, Frankenstein-like attentions of her newest followers, Melpomene has become a gruesome and rather risible monstrosity. If she was to demand, as Wolfram does in Death's Jest-Book 'Who breaks my death?' (III.iii.560), one guilty party who might come forward would be Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

One of Beddoes's various confessions of the incompleteness of his own Fool's Tragedy appears in this same letter. In comparing the fragments of an unfinished drama to the pieces of a dismembered body, he makes the comparison with the scattered limbs of Pelias, again raising the theme of botched revival. Beddoes's metaphor is rich with implications: his drama is in disarray; what he had hoped to revitalize, he has only succeeded in tearing apart and violently disfiguring; and yet, his enterprise was from the outset a rash one. Tragedy in 1826 is old, decrepit or dead, and was perhaps better left alone. In an earlier letter to Kelsall (of January 1825, before his departure for the Continent), Beddoes made what has become his best remembered statement on tragedy. Here too the issue is the desired revival of tragedy, and the shocking results of failure:

Say what you will - I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow - no creeper into worm-holes no reviser even - however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold. Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster &c are better dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contemporary of ours - but they are ghosts - the worm is in their pages - & we want to see something that our great-grandsires did not know.

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