Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. The contributors assess Beddoes's German context, read his plays in light of recent work on theatre history and gender, and revisit key areas in Beddoes's scholarship such as nineteenth-century medical theories, psychoanalytic myth, and Romantic ventriloquism. The volume makes the case for Beddoes's centrality to debates about nineteenth-century literary culture and its contexts.

This book is Thomas Lovell Beddoes's defining text, a pastiche Renaissance tragedy replete with treachery, murder, sorcery and haunting, the extravagant expression of the poet's lifelong obsession with mortality and immortality. It is a classic of the literature of death.