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Death’s Jest-Book a depression that led to his first suicide attempt, and changing permanently his attitude towards publication and readership.7

This is a defining moment of Beddoes’s writing career: with the publication of the Jest-Book indefinitely suspended, Beddoes began to write in a different way, and very soon left the ‘satiric pathos’ of The Fool’s Tragedy far behind him. He expanded the text enormously, moving sharply away from the formal constraints of a tragic action. An abundance of lyrics was drafted for inclusion within the growing drama. The majority of new material Beddoes wrote in the 1830s and ’40s had some association with the Jest-Book. When new volumes were planned (such as Charonic Steps and The Ivory Gate) they were intended not as entirely separate ventures, but as large-scale frames, new ways of presenting the Jest-Book. This long and uncertain programme of revision after 1829, but especially between 1838 and ’44, Beddoes’s editor H.W. Donner calls the γ text. This is another Jest-Book entirely, containing a fully revised Act I, greatly expanded with ironic lyrics, and a number of changes, insertions and deletions that represent Beddoes’s unfinished attempt entirely to recast the drama in a new style.

There are continuing arguments over the respective intellectual and aesthetic merits of each version. What is certain is that they are distinct – as significantly different from each other as the texts of King Lear, or The Prelude. Death’s Jest-Book; or, The Fool’s Tragedy (1829) is a satirical tragedy, essentially obedient to the conventional five-act structure, centred on a revenge plot, and predominantly written in blank verse and prose. Death’s Jest-Book; or, The Day Will Come (post-1829, but principally 1838–44) has developed far away from this origin, the tragic structure fading to the point of dissolution with the incorporation of nine new lyrics in the first act; the material stage play element has also waned in favour of a psychic ‘theatre’ of disembodied voices. Faced with a difficult choice between these two immensely different creations, I have opted for the earlier version. For the present edition I have chosen to use what I have called ‘the 1829 text’ (otherwise Donner’s β text), essentially for the following three reasons.

Firstly, as far as it is possible to tell, this is the form in which the drama would have been published in Beddoes’s lifetime, but for the negative advice of his friends.8 Beddoes considered the drama finished in 1829; and it seems that he wanted to publish it in this form. The uneven programme of revision that followed in the 1830s and ’40s is the creature of Procter’s rejection, and Beddoes’s