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Death’s Jest-Book declining Romantic vision, while others celebrate its wild intensity and ironic intelligence. The location of Beddoes in terms of literary periods has long been regarded as problematic, due both to his love-affair with the English Renaissance, and also to his ‘transitional’ generation, stranded somewhere between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Victorian’. Lytton Strachey (1907) was an influential early critic who discussed the issue of Elizabethan pastiche in the Jest-Book and other works:9 ‘The Last Elizabethan’ is a beautifully written and sympathetic assessment of Beddoes’s talent, but attests to the inherent strangeness of a dramatic poetry which seems to live two hundred years in the past. In ‘Beddoes and Chronology’, Ezra Pound (1913) also considers the poet’s archaic style, and the various literary-historical accidents which contribute to the making of an author.

For much of the twentieth century, Beddoes criticism and scholarship were overshadowed by H.W. Donner. Donner’s critical biography Thomas Lovell Beddoes: The Making of a Poet (1935) established certain paradigms in the interpretation of Death’s JestBook which have since proved enduring and slow to shift. It was Donner for instance who proposed the first substantial psychoanalytic argument, reading the drama as in part the literary exorcism of a death terror or ‘skeleton complex’10 that had its origin in the morbid dissections with which Dr Thomas Beddoes is thought to have educated his children. Donner also established the view that German ‘Romantic irony’ is of key importance in unlocking the hidden strategies of the text, a line since pursued by Anne Harrex (1967) and others. Donner devotes several major chapters to the Jest-Book, and constructs a narrative of its development: he records its inception as an ill-fated satire on death; he observes how this quickly gave way to a satire on human life, the skeleton complex neutralised by ironic detachment; and argues that it moved gradually towards a weary love of harmony, a longing for completion, the lyrical wish to die. Essentially, this is a tragic narrative, and in matching the works to the life, Donner is fully committed to the tragic structure and the tragic effect throughout. Some remarks from his ‘Conclusion: An Aesthetic Summary’ show how closely Donner associates the rhythms of the genre with the actual life history of his author:

Only when disharmony is dissolved in harmony and conflicting passions reconciled in a sublime atonement, do we experience