BEDDOES, THOMAS LOVELL English dramatist and poet, son of the physician, Thomas Beddoes, was born at Clifton on July 20, 1803. His mother was a sister of Maria Edgeworth, the novelist. He was sent to Bath grammar school and then to the Charterhouse. In 1820 he was entered at Pembroke college, Oxford, and in his first year published The Improvisatore, afterwards carefully suppressed, and in 1822 The Bride's Tragedy, which showed him as the disciple of the later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. Beddoes was one of the first outside the limited circle of Shelley's own friends to recognize Shelley's genius, and he was certainly one of the earliest imitators of his lyrical method. In the summer of 1824 he met Mrs. Shelley and Walter Savage Landor in Italy. In 1825 he took his degree at Oxford, and in that year began the fantastic and incoherent drama, Death's Jest Book; or, The Fool's Tragedy; but he con tinued to revise it until his death, and it was only published post humously. He studied anatomy and physiology at Gottingen (1825-29) and at Wurzburg (1829-32) ; and in Zurich practised as a physician until, in 1839, the anti-liberal riots in the town rendered it unsafe for him, and he had.to escape secretly. In he returned to Frankfurt, where he lived with a baker called Degen, to whom he became much attached, and whom he per suaded to become an actor. He took Degen with him to Zurich, where he chartered the theatre for one night to give his friend a chance of playing Hotspur. The two separated at Basle, and in a fit of dejection (May 1848) Beddoes tried to bleed himself to death. Later, he took curare, from the effects of which he died on Jan. 26, 1849. His mss. he left in the charge of his friend Kelsall.
In one of his letters to Kelsall Beddoes wrote :—"I am con vinced 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 re-animations are vampire cold." In spite of this, Beddoes was himself a "creeper into worm-holes," a close imitator of Marston and of Cyril Tourneur, especially in their familiar handling of the phenomena of death, and in the remote ness from ordinary life of the passions portrayed. In his blank verse he caught, to a certain degree, the manner of his Jacobean models, and his verse abounds in beautiful imagery, but his Death's Jest Book is only finished in the sense of having five acts completed; it remains a bizarre production which appeals to few minds, and to them rather for the occasional excellence of the poetry than as an entire composition. His lyrics show the influence of Shelley as well as the study of i 7th century models, but they are by no means mere imitations, and some of them, like the "Dirge for Wolfram" ("If thou wilt ease thy heart") and "Dream Pedlary" ("If there were dreams to sell"), are among the most exquisite of i9th century lyrics.
Kelsall published Beddoes' great work, Death's Jest Book; or, The Fool's Tragedy, in 185o. The drama is based on the story that a certain Duke Boleslaus of Mdnsterberg was stabbed by his court-fool, the "Isbrand" of the play (see C. F. Floegel, Geschichte der Hof warren, Leipzig, pp. et seq.) . He followed this in 1851 with Poems of the late Thomas Lovell Beddoes, to which a memoir was prefixed. The two volumes were printed together (1851) with the title of Poems, Posthumous and Collected. All these volumes are very rare. Kelsall bequeathed the Beddoes mss. to Robert Browning, with a note stating the real history of Beddoes' illness and death, which was kept back out of consideration for his relations. Browning is reported to have said that if he were ever professor of poetry his first lecture would be on Beddoes, "a forgotten Oxford poet." Mr. (now Sir) Edmund Gosse obtained permission to use the documents from Browning and edited a fuller selection of the Poetical Works (189o) for the "Temple Li brary," supplying a full account of his life. He also edited the Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1894), containing a selection from his correspondence, which is full of gaiety and contains much amusing literary criticism. See also the edition of Beddoes by Ramsay Colles in the "Muses' Library" (1906) .