SOURCE: “Thomas Lovell Beddoes's The Brides' Tragedy and the Situation of Romantic Drama,” in Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, Vol. 29, No. 4, Autumn, 1989, pp. 699-712.

In the following essay, Watkins situates The Brides' Tragedy within the tradition of Romantic literature.

Like Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley before him, Thomas Lovell Beddoes published, before the age of twenty, a literary work of extreme horror that touches the dark underside of the Romantic imagination. Unlike The Monk and Frankenstein, however, The Brides' Tragedy has rarely been studied seriously, partly because it is a poetic drama (a genre out of favor with most scholars and critics of Romanticism), and partly because of numerous technical or expository weaknesses, especially in its handling of the motives for action and in its imbalance of dialogue and action. The few scholars who have admired and studied the drama systematically have not attempted to establish its place...