SOURCE: “Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's Tragedy,” in Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Covici & Friede, 1928, pp. 99-128.

In the following essay, Snow deems Death's Jest Book a unique but flawed drama, contending that the play's “brilliance is akin to that of a diamond crushed under a pile-driver—scattered, chaotic, begrimed, but still there and sparkling.”

I

A Study in Intensities

It is in Death's Jest Book that Beddoes' spectacular and morbid genius comes to its final flowering; and it is upon this play, together with a handful of scattered lyrics, that his fame must rest—that tentative fame a self-assured and normal world concedes to an explorer of the uncharted and a companion of spectres. For The Fool's Tragedy is something that comes from the fringes, at least, of delirium and despair. Skeletal figures, painted on the wall of a ruined church, step down to feast and dance a...