SOURCE: "The New Revenge Tragedy: Comparative Treatments of the Beauchamp Case," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 22, Fall, 1989, pp. 117-27.

[In the following essay, Goldhurst remarks on several literary treatments of the Beauchamp-Sharp murder case, which transpired in Kentucky in 1825.]

Poe's strategy of setting an American literary situation in a remote and exotic environment has a special and complex application in the verse drama Politian, written in 1835. Set in Rome during the Renaissance, the play is a retelling of the Beauchamp-Sharp murder case, which took place in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1825 and is known to historians as the Kentucky Tragedy. The story has attracted the notice of numerous authors from Poe's day to our own, including Thomas Holley Chivers, William Gilmore Simms, Charles Fenno Hoffman and Robert Penn Warren.

The lurid aspects of the sordid affair needed little blowing up to please sensation seekers of the period. Sex and...