ABSTRACT
Brotherhood is one of many figurations of the coexistent, parallel states of being in Thomas Lovell Beddoes's early dramas and will, of course, be amplified in The Second Brother. These states, sometimes alternative and complementary, more usually polarized opposites, may collapse into each other, but do not form a cohesive, integral whole. Mary Anne Caporaletti Dewsnap observes that the portrayal of crime in The Brides' Tragedy is accompanied by disjunctions within the individual, whether this is the image of Hesperus's second self, or the idea of the rift between the present self and the innocent self of the past. Seeking after disembodied immortality, Hesperus has employed the idealist idiom of perfect musical pitch and the insubstantiality of perfume; in seeking immortality by looking to the death of the body, he has employed the macabre idiom of decay.
