ABSTRACT
John Keats’s unfinished comic experiment, The Cap and Hells, most of which was written in the final months of 1819, was the poet’s last extended work. Though it has a cast of other-worldly characters which would not seem out of place elsewhere in Keats’s poetry, the tone of the piece is markedly different from anything else in his writing. ‘Keats’s hostility to Byron went deep’, writes Christopher Ricks, and ‘the satirical fantasy ‘The Cap and Bells’, gets most of what energy it has from a drawling contempt for Byron’. In the portrayal of Elfinan, the fairy king, there are satirical glances at Byron’s arrogance, sexual cupidity and marital difficulties. The use of the Spenserian to comic effect, the jovial handling of the faery and the not infrequent use of material and characters borrowed from Keats’s previous work, ‘The Eve of St Mark’ most notably, also introduces an element of self-parody.
