ABSTRACT
In the last years of the 1980s and the early 1990s Arden and D’Arcy stuck to their chosen paths as they moved into their sixties. They worked together less and less, but by 1991 they were able to look back at the embargo which had blocked so much of their work for twenty years with comparative equanimity. Arden’s non-naturalistic dramaturgy then was hard for the patrons of the Royal Court Theatre to cope with. Three years after Books of Bale, Arden’s next fiction, Cogs Tyrannic, presented four interlinked novellas, each from a different period of history, but each concerned with the impact of technology on social and political life. Jack Juggler and the Emperor’s Whore, published in 1995, was Arden’s last full-length novel. The plot of Jack Juggler and the Emperor’s Whore deals mostly with the machinations and desires of a group of dropouts and inhabitants of the ‘fringe’ culture of the years between 1968 and about 1990.
