The Testaments of John Davidson

John Davidson (1857 - 1909)

The oft-maligned Testaments of John Davidson work as a sublime, psychopathic post-Nietzchean (Zarathustra was merely Davidson's springboard into a deeper transcendence) prologue to his impending suicide in 1909. After a warmly receptive life of ballad making and the like (benevolent pedagogy and inclusion in the chintzy Rhymer's Club), a by then poverty-stricken, neglected Davidson could sharpen his mind toward the completion of a more pristine art. Subsequently, we are given the meanest gap between symbolism and modernism (an expressionistic, Schopenhauerian materialist monism in monologic profile a la Browning, a demented Kipling) on record, a Marlowe-level blank verse masterwork of the now, warping into a demented, ironically (intended or not, certainly unfunded and ignored by anyone in charge) nationalist individualism, a system of self-deification, the final scream of a decaying genius. (Summary by kilpatrick83)

Genre(s): Single author

Language: English

Section Chapter Reader Time
Play 01 The Testament of a Vivisector kilpatrick83
00:13:52
Play 02 The Testament of an Empire-Builder kilpatrick83
00:43:56
Play 03 The Testament of a Prime Minister kilpatrick83
00:56:47
Play 04 Excerpt from The Theatrocrat kilpatrick83
00:03:31
Play 05 The Testament of John Davidson (Part 1) kilpatrick83
00:33:06
Play 06 The Testament of John Davidson (Part 2) kilpatrick83
00:42:28
Play 07 The Testament of John Davidson (Part 3) kilpatrick83
00:22:34
Play 08 The Testament of John Davidson (Part 4) kilpatrick83
00:39:30
Play 09 St. Valentine's Eve (Fleet Street Ecologues) kilpatrick83
00:08:17