"I'll go hunt the badger by owl-light:
'Tis a deed of darkness." -- Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi
PS I had not appreciated the extent to which the play had penetrated crime fiction and the like. For instance, there is a TV thriller called "Badger by Owl-Light." And more famously, the wonderful line "Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young." was picked up and used by Agatha Christie in a Marple story, Sleeping Murder, that I don't remember reading.
Very extensively used by P. D. James, in fact I feel that it is possible I first came to it that way ("The Skull Beneath the Skin"?). Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers are also steeped in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical epigraphs, plus Beddoes; and Nicholas Blake a.k.a. Cecil Day-Lewis actually wrote a whole mystery whose solution hinged on the question of whether people present at a dinner party had or had not read "The White Devil"!!! ("Thou Shell of Death."
ReplyDelete