Abstract
Shortly before his death in 1981, Herman Melville finished Billy Budd, a novel published posthumously in 1924. The action takes place, first aboard the ship “The Rights of Man,” then aboard the “H.M.S. Indomitable,” at sea, August 1798, the year following the Naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, and shows life on board a British warship at the end of the eighteenth century. The most common interpretation of Billy Budd sees in this story of two seamen a confrontation of good and evil during one of the many wars that pitted the English against the French.
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Notes
The movie script is an adaptation of the dramatization by Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962). All the quotes in this article are from this Broadway adaptation originally written in 1947 and revised in 1951.
There has been many editions of Billy Budd,which was begun by Herman Melville on Friday, November 16, 1888, revised from March 2, 1889 until it was finished in April 19, 1891. Used here is the standard edition of The Works of Herman Melville, edited by Raymond W. Weaver (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963).
E. L. Grant Watson. “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance,” Studies in Billy Budd (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill Publishing, 1970), p. 14
Walter Sutton. “Melville and the Great God Budd,” Studies in Billy Budd (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill Publishing, 1970), p. 86.
William York Tindall. “The Ceremony of Innocence,” Great Moral Dilemmas in Literature, Past and Present, edited by R. M. Maclver (New York: Harper and Row, 1956).
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Michael, C. (1994). Billy Budd: An Allegory on the Rights of Man. In: Kronegger, M., Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Allegory Old and New. Analecta Husserliana, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1946-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1946-7_17
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