20 Facts About Billy Budd

Billy Budd, Sailor is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891.

Billy Budd is a "handsome sailor" who strikes and inadvertently kills his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart.

Billy Budd has been adapted into film, a stage play, and an opera.

Billy Budd is a seaman impressed into service aboard HMS Bellipotent in the year 1797, when the Royal Navy was reeling from two major mutinies and was threatened by the Revolutionary French Republic's military ambitions.

Billy Budd is impressed to this large warship from another, smaller, merchant ship, The Rights of Man.

Related searches

Billy Budd has a stutter, which becomes more noticeable when under intense emotion.

Billy Budd intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to persuade them to convict Billy, despite their and his beliefs in Billy's moral innocence.

The court-martial convicts Billy Budd following Vere's argument that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir more mutiny throughout the British fleet.

Billy Budd added a short, prose head-note to introduce the speaker and set the scene.

The character of "Billy Budd" in this early version was an older man condemned for inciting mutiny and apparently guilty as charged.

Billy Budd's tried to follow through on what she perceived as her husband's objectives but her editing was confusing to the first professional editors, Weaver and Freeman, who mistook her writing for Melville's.

Billy Budd's gave him access to all the records of Melville that survived in the family: manuscripts, letters, journals, annotated books, photographs, and a variety of other material.

Billy Budd believed he stayed closer to what Melville wrote, but still relied on Weaver's text, with what are now considered mistaken assumptions and textual errors.

In relatively short order he and several other influential British literati had managed to canonize Billy Budd, placing it alongside Moby-Dick as one of the great books of Western literature.

In 1990 the Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker pointed out that all the early estimations of Billy Budd were based on readings from the flawed transcription texts of Weaver.

The second view, a reaction against the first, holds that Billy Budd is ironic, and that its real import is precisely the opposite of its ostensible meaning.

Billy Budd's interprets the mutiny scare aboard the Bellipotent, the political circumstances that are at the center of the events of the story, as a portrayal of homophobia.

Billy Budd acknowledges that Melville was writing at a time before the word "sociopath" was used.

Since the late 20th century, Billy Budd has become a central text in the field of legal scholarship known as law and literature.

One scholar argues that Vere manipulated and misrepresented the applicable laws to condemn Billy Budd, showing that the laws of the time did not require a sentence of death and that legally any such sentence required review before being carried out.