Bedlam Theatre: Robert Fergusson and Auld Reekie
Why is it significant?
Look at the Victorian Gothic church on the corner, with its pointed spire and its posters for student plays. For decades now it has been the Bedlam Theatre, run by students of the university, and the name is a deliberate echo.
Key Facts
| Place | Bedlam Theatre: Robert Fergusson and Auld Reekie |
|---|---|
| Address | Bedlam Theatre, 11b Bristo Place, Edinburgh EH1 1EZ, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.94620, -3.19060 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Ballads and Double Lives: Edinburgh's Literary Old Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at the Victorian Gothic church on the corner, with its pointed spire and its posters for student plays. For decades now it has been the Bedlam Theatre, run by students of the university, and the name is a deliberate echo. Close to this spot stood the city's old Bedlam, its public asylum, where in 1774 one of Scotland's finest poets died at the age of twenty-four.
Robert Fergusson was the son of a clerk, a brilliant, funny, restless young man who copied legal documents for a living and wrote poems at night. In barely three years he poured out poems in Scots about the city he loved: its taverns and clubs, its fogs and gossip, its daft days of midwinter. His poem Auld Reikie, of 1773, celebrated Edinburgh under the smoky nickname it still answers to today.
Then it all went wrong. After a spell of deep depression and a bad fall down a flight of stairs, he was taken to the asylum. He died there in October 1774, and the story goes that he lay alone in a cell on a bed of straw. The city that had laughed at his verses buried him in the Canongate Kirkyard without a stone.
Twelve years later, a young farmer from Ayrshire came to town and went looking for that grave. Robert Burns found it unmarked, asked permission to put up a headstone at his own expense, and wrote the epitaph himself. He called Fergusson his elder brother in misfortune and, by far, his elder brother in the muse, and admitted that reading him had made him take up his own Scots verse with new energy. Today a bronze Fergusson strides out of the gate of that kirkyard on the Canongate.
Other young writers grew up just south of here. Walter Scott spent his childhood in a tall house in George Square, a few minutes away, and walked each morning to the High School near the Cowgate. Now walk north up Forrest Road, past the little dog once more, and carry on along George IV Bridge to two great libraries facing each other across the road.