Billy Budd has served as the kernel of a stage play, opera, musical, and movie. The 1949 stage play, written by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman, entitled Uniform of Flesh, reappeared two years later under its original title. Also performed in 1949 was the opera Billy Budd, featuring a text by Salvatore Quasimodo and music composed by Giorgio Ghedini. Two years later, Benjamin Britten, England’s major twentieth-century composer, produced a four-act musical version of the story. Performed in London’s Covent Garden Theatre, Britten’s Billy Budd featured a memorable interlacing of sea chanteys and traditional hornpipes, as well as words by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier.
In 1962, Peter Ustinov produced a British film version in black and white. Directed by Ustinov and starring Robert Ryan, Melvin Douglas, David McCallum, and Terence Stamp, who received an Academy Award nomination for his performance, the film lacked public enthusiasm. Viewers responded well to the vivid photography, but languished in the obtuse allegory, which deprived the play of commercial success.
In addition to these productions, poet W. H. Auden memorialized the novel in his poem “Herman Melville,” which appeared in Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957. Likewise did Helen Pinkerton in a four-line verse entitled “Billy Budd” for Southern Review, Summer 1968.
