Shakespearean Gothic

Christy Desmet, Anne Williams

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780708320921, 9780708320938
• eBook ISBN: 9781783163717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria dei generi gotico, romantico e horror

This collection of essays explores the thesis that Shakespeare as we know him today was born in the eighteenth century, at the same time as the Gothic tradition, first named by Horace Walpole in 1764. The two are inextricable. Writers interested in pursuing 'Gothic' themes and forms (the supernatural events and generic hybrids decried by French neoclassicism) justified their aesthetic choices as following the example of their great - and emphatically English - precursor. They cited him in their epigraphs and appropriated his narratives. They echoed his language and imitated his dramatic devices. Like Shakespeare, they explored the ways in which familial ghosts may haunt the present. Like him, they mixed modes and genres: tragedy and comedy, verse and prose. Together, critics of Shakespeare and creators of the Gothic (often one and the same author) not only canonized England's secular saint and created a new literary mode; they collectively initiated a mode of subjectivity that remains with us today in both high and popular culture.

PART I

Gothic Appropriations of ‘Shakespeare’

1

Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare

ANNE WILLIAMS

Walpole’s Gothic, both literary and architectural, is a thing of shreds and patches. The Castle of Otranto was inspired by the fragment of a nightmare concerning a ‘gigantic hand in armour’, and chapter 1 begins with the fall of an enormous helmet into the castle’s courtyard. Walpole pieced together his story from patches of history, folk tale, kidnapped romance, medieval superstition and Shakespearean allusions. Strawberry Hill, the villa that Walpole constructed over nearly forty years, is a pastiche of Gothic designs, imitated (in wood or papier mâché) as adornments for fireplaces, ceilings and library shelves – to say nothing of battlements and turrets made of lathe and plaster. Walpole’s prolific writings appear in an equally heterogeneous range of genres. His body of work, in short, seems as disjointed as the armour of Alphonso the Good.

Yet the works of the 1760s reveal an unexpected kinship. Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, and in February 1768 Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third. Six months later, he printed at Strawberry Hill fifty copies of The Mysterious Mother, a tragedy in blank verse. These works mark the climax of Walpole’s creative activity. With the exception of the Beauclerc Tower (1776), built to house illustrations of the play, Walpole’s original work was essentially finished by the end of the 1760s. Despite their seeming diversity, however, these works share one important characteristic: they are all ‘Shakespearean’. Walpole appropriated, rewrote and impersonated his precursor. I propose that under the aegis of Shakespeare, Walpole finally lived up to the Horatian motto he had chosen for his library ceiling – ‘fari quae sentiat: he says what he feels’.¹

Walpole plays Shakespeare

[Horace Walpole’s] features were covered by masks within masks … He played innumerable parts and over-acted them all.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother are overtly fictional, though Walpole repeatedly teases us about their relation to reality. Historic Doubts is also a kind of romance, a wish-fulfilment fantasy disguised as history. All belong to other times and places – medieval Italy, fifteenth-century England and sixteenth-century Narbonne. All involve sexual transgressions and the abuse of power and family secrets. Otranto describes a failed Oedipal struggle in which a grandson learns that his grandfather had usurped the throne, knowledge that destroys ‘The House of Manfred’. Historic Doubts seeks to exonerate the sins of a ‘father’ – a king – who was not, Walpole insists, history’s murderous monster. The Mysterious Mother enacts the opposite process. In this tragedy, an apparently virtuous woman confesses to a sexual liaison with her son, and, learning that he has married the resulting sister/ daughter, kills herself.

Shakespeare’s influence in these works appears both in the old-fashioned sense of verbal echoes, formal imitation, repeated characters and themes, and in Harold Bloom’s concept of influence as an unconscious struggle between literary fathers and sons. Each work appropriates Shakespearean ‘authority’ in different ways.² As Kristina Bedford has shown, Otranto has a ‘Shakespearean sub-text’ produced by Walpole’s ‘constant allusion and imitation’, and E. L. Burney shows that he imitated the rhythms of Shakespearean blank verse in his prose, particularly when the aristocratic characters are speaking.³ In the second preface to Otranto, Walpole invokes Shakespeare in order to defend his own aesthetic choices and defends him against Voltaire. It seems that having removed several layers of his protective anonymity in the first edition, Walpole assumes the armour of Shakespearean authority and then takes up arms against his ‘father’’s foreign enemies.

Walpole’s relation to Shakespeare in Historic Doubts is, however, oddly covert. Readers might well assume from the title that Shakespeare, largely responsible for the image of Richard as monster, is his chief antagonist. Yet Shakespeare’s name appears only four times in the text. Early in his treatise Walpole writes: ‘I did not take Shakespeare’s tragedy for a genuine representation, but I did take the story of that reign as a tragedy of the imagination. Many of the crimes imputed to Richard seemed improbable, and what seemed stronger, contrary to his interests.’⁴ Whereas in Otranto, Walpole had justified his violations of novelistic realism by claiming Shakespearean precedent, writing as a historian he reproaches Shakespeare for being insufficiently realistic. Shakespeare’s Richard, however, cannot be escaped entirely. He haunts the text much as the ghost of Hamlet’s father haunts him. Historic Doubts does, however, involve a sort of Bloomian Oedipal struggle. But, instead of meeting the father on his own ground (as Wordsworth confronts Milton in epic blank verse), here the aspiring son chooses to challenge him in another genre, and one that Shakespeare never essayed: the scholarly history in prose. Walpole’s deep emotional investment in this project is evident from the energy he exerted in answering his critics, eventually publishing a supplement almost as long as the original document.

This shadowy conflict apparently whetted Walpole’s purpose in Shakespearean endeavours. In writing The Mysterious Mother, he dons a suit of Shakespearean armour, adapting ‘Shakespearean’ language to create a ‘Shakespearean’ tragedy set in Shakespearean times. Despite his scandalous plot, however, Walpole’s Shakespearean imitation is flat, at least to my ears. Here, too, he blurs the line between history and fiction, justifying his theme of double incest by citing historical precedent. He avoids the Shakespearean ghosts that had enlivened the ‘barbarity’ of Otranto. The Mysterious Mother is downright decorous. Walpole obeys the unities of time, place and action – though declaring this choice unintentional. And the crucial bed-trick is buried sixteen years in the past.

This ‘Shakespearean’ device strikes readers nowadays as psychologically unconvincing. How could Edmund, her son, have confused his mother’s aging body with that of Beatrice, the young maid? Marliss Desens points out that, in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the bed-trick device almost invariably serves to restore dynastic or legal rights, as when, in All’s Well that Ends Well, Helena tricks her husband into consummating their marriage. Such questions of verisimilitude are thus beside the point. But when the purpose of the trick is primarily sexual, to make possible the birth of a mythic hero, actual shapeshifting usually takes place. Merlin, for instance, transforms Uther Pendragon into a copy of Igraine’s husband so that Arthur may be conceived. Walpole’s adoption of the convention, however, does suggest something about his motives in writing the play. His plot demanded that the countess become pregnant by her son but in the least blameworthy way imaginable, in a moment of erotic insanity. This relatively sanitary solution, however, still dismayed Walpole’s friend William Mason. He insisted that the mother’s motive must be jealousy, not lust, and sent Walpole his suggested revisions. Walpole kindly thanked him for his comments and ignored them.

E. J. Clery has argued that The Mysterious Mother registers Walpole’s ambivalence in the face of changing cultural conceptions of female sexuality.⁵ I believe, however, that Walpole’s anxiety is far more immediate. Thus, before continuing to trace his debts to Shakespeare, we need to ask another question. Why did Walpole’s Shakespearean experiments embody such seemingly adolescent anxieties about fathers, mothers and sons? Walpole turned forty-seven a month after completing Otranto. Lady Walpole had died in 1737, Sir Robert in 1745. Nevertheless, in his fifth decade, their son was impelled to write of impotent sons, guilty/innocent fathers and innocent/guilty mothers. What could account for this belated preoccupation?

An unconscious confession

Freud acknowledged that the poets had discovered the unconscious before him. But Horace Walpole’s contribution to this collective enterprise was surprisingly concrete. In writing Otranto, Walpole inadvertently stumbled upon the process of Freudian psychoanalysis. As he confessed to William Cole on 9 March 1765, he had awakened from the disturbing dream of ‘a gigantic hand in armour’ resting on ‘the uppermost bannister of a great staircase’. He felt driven to explain its presence, and to do so, spontaneously adopted the proto-Freudian technique of ‘free association’: ‘I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.’⁶ In trying to make sense of his nightmare, Walpole also engaged inadvertently in an overdetermined exercise in self-analysis. His nightmare involved a house, which Walpole hinted was his own Strawberry Hill: ‘The scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle.’⁷ Walpole had been remodelling and adding to his villa since around 1749, creating a miniature castle designed ‘to please my own taste, and in some degree to realize my own visions’.⁸ Thus this ‘house dream’ about his ‘dream house’ inevitably concerned himself. The Castle of Otranto constitutes a ‘psychoanalysis’ of both Strawberry Hill and its author Horace Walpole.

The terror and horror emerging from Walpole’s exercise in free association seem incongruent with his dwelling’s whimsical character, whose name sounds more pastoral than Gothic.⁹ But in telling its story, Walpole unconsciously ‘realizes’ (in several senses) that Strawberry Hill has its ancient, dark, labyrinthine aspects. It literally embodies (in words) its master’s fatal secret.¹⁰ In the second preface, Walpole declared his desire that Otranto would free his readers from the present world, where ‘the resources of fancy have been dammed up’ (p. 9). But Otranto portrays a world that is anything but free; it tragically embodies ‘the Law of the Father’, patriarchal culture’s symbolic order. This law inextricably entangles the destiny of fathers and sons. Furthermore, just as Otranto seems an unlikely ‘reading’ of Strawberry Hill, the hero/villain Manfred’s fate is oddly incongruent with Walpole’s secure position near the top of the so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Gothic Appropriations of ‘Shakespeare’
• Part II: Rewriting Shakespeare’s Plays and Characters
• Part III: Shakespeare as Gothic Writer
• Afterword: Shakespearean Gothic
• Bibliography