1.6 - Shakespeare’s Gothic Transmigrations

Summary

This chapter argues that as Shakespeare was canonised as Britain’s national poet from 1660 through to the end of the eighteenth century, so editors and critics increasingly presented him as bourgeois and respectable, minimising the plays’ barbarous violence, ghosts and witches – their ‘Gothic’ elements. Between 1764 and 1768, Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto (a novel/romance hybrid), Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (a revisionist history) and The Mysterious Mother (a Shakespearean blank-verse tragedy), three different genres that variously appropriate and rework Shakespeare. Confronting the national poet, the argument holds, enabled him to work through his fears of illegitimacy, the sense that he had no claim to being the trueborn son of the powerful Sir Robert Walpole and the implied adultery of his beloved mother. His reading of Hamlet’s anger and loathing of his mother Gertrude’s behaviour unconsciously facilitated Horace Walpole’s invention of ‘Gothic Story’, which he located within the walls of an ancient castle haunted by the family secrets generated by the laws of patriarchy.