This chapter explores the extensive discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century English, Irish and Scottish philosophy, often considered as laying the groundwork for the Romantic sublime. The chapter also examines academic histories of these eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, showing how such histories have at times over-simplified the relationship between competing philosophical approaches and national traditions. The chapter pays particular attention to the increasing centrality of the association of ideas to descriptions of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, identifying it as a key marker of difference from the German idealist tradition that has been the focus of so many scholarly accounts of the Romantic sublime.

This chapter traces the fortunes of Aaron Hill’s English translation (1735) of Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre (1732), from its first performance under Hill’s direction outside the patent theatres to David Garrick’s reworking of it at Drury Lane. I show that Zara’s scepticism of established religion and her father’s deathbed proselytising are used by Hill to produce what his friend John Dennis called an ‘enthusiastic’ passion and suggest that Voltaire’s work appealed to Hill for its handling of religious material capable of producing extreme sequences of sublime emotions. At the same time, Hill’s Zara is also an exposition of what Hill described as ‘dramatic passions’. Those who read, saw, or performed Zara could witness the outward marks of many passions and trace on stage and on the page their performance through transition to the very instant. Such opportunities made the play perfect for what Hill called an ‘Experiment’ on English tastes and acting. When Garrick came to revive this experiment in the 1750s, its passions become the property of Garrick himself, as he rewrote sections of the play to favour his character of Lusignan.

This chapter investigates the grounds upon which we might address the question of Gothic literature before the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in late 1764. In line with much criticism, it begins by identifying traces of the Gothic in a selection of earlier texts, including Shakespearean drama and the Graveyard poetry of the 1740s. Proposing that this question is best thought of in historical terms, however, it considers how late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century critics themselves conceptualised the nation’s ‘Gothick’ literary inheritance, surveying, as it does so, such Whig writers as William Temple, John Dennis, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Joseph Addison and Mark Akenside, as well as works by the Tory John Dryden. Having situated Walpole’s fiction alongside contemporary works by Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson, it argues that a self-conscious spirit of ‘Revival’ is crucial to what would later become known as ‘Gothic fiction’. By way of conclusion, the chapter turns to the case of Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), assessing the extent to which it might be described as an example of pre-Walpolean Gothic.

John Dennis, a founding father of the Longinian sublime in English literary culture around 1700, also wrote against male-male sodomy, then subject to moral panic, prosecution and hangings in London. This was more than coincidence: Dennis imagined the effects of the sublime on a (normatively) male reader in terms of sexual violence, ravishment and penetration. This chapter suggests a dialectical relationship between sodomy and the sublime. Rooting its argument in the critic’s homosocial literary context, classical pedigree, defence of the morality of the stage, and highly sensual theories of literary creation and reception, it unsettles the place of the sublime on the continuum of virtue and vice. Similarly, Dennis’s ambivalence towards music is explored in terms of sexual politics. A disunified and queer term in his writing, music lent penetrative force when in service to sublime literature (helping to ensure patrilinear continuity) but threatened to undo the male subject when taking the lead in Italian opera (through the performances of women and castrati). Such entertainments, Dennis warned, would lead to male-male marriages should their popularity continue. The prospects for a musical sublime in England in the lead-up to Handel’s arrival were mixed.