This chapter traces the sound of the Gothic across Schubert’s piano music. Its features are suggested through funereal imagery, doubles and distortions, yet their tangibility slips out of reach as soon as words come into the picture. The analysis confronts this paradox in pieces ranging from Schubert’s Grande marche funèbre in C Minor, D859, to his Fantasy in F Minor, D940, both for piano four hands, without reducing their depictions of death to a singular conception. It interprets these pieces vis-à-vis Gothic tropes in literature and the virtual arts, among them ghostliness and ambivalence, while allowing meanings to emerge in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence. In doing so, the chapter not only reassesses the associations of death in Schubert’s music, but offers ways of contextualising his artistic approach more generally. The Gothic is conjured, problematised, reimagined, yet in the end left to percolate within and beyond the nineteenth-century artistic imagination.

In Shakespeare, Borges found a precursor of his own philosophical preoccupations with the negation of personal identity and with the transmission of a cultural legacy. ’Everything and Nothing’ (1960) and the later ’A Page on Shakespeare’ (1964) explore the first of these concerns. Compensating somewhat for his sense of nothingness, Shakespeare exploited the roles of actor and playwright to create and impersonate multiple selves. Regarding him as the epitome of reworking and recycling pre-existent stories and plots, Borges exemplifies a flawed approach to Shakespeare’s legacy in the character of Sogel in a late story entitled ’Shakespeare’s Memory’.