Shakespearean Gothic (review)

Enlightenment (Aufklärung). The word defines a program for bringing human nature out of the shadows that had obscured it and into the clear light of day. Philosophical inquiry was to banish the darkness of superstition and turn its back on the unreason ascribed to the Gothic barbarism of the Middle Ages. People themselves would be seen to be civilized and rational beings. But the repressed returned with a vengeance in fiction. Eighteenth-century Gothic imagined a medieval past that never was, repudiating the rules of classical poetics to let loose the secrets of the imagination and the demons of the night. Gothic fiction centered on the extravagant passions experienced by the helpless victims and remorseless practitioners of unmotivated cruelty or unrestrained sexuality. It was characteristically set among bleak ruins and gloomy dungeons frequented by slimy creatures or unearthly apparitions. And its champion was Shakespeare, newly canonized in the same period.

Shakespeare broke the laws of genre and ignored decorum; he dealt in madness and sorcery. The plays thread their way through Gothic fiction in the form of references, quotations, or the invocation of broadly Shakespearean plots, rhythms, and vocabulary. Most of the contributors to Shakespearean Gothic share the view that to appropriate a writer of Shakespeare's stature was to invest this emerging popular and wayward genre with a degree of literary legitimacy. Rictor Norton sees the habit of deriving chapter epigraphs from Shakespeare confirmed, if not initiated, by Ann Radcliffe, whose name was consistently coupled with the dramatist's in contemporary criticism and actually preferred to his in some instances. And while Shakespeare was held to be sublime, he was also fast becoming a valuable commercial proposition. In an age of literary fakery, William Henry Ireland knew an opportunity when he saw it. According to Jeffrey Kahan's engaging account, the forger of the "Shakspeare Papers" cheerfully owned up when he was unmasked by Edmond Malone, and went on to make a career out of fictitious accounts of his own life, as well as habitual plagiarism, misquotation, and misattribution.

Perhaps Ireland only takes to extremes an intertextuality the Gothic everywhere exemplifies. The Shakespeare plays offering the greatest scope for allusion and imitation were predictably those that foregrounded the supernatural: Macbeth, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest. Richard III and Iago offered role models for any number of fascinating villains; Lady Macbeth, Tamora, and Margaret of Anjou anticipated a range of terrifying women. But the favorite by far was Hamlet. Susan Allen Ford's sympathetic reading of Kenneth Branagh's film brings out the play's own Gothic elements: darkness, mystery, a medieval setting, the tyranny of the paternal law, and guilt at the heart of the ostensibly loving family. All three of Horace Walpole's Shakespearean Gothic texts, Anne Williams argues, are reinscriptions of Hamlet. Thomas Love Peacock's irresolute Scythrop, Marjean D. Purinton and Marliss C. Desens propose, is a version of Hamlet.

Intertextual relations are rarely simple, however. The strongest essays in this collection recognize that wherever there is a parallel, the discerning reader may also identify a difference. Diane Long Hoeveler's account of the bestselling Father and Daughter, A Tale in Prose shows how Amelia Opie rewrote the Shakespearean sublime as pathos, domesticating Cordelia and exonerating Lear to uphold the bonds of filial piety. But then Nahum Tate's version of the play, the only one known to the theater-going public of the time, had prepared the ground in advance. Tate's Cordelia is already Gothic, subdued, in love, threatened with rape, and more given to tears than to resistance. Yael Shapira's highly sophisticated discussion of a Gothic "abduction" of Romeo and Juliet puts the case that Matthew Lewis's horror novel The Monk empowers itself by calling in question the authority that belongs to Shakespeare's tragedy: if Romeo establishes a model of romantic courtship, Ambrosio's perversity as voyeur, stalker, and rapist is emphasized by a difference that throws into relief...