Performing Arts and the Gothic | Introduction
INTRODUCTION
The English Gothic drama, like the Gothic novel, was characterized by a reliance on supernatural elements and dramatic spectacles of suffering. Generally confined to a brief period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gothic plays were condemned by critics as atheistic and unenlightened, but were tremendously popular with audiences seeking the escapism the works provided. Romantic poets and dramatists ridiculed Gothic productions as superstitious, and the stereotypical ghostly figure slowly rising through a trap door on the stage became synonymous with Gothic excess, often eliciting more laughter than terror.
Critics point to a number of factors that converged in the late eighteenth century to produce the sudden success of the English Gothic drama. These include domestic civil unrest in England, revolutionary events in America and France, and changes in theatrical aesthetics. According to Jeffrey N. Cox (see Further Reading), although Gothic plays appeared as early as the 1770s and continued far into the nineteenth century, the form's popularity peaked around two important political events: the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Contemporary commentary posits a connection between the new form of drama and innovations in the political arena, between the real horrors of revolution and the staged horrors of the Gothic drama. Diane Long Hoeveler suggests that the plays convey an anarchic message to the English monarchy to reform or risk revolution. According to Hoeveler, the dramas "attempt to mediate between classes, races, and genders that were at odds over the shape and power structure of the evolving bourgeois society."
Another factor that encouraged the rise of the Gothic genre was the expansion during the 1790s of two important London theaters—Drury Lane (capacity: 3,600) and Covent Garden (capacity: 3,013)—whose cavernous size dictated that visual spectacle on a grand scale would play better than subtlety and nuance, particularly since dialogue could barely be heard by many in the audience. Increased competition from the numerous new theaters in the area added to the pressure on theatrical producers to stage the spectacular and the unexpected in order to draw substantial audiences. The period also saw advances in staging techniques, lighting, and special effects that made possible some of the ghostly apparitions associated with the Gothic.
Gothic dramas were typically set in dungeons or castles, ruined churches or cemeteries, dense forests, steep mountainsides, or other forbidding natural landscapes. Their dramatic situations were usually projected far into the past for the purpose of deflecting criticism by contemporary reviewers who found the Gothic reliance on ghosts and specters to be out of step with the post-Enlightenment age. By placing the action safely back in medieval times, playwrights attempted to make the characters' belief in superstition and the supernatural seem more plausible. Gothic themes involved terror, jealousy, violence, death, abductions, seduction of virtuous young women in the sentimental novel tradition, and revelations of crimes and punishments. Progression from enclosure or imprisonment to freedom characterized many Gothic texts, as did the influence of the past on present (and future) characters and events. Stylistic devices at the staging level included ghosts and visions appearing behind gauzy screens or rising out of trap doors in the floor of the stage, disembodied voices, and clanking armor. Because the presence of ghosts on the stage drew so much ridicule from critics, Gothic playwrights often defended their inclusion in the drama by invoking Shakespeare's use of ghosts in Macbeth (1606) and Hamlet (c. 1600–01), or by insisting that the supernatural elements were the product of a character's imagination or an elaborate hoax played on one character by another.
Romantic writers, sensitive to what they perceived as the lowbrow nature of Gothic theater, often distanced themselves from the genre by publishing their works anonymously or by writing "closet dramas," those plays intended to be read rather than staged. Despite the stigma, though, a significant number of authors associated with the Romantic school produced dramas that drew on the Gothic tradition: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Remorse (1813); Lord Byron's Manfred (1817) and Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci (1819) are among them. Playwrights such as Joanna Baillie struggled to maintain their legitimacy as playwrights while competing with the popularity of Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Castle Spectre (1797) or George Colman the Younger's Blue-Beard (1798).
The contemporary version of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic drama is the horror film, which often adapts works of Gothic fiction entirely and relies upon the stock elements of the Gothic to evoke fear, dread, and suspense. Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, film directors adapted Gothic fiction for the screen. An early notable film in this genre is Nosferatu (1922), a vampire film that offered an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The silent film, which was directed by F. W. Murnau, has achieved notoriety not only as one of the earliest horror films and as an example of German Expressionism, but because it prompted a lawsuit by Stoker's widow, who successfully sued the film's production company for copyright infringement. As was the case with Gothic literature, horror films began in Europe with such silent films as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908) and Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and were adopted and modified by American directors beginning in the 1930s, with such films as Dracula (1931), James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), and King Kong (1933). The enormously popular horror films of the 1930s gave way in the 1940s and 1950s to science fiction films centered on alien invasions or human travels into space. The horror film regained popularity in the late 1950s with Hammer Studios releases such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Mummy (1959), both directed by Terence Fisher, and in the 1960s, with such films as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). Psycho not only sparked a resurgence in interest in the horror film, it set a standard for artistic achievement in the genre that since has been only occasionally matched, in films such as Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). The vast majority of horror films are panned by critics and range in popularity from cult films—including Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Night of the Living Dead (1968)—viewed repeatedly by die-hard horror fans, to such box office record breakers as Stephen King's Carrie (1976), or the various Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's works, including The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). As Stephen King has asserted, "the artistic value the horror movie most frequently offers is its ability to form a liaison between our fantasy fears and our real fears." In this respect, and in many others (including its popular appeal and almost universal critical dismissal), the modern horror film bears a strong resemblance to the Gothic drama. The numerous subgenres and classifications of horror films have been examined by such commentators as S. S. Prawer, Robin Wood, and King.
The presence of the Gothic and horror in television has not matched that of film or literature, but can be found in such works as King's teleplay 'Salem's Lot (1979), the Rod Serling series The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and Night Gallery (1970–73), and in such comic spoofs on horror as The Addams Family (1964–66) and The Munsters (1964–66). The comic expression and reception of such stock Gothic trappings as monsters and ruined mansions is common in horror films and television. As Wood has noted, "many people who go regularly to horror films profess to ridicule them and go in order to laugh." Critics Fred Botting (see Further Reading) and Lenora Ledwon have examined David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks (1990–91) in relation to the Gothic tradition. Ledwon uses Twin Peaks to illustrate her concept of "Television Gothic," and maintains that "its very fluidity and resistance to boundaries make the Gothic a particularly apt genre for television…. Twin Peaks taps into this Gothic resistance, creating a Television Gothic characterized by a polysemous mingling of 'authentic' representations which constantly forces the viewer into an uneasy oscillation between ways of understanding."
Some of the more innovative and controversial early rock bands also tapped into the Gothic as a mode of communication and entertainment. "It is a long way from the 1764 appearance of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to the 1968 Led Zeppelin I," asserts Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, "but the monstrous subgenre behavior of the latter … surprisingly resembles the former, both formally and historically." Hinds goes on to correlate the subversive nature of Gothic fiction with that of heavy metal music and concludes that both "are peculiar in their purposeful deformity and evocation of the Satanic." Heavy metal music, performed by such bands as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath during the late 1960s and early 1970s, ushered in a subgenre of rock music that recalled the rebellion and culturally subversive nature of earlier rock music with a dark, violent, perverse, and overtly sexual approach. The music of these groups was excessive and designed to shock and evoke strong responses in both its proponents and its detractors. During the 1970s Alice Cooper, described by James Hannaham as an "iconoclastic, gender-bending social misfit," became the first performer to embody the grotesque in rock music, to take "counterculture to its illogical extreme," according to Hannaham. This grotesque figure became more common in the Gothic subculture (known as "Goth") that grew out of punk rock during the late 1970s. Hannaham asserts that punk and Goth music were one and the same, until Siouxsie and the Banshees—led by Siouxsie Sioux, who pioneered the combination of deathly pale skin, a bird's nest of tangled black hair, dark black eye makeup, and smeared bright-red lipstick that became what Hannaham called "a trademark of 80s 'new wave'"—deliberately moved away from the punk rock trend of deriding anyone or anything considered conformist or part of the establishment and began instead to address emotional pain, mental illness, fear, and isolation. Goth musicians such as Joy Division, Morrissey, and The Smiths use haunting melodies and imagery in much the same manner as Gothic novelists and playwrights to express the deep-seated and—most importantly, to the Goth subculture—genuine agony of both performer and fans. Hannaham explains that "Goths, by turning death, madness and violence into archetypes, depersonalize their connection to horrific events. They position themselves as reporters or tour guides to the macabre, rarely its victims."
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