The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare | Gothic literature
Gothic literature, fiction driven by the macabre, fantastic, or supernatural, in exotic settings of castles, ruins, subterranean caverns, and wild landscapes. The first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765), was programmatically Shakespearian. Walpole borrowed the plot of guilt and remorse laced with supernatural terror from Macbeth and Hamlet, supplied comic servants for ironic contrast, set his action in a 16th-century Italy full of danger and sexual intrigue derived from the problem plays, took the romance of the lost heir from the last plays, and saturated his text with Shakespearian tags and epigraphs. His successors, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Charles Maturin, would elaborate these strategies; Byron and Scott would send them up; and the interview between Hamlet and his father's ghost would remain an important model throughout the 19th century. It continues to haunt the Gothic novel's surviving descendant,...
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