SOURCE: Backscheider, Paula R. “Gothic Drama and National Crisis.” In Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England, pp. 149-88. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Backsheider maintains that the enormous popularity of Gothic drama can be accounted for by its ability to reproduce and contain the cultural anxieties that accompanied the era's political and social unrest.]

Gothic drama reached its creative and popular peak at a time when a number of political orders were being renegotiated and being complicated by almost unprecedented national and international crises. A few of the major events of the last quarter of the eighteenth century were the American Revolution, the Gordon Riots, the Regency Crisis, the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. In addition, Britain had to absorb the massive physical and social dislocations of the agrarian and industrial revolutions, navy mutinies, Irish unrest, and the arming of British citizens in preparation for a French invasion in the winter of 1797-98.¹ Economic pressures from bad harvests and new taxation, unsettling radical educational tracts by and for women, and waves of political pressures propagated through reformist societies and their publications increased the people's sense of insecurity and turmoil. By the end of 1793, Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man had sold two hundred thousand copies. Even traditional conceptions of the family and gender were undergoing drastic revision.

During the tumultuous 1780s, the gothic drama became a recognized and popular literary mode; in the 1790s it became a mania, as did the gothic novel. The gothic suited the times, for it challenges the limits of the predictable, the “natural,” the possible. If borders and limits do not hold, then the assumptions that determine our interpretations of phenomena and behavior are threatened. The public and private, the affectionate, the social, and the political become areas of uncertainty and insecurity, and every person and every event is capable of arousing dread.

Gothic drama, surely one of the most denigrated and neglected forms in the entire history of drama, is an especially rich field for the study of literature as hegemonic apparatus. In addition to offering a third kind of case study for the analysis of how some forms of literature function in times of social crisis characterized by competing ideologies, it also contributes to strains of intellectual and social history presented in parts 1 and 2 of this book.

As the size of the London theaters increased, as the number of provincial theaters rose sharply, and as published plays and novels became ever more inexpensive and accessible, the gothic became available to a very broad spectrum of society. Indeed, it may be the earliest indisputable example of what we call mass culture. Although individual works of literature, including John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and Daniel Defoe's True-Born Englishman, had attracted mass audiences, and a few literary kinds, such as multivolume romances, travel books, and she-tragedies, had had sustained appeal, the gothic drama marks a new stage. It offers a paradigm for the study of the artistic and social dynamics that give rise to those wonders of cultural history that are modern mass culture: an artistic configuration that becomes formulaic and has mass appeal, that engages the attention of a very large, very diverse audience, and that stands up to repetition, not only of new examples of the type but of production of individual plays. As such, it offers a way to extend the exploration of several questions raised earlier: Why at some moments in a nation's life do strikingly large numbers of the population give themselves over to an art form? What in the experiencing of that form captivates and gratifies that audience? When that form is judged to be inferior, not only by subsequent ages but even by its major creators and practitioners and by professional critics, as the gothic drama has been, these questions become even more intriguing. It seems likely that greater understanding of why certain forms come to have mass appeal in modern Western societies will emerge from such inquiries.

Inscribed in the gothic drama are two other major concerns of my study: sex as political category and public opinion. By this time, women and women writers had learned that their acceptance and even authority—at least what authority they were permitted—depended upon their conforming to a female script. The gendered spheres so eloquently documented by Jane Spencer, Janet Todd, Nancy Armstrong, and Mary Poovey were firmly in place and available as a simple symbolic code. Gothic dramatists, therefore, could use sex as binary opposition in order to schematize philosophical and political systems. By this time, too, public opinion as a legitimate and legitimating political force had been almost universally accepted. Those in power had been brought to say with Charles Fox that “he had contended, and he ever would contend, that no ministers who acted independent of the public opinion, ought to be employed. The public opinion alone was the basis, in his mind, on which an administration should be formed.” Increasingly large numbers of people from all social orders felt competent to make and express political opinions and even to believe in their ability to influence their nation's history. As Pierre Bourdieu observed, “The propensity to speak politically … is strictly proportionate to the sense of having the right to speak” (411).

Unlike the creators of coronation year events and of Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, the writers of gothic drama did not see themselves primarily as participating in a political discourse when they wrote gothic drama.² Unlike playwrights like Howard and the women novelists, they were not feeling in opposition, seeking ways to “say the unsayable,” or creating a new space for newly deliberative groups to write themselves and their perspectives into history. These playwrights, however, no less than the other writers in this study, were innovators and deeply engaged in hegemonic processes.

Chapter 5 [Popular Art] demonstrates how they gradually precipitated out technical and ideological elements that captured and spoke to the most pressing anxieties and needs of their time and how their plays, like Behn's text, used visible, orchestrated languages. This chapter thereby identifies the aspects and operation of gothic drama that ally it with popular mass art and made it successful. Chapter 6 extends the analysis of the ways gothic drama exercised, released, and then contained the major personal and social anxieties of the time. It reveals the political dynamic symbolized by male, female, and crowd that allowed the gothic to articulate conflict and then to deny it. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic drama is a huge subject. My concerns here are with its rise from plays such as Miles Peter Andrews's Enchanted Castle, on the one hand, and John Home's Douglas, on the other; and with its participation in the events and anxieties of 1780-98 and the ways it became one of the many hegemonic apparatuses that negotiated the world-view that allowed England to defeat Napoleon. Although I include references to late eighteenth-century plays that signal the diverse modes of related drama popular in the new century and to Matthew Lewis's Castle Spectre, which exemplifies the beginning of the process of deconstructing the gothic, I do not analyze any of them in detail.

POPULAR ART

A young wife hears a muffled groan from behind a locked door; responsive to “the accent of distress” and the duty of “humanity to succour a wretched soul,” she uses her husband's key to unlock the door. Rather than swinging open, it drops down into the floor “with a tremendous crash.” Revealed is a room streaked with “vivid streams” of blood containing tombs “in the midst of which ghastly and supernatural forms are seen—some in motion, some fix'd—In the centre is a large Skeleton seated on a tomb.”

A heroine dies bravely between the two virtuous, heroic men who have loved her. They weep copiously. The villain, who has poisoned her, throws himself off a cliff onto the rocks in the sea far below.

These are typical scenes from early gothic drama. It is hard to find an eighteenth-century gothic play that did not have a respectable initial run and regular revivals, and many had truly phenomenal success.³ And the London theaters had become very large. By the 1792-93 season, Covent Garden held 3,013; by the spring of 1794, Drury Lane held 3,611, and the gothics were equally popular at the increasingly numerous provincial theaters.⁴ James Cobb's Haunted Tower (1789), with eighty-four performances in the first two seasons, was the most successful opera staged by Drury Lane in the entire century. George Colman the Younger's Battle of Hexham had twenty performances at the Haymarket in 1789, sixteen the next season, eleven the next, fifteen the next, and so it went. His Blue-Beard (1798) ran sixty-four nights in its first season, the longest first run of any play produced between 1776 and 1800; his Iron Chest (1796) ran almost annually until 1879. Theaters staged John Burgoyne's Richard Coeur de Lion (1786), which was one of the ten most performed plays in the last quarter of the century, produced 123 times in fourteen years. Among the most successful plays of the 1794-95 season were the gothics, The Mountaineers (1793), The Mysteries of the Castle (1795), The Secret Tribunal (1795), The Count of Narbonne (1781), Fontainville Forest (1794), and The Battle of Hexham. The seasons of 1797-98 and 1798-99 included even more gothic plays, and, again, among the most successful were The Battle of Hexham, The Iron Chest (1796), and The Italian Monk (1797), and the premiers of The Castle Spectre (1797), Blue-Beard, and Aurelio and Miranda (1798).

Gothic plays are quite diverse, and it is not possible to construct a definitive, “pure” list of them. Indeed, gothic elements were markedly present in English drama at least as early as the production of John Home's Douglas (Edinburgh, 1756; London, 1757); in fact, critics beginning with Samuel Johnson have located similar strategies, characters, and themes in the plays of John Dryden, Thomas Otway, and their contemporaries. Of Dryden's scenes for Almanzor, for example, Johnson wrote, “They exhibit a kind of illustrious depravity and majestick madness: such as, if it is sometimes despised, is often reverenced, and in which the ridiculous is mingled with the astonishing.”⁵ As early as the 1740s, the structures of feeling that would animate the gothic were beginning to appear in architecture; an example is the duke of Cumberland's artificial ruin, Virginia Water (1746), which had transported, ancient columns augmented by constructed, complementary parts and was set over a wide, somewhat barren area. In 1759, William Chambers added an imitation gothic “cathedral” to Kew Gardens.⁶ By the 1780s, characteristics that we usually associate with the gothic had been incorporated in many kinds of plays. The use of archaic settings and attempts to portray the terrifying as well as the presence of such icons as skulls, shrouds, bones of limbs or rib cages, daggers, moving curtains, and flickering lights had become ubiquitous.

Yet some generalizations about gothic drama can be made and a group of plays identified as belonging to a category of literary kind that we can safely classify as English gothic drama. In the decade of the 1780s, with a few exceptions such as The Count of Narbonne, gothic drama depended primarily upon the conventions of English comic opera and even pantomime. Among these plays were Miles Peter Andrews's Enchanted Castle (1786), which was a true pantomime with Harlequin and Colombine; James Cobb's comic opera, The Haunted Tower (1789); and George Colman the Younger's Battle of Hexham, which he called a comedy. In the nineties, although the plays of the eighties remained extremely popular and others like them became hits, gothic drama drew primarily upon the conventions of post-1670s English tragedy with its strong elements of melodrama. The variety of these plays can be surmised from the forms with which their titles allied them. Lewis called The Castle Spectre “a drama,” and Andrews styled his Mysteries of the Castle (1795), which was based on Laetitia Aikin's Fragment of Sir Bertrand (1774)⁷ and on Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, “a dramatic tale.” Colman intended Blue-Beard to be the Christmas pantomime for Drury Lane, and he called it “a Dramatick Romance.”⁸ Robert Jephson had called The Count of Narbonne, which was also loosely based on Walpole's Castle of Otranto, a tragedy. By midcentury, “A Play” became the conventional choice.

In spite of the diversity of the plays, that gothic drama became a formulaic type is indisputable. Like all formula literature, it had come to promise its consumers a definite setting, a particular cast of characters (which in this case implied predictable casting decisions and acting styles), a restricted repertoire of highly readable cultural icons, and a limited number of what John Cawelti has called “lines of action.” Matthew Lewis, one of the most perceptive analysts of the late eighteenth-century gothic, described the dramatic “formula” in the prologue to his Castle Spectre; first he mentioned such elements of setting as the “dungeons damp, / Drear forests, ruin'd aisles, and haunted towers,” the howling storms, and the sound of surf on rocks; then he continued,

Next choosing from great Shakespeare's comic school,
The gossip crone, gross friar, and gibing fool—
These, with a virgin fair and lover brave,
To our young author's care the enchantress gave;(9)
But charged him, ere he bless'd the brave and fair,
To lay the exulting villain's bosom bare,
And by the torments of his conscience show,
That prosperous vice is but triumphant woe!

Lewis captures setting, repertory of characters, and plot well. The configuration of characters determines the plot. Basically, the villain, who is the protagonist, menaces a beautiful, virtuous woman who will be happily married to an admirable, stable man. Desire for property, not love or sex, motivates the villain, who, as Lewis notes, has a tortured conscience. The romance line is strongly subordinated to the story of removing the threat emanating from the protagonist, who always repents or dies.

Modern theorists of the gothic have gone beyond these concrete elements to argue that the form, in all its manifestations, is best distinguished by the experience its readers or spectators have, and it is now widely accepted as an expression of dissatisfaction with the possibilities of conventional literary realism.¹⁰ In his prologue, Lewis had cast “Romance,” “the moon-struck child of genius, and of woe” as the Muse, and numerous gothic playwrights added “romance” to their titles. Thus, they signaled their freedom from the referential, veridical world of realist texts and allied themselves with a highly symbolic art, often reaching for a higher reality or a deeper psychology. Tzvetan Todorov quotes Pierre Mabille: “Beyond entertainment, beyond curiosity, beyond all the emotions such narratives and legends afford, beyond the need to divert, to forget, or to achieve delightful or terrifying sensations, the real goal of the marvelous journey is the total exploration of universal reality” (57). Peter Brooks, in “Virtue and Terror,” calls “the Gothic emotion” “a delectation in chiaroscuro, in the experience of ruin, mystery, awe—in order to imply the capacity and aptitude of the natural world to receive and produce the supernatural” (255), and David Punter notes that “the world, at least in some aspects, is very much more inexplicable—or mysterious, or terrifying, or violent” than realism allows (407). This sense of the unknown, the unpredictable, the essentially threatening nature of the world, and especially of the possibilities for familiar limits to collapse underlies the gothic experience. “It is a fear of shadows and unseen dangers in the night” (Keech, 132). It is the fear of what might happen, of what human beings, even a friend or relative, might suddenly do.

In the 1770s and 1780s, gothic drama brought threatening, mythical archetypes into dynamic contact with contemporary preoccupations. The social ruptures that would be fought out in every aspect of nineteenth-century British life were becoming painfully evident,¹¹ and the signs of competing ideologies challenging the dominant order are manifest in the Gordon Riots, the reformist societies, and the radical educational tracts by and for women. In 1788 King George III had his first extended attack of porphyria, and his physicians' reports and the Regency Crisis astonished the nation. The Castle of Otranto, often considered the first gothic novel, appeared shortly after John Wilkes was expelled from Parliament,¹² and The Count of Narbonne in the year after the Gordon Riots; in the 1790s, the decade in which the ramifications of the French Revolution and the horrors of the Napoleonic War became clear, the gothic drama and novel became a public mania that lasted well into the nineteenth century. In the 1760s, the second largest group of chapbooks dealt with the supernatural and religion,¹³ and by 1790 critics were saying that gothic drama was threatening to drive all other plays off the stage. Between 1764 and 1820, four thousand gothic novels were published in England, and the Minerva Press books, which began in 1790, made cheap editions widely available.

The time was right for the gothic. Writers felt its spirit in the times. Charlotte Smith began The Romance of Real Life (1787), “It has been asserted, that there is in human nature a propensity to every kind of evil; and that persons of the best disposition, and most liberal education, may find themselves in situations as will, if their passions are suffered to predominate, betray them in the most frightful excesses, into crimes which cannot be related without horror” (1). The Marquis de Sade commented perceptively,

For anyone familiar with the full range of misfortunes wherewith evil-doers can beset mankind, the novel became as difficult to write as monotonous to read. There was not a man alive who had not experienced in the short span of four or five years more misfortunes than the most celebrated novelist could portray in a century. Thus, to compose works of interest, one had to call upon the aid of hell itself.¹⁴

In 1793, Frances Burney, who had lived at court, conversed with George III at the onset of his illness, and walked in the garden with the “mad” king, wrote: “Already we look back on the [recent] past as on a dream … wild in its horrors.”¹⁵ Pent up in this drama were the signs of the cultural crisis.

It is now common to locate the gothic impulse in the French Revolution, but it seems to me that the great gothic impetus was born in an English crisis and, from its inception to its demise, reflected British events and structures of feeling at least as much as it did any winds that blew across the channel to England.¹⁶ Between the time of the adaptation of Walpole's Castle of Otranto for the stage in 1781 and the first adaptation of one of Anne Radcliffe's novels in 1794, there was more than a decade during which gothic drama rose in popularity and took shape. That decade's gothic drama has largely been ignored.

Something as simple as comparing the sets for these plays with the new palace under construction at Kew suggests the fanciful and romantic cast of this early gothic and its relationship to the king. In 1783, the king engaged James Wyatt to build a royal residence large enough for his family; from then until into the next decade, construction on the “Gothic” or “Castellated Palace” continued. Sir N. Wraxall came to call it a “most singular monument of eccentricity” and an “image of distempered reason.”¹⁷ In 1783, James Wyatt was a sensationally successful young architect. Only thirty-seven years old and elected an associate to the Royal Academy at age twenty-four, he had dazzled London with his Pantheon in Oxford Street (designed 1769, opened 1772).¹⁸ Between 1770 and 1799, he exhibited designs at the Royal Academy no fewer than thirty-five times and established himself as an architect of elegant, imaginative, and pleasurable rooms graced with exquisite and often unexpected yet harmonious details. By 1780, he was abandoning such influences as the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the model for the Pantheon, and the classical for the gothic, a style he is sometimes credited with having made fashionable.¹⁹ As the DNB says, “There is scarcely a county or large town in which Wyatt did not erect some public or private building.” Although detractors compared Kew Palace to the Bastille, pointed out that its chief “prospect” was “the dirty town of Brentford,” and pronounced it “highly inconvenient and uncomfortable,”²⁰ public interest ran high. The Times for 27 August 1805, for instance, reported:

His Majesty's chateau at Kew, is proceeding as fast as possible. By the erection of a castellated range of buildings … with a Gothic gateway in the centre, the disagreeable appearance of Brentford is nearly hidden. … Great alterations are making in the gardens. … Most of the temples have been recently repaired and painted, and a fosse is now digging in a semi-circular direction, which will enclose the house from that part of the gardens in which the public may be permitted to walk. From various parts of the grounds the new building forms a very picturesque object.

(3)

In the king, too, were the hints of the Janus-faced gothic protagonist. By 1771 political essayists, including Junius, were depicting George III as the “virtual director of a neo-Stuart attempt to impose tyranny on Britain.”²¹ It was during the decade of the '80s that George III's strong demands for respect for royal prerogative and his willing assertion of the power of the throne came to be well known. In fact, in 1780, Commons had passed a motion stating that “the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.”²² In the midst of the Gordon Riots he brought the troops, both horse and foot, into London and ordered them as a last resort to shoot rioters without pausing to read the Riot Act and even asserted that he was willing to lead the Horse Guards himself if necessary.²³ During the debate over the India Bill in 1783, the king ruthlessly pressured the members of the House of Lords, including the archbishop of Canterbury, to vote as he desired.

The “plot” of the king's life and the standard gothic story had many points of similarity. Before his illness, George III had first been in opposition to his own ministers, including the popular Pitt-Newcastle “broad-bottom” coalition, and had then been the object of resolutions passed in Parliament condemning the increase in his exercise of power. In the autumn of 1788, he suffered a severe attack of porphyria, one that led his chief physician to write on 6 November that the king had “lost his reason.” It would be late February before his recovery was certain.²⁴ Among the most violent signs of his illness were violent mood changes, eruptions of impatience and rage, pathetic evidence of self-awareness, and great agitation accompanied by multiple and contradictory orders.²⁵ One of the most embarrassing symptoms of his illness was his delusion that he was married to a youthful sweetheart, Elizabeth Pembroke, rather than to his queen. At other moments, he would say that he planned to become a Lutheran in order to divorce Charlotte and marry Elizabeth.²⁶

Simultaneously, George III was “Farmer George,” the king who mingled freely with his subjects, talked on mundane matters with them, and headed a “cult of domestic virtue, a cult in which he was not to be surpassed even by his grand-daughter.”²⁷ Even his youngest children attended his drawing rooms, and the precedent-setting division he made between them and his audiences, between his home and his court, Queen's House (the former Buckingham House) and St. James, contributed to the establishment of the nineteenth-century conception of private and public. Prints depicted him taking tea with his daughters or toasting muffins while the queen fried sprats. A few months before he fell ill, he and his wife walked the streets of Cheltenham hand in hand and even visited in private homes; they would do the same in Weymouth during the king's recovery in June 1789.²⁸ He and his family were frequently at Windsor after 1780, and, since the grounds were open, he often met his subjects while he was engaged in mundane actions.

To some extent, all monarchs provide stability to a nation, and George's firm adherence to such traditional institutions as the Church of England, the family, and a strong, patriarchal monarchy increased the illusion of security that his people drew from him. His illness, accompanied by shocking reports of his behavior and treatment and by political intrigue, threw the entire nation into distress. His recovery in 1789 occasioned extravagant national rejoicing, and George seemed to have become a more sympathetic monarch. During the time when his illness was abating, he wanted to set up a new order with the motto “Rex Populo non separandus.”²⁹ A man who saw him often, Lord Auckland, remarked that the king “is a quite altered man, and not what you knew him even before his illness; his manner is gentle, quiet, and, when he is pleased, quite cordial.”³⁰ In spite of lingering weakness, he insisted upon attending the five-hour St. George's Day thanksgiving that began with a service at St. Paul's and concluded with a feu de joie from the Guards under the windows at Buckingham Palace. He tirelessly greeted his subjects in every village he went through. In late August, he began a three-week progress where “one constant mob” turned out for him.³¹

By 1788, George III was also “the distressed father of the wicked Prince of Wales,” frustrated by his rebellious son and the rebellious Americans.³² The nation knew that they were not eager to see the Prince of Wales, George Augustus Frederick, ascend the throne. He had been scandalously involved in an expensive relationship with an actress, Mary Robinson, and soon came to be known for excessive indulgence in what many considered the vices of the ton: heavy drinking, gambling, masquerades, and sexual assignations. His extravagance was common knowledge. By then, too, he was deeply involved with the opposition and especially with the Fox-North-Portland coalition.

When George III began making public appearances in 1789, the signs of his illness could not be ignored, for he was extremely thin, persistently hoarse, and some even noted that he became upset more obviously and quickly. Burney recorded a conversation in which he expressed sentiments of great benevolence and “sweetness” and yet became “animated almost into a rage” and said he was going to “rule with a rod of iron” (4:247, 249). His subjects would never be able to forget that he had been mad and, therefore, always feared that he would be so again. In these first fragile weeks of his public emergence, the French Revolution began. At first regarded with detachment and even approval, it would be nearly two years before such events in France as the abolition of all titles, the arrest of Louis XVI, and the invasion of the southern Netherlands began to change public opinion. Pitt, for instance, had expected that France would be less warlike under a constitution more like England's.³³ By 1791, however, events in France, demands for reform in England, and riots, such as those in Birmingham and Manchester that required the dragoons to end them, had English anxieties high.

The heart of gothic drama in the nineties is an authority figure gone mad, or at least seriously obsessive and neurotically moody. Here is the face of authority in England after 1788:

Such rapid fluctuations between great excitement and comparative calm, between insight that his mind was playing tricks and a conviction that his hallucinations were reality and building false beliefs on them, between rational behavior and impulsive inappropriate actions. …

To these gentler workings of a disordered mind, [there] often succeeded sad transports of vehemence and agitation.³⁴

These descriptions of King George III's first descent into madness could be descriptions of the protagonists of almost all gothic plays. Moreover, other powerful people exhibited similar troubling behavior. Edmund Burke's conduct, for instance, was described as irrational, “violent almost to madness,” and as “confirm[ing] the suspicions which many of his contemporaries entertained regarding his mental stability”; George Selwyn mused, “Burke walking at large and [the king] in a strait waistcoat!”³⁵ Soon the Reign of Terror and Napoleon would provide mind-boggling images of the face of authority.

This man, and it seems always to be a man, is “gothic” because he is pushing the absolute limits of what the audience imagines to be possible in nature. He is subject to cataclysmic passions, has committed or is contemplating unspeakable crimes that reek of ancient, sacred taboos, and is engaged in a magnificent struggle with himself. Like Colman's Mortimer, he can horrify with his rapid changes: “I will crush thee! pulverise thy frame! … Ha, ha ha!—I will not harm thee, boy—O, agony!” (Iron Chest, 32). Narbonne, Octavian (The Mountaineers), Rawbold, Mortimer (both Iron Chest), and many others experience periods of madness; other characters, Ferrand in The Castle of Otranto³⁶ and Schedoni (Italian Monk), describe their brains as “on fire.” Abomelique, Bulcazin Muley, and Mortimer are passionate, agitated, and subject to rapid mood changes.

Because the plays are usually set in feudal times and in isolated parts of familiar nations, the characters are few and palpably isolated. Therefore, the protagonist's influence—both political and emotional—is vast and permeates every aspect of the portrayed world. Because of this man, the gothic settings are completely appropriate. They develop his character and influence but also carry subliminally the other messages essential to the gothic. Secret chambers, locked rooms, sealed vaults, dungeons, and underground catacombs—places available as reminders of his guilt or locations for future atrocities—express the most obvious possibilities for such a man. He is also capable of assuring that a woodland glen will be a threatening, dark forest where conversations may be overheard and assassins hide.

What has gone berserk in this world, of course, is power. And British people felt they lived in such a place. By creating a claustrophobic world with this kind of single authority figure, the playwright found a way to make power prevail everywhere and to embody an ideological struggle. The audience sensed what Foucault has identified as the true nature of power, that it is very widely disseminated and penetrates everywhere. Foucault saw that power had come to work on the mind as well as the body and to permeate into private spaces, private places, even into the soul. When power transferred its pressure from the body to the mind, it gained the power to “modify, use, consume, or destroy” the subject that the British mind identified as the “true self.” Many of the most effective episodes in gothic art and literature make the audience acutely aware of the multiple sources of power and the fragility of the restraints on these forces. In human beings the British saw new capacity for evil, for the perverted use of authority. In official forms of authority they saw the ability to put under surveillance, to coerce, to confine, and to silence, and they saw the church and the state colluding. In landscapes and the theater's special effects, they saw the power of nature, sensed the omnipotent force behind it, remembered its superhuman and unpredictable power, and realized that such power could make it seem crushingly malevolent. Such awareness of the reality, dissemination, and potential of power is painful and frightening.

The protagonist of a gothic play represented the ideology of feudal privilege, and in some plays specifically as it manifested itself in the period Alexis de Tocqueville called “the ancien régime.” Insisting upon the absolute right of prerogative even as he recognized this stance as threatened, the protagonist is the sign of aggressive, individualistic behavior, which objectifies, commodifies, and consumes. He was a particularly effective carrier of threat, because of feudalism's similarities and contrasts to bourgeois and capitalist ideologies.³⁷ Like these, ancien régime feudalism emphasized the solitary actor and tended to glorify aggressive, individualistic energy. As economic historians have noted, feudal lords exploited people and lands in ways we now consider capitalistic, although significant differences in philosophy and values existed.³⁸ For instance, rather than insisting upon “natural rights” as higher laws as capitalists often did, feudal lords saw themselves as the law and, therefore, were willing to deny all other legal claims. Representing the demand for obedience based upon obligation to status, they denied any claims of rational self-interest and any legitimacy to voluntary contractual community.

As J. G. A. Pocock points out, England can be seen as an ancien régime because it was doing modern things—commercially, imperially, and intellectually under the authority of the ancient institutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and church.³⁹ In some gothic plays, the king intervened, usually through an emissary, to check or correct the actions of a nobleman. In Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Edmund Burke had argued against “a phantom of tyranny in the nobles” but almost simultaneously Horace Walpole “hoped the Crown can reduce the exorbitance of the peers.”⁴⁰ The ideal of Polybian mixed government with its checks and balances runs deep in English discourses, and in the last quarter of the century the king could be seen as the best hope of controlling the excesses and abuses of both capitalistic power from wealth and aristocratic power based on traditional “rights.” It is no coincidence that playwrights made the gothic protagonist an aristocrat, but one corrupt and in decline and never the legitimate possessor of his estate. Raymond, Count of Narbonne, announces, “My will's the law.” Austin, the priest, exclaims, “A venerable law! / The law by which the tyger tears the lamb.” He asks Raymond if, when he is called to answer in heaven's court, “Will that supremacy accept the pleas, / I did commit foul murder, for I might?”

His basic drive is to secure his claim, and that claim is rapidly embodied in or transformed into a young woman. Like Otranto, who wants to maintain and bequeath his fiefdom and whose story Ronald Paulson calls a fable of the ancien régime,⁴¹ these characters are not like the modern bourgeois dictator who often claims to be “enlightened” and dedicated to “supposedly emancipatory values of freedom, justice, and fraternity, the abolition of social hierarchies and privileged authority.”⁴² Unlike bourgeois ideology, it lacks commitment to humanism, “progress,” or even the crucial importance of the individual's interiority.

Even relatively early gothics, such as Narbonne, state explicitly the assumption of the privileges of power depicted in gothic protagonists and even in a few minor characters who imitate these aristocrats in kind if not magnitude. Collectively they recall the aggressive and oppressive old order, the violence of the past, and its lingering power over the present. Lamotte in Fontainville Forest explains, “My means for ever sunk below my wishes—/ I lanquish'd still for splendour out of reach, / Never by industry to be obtain'd” (52). He resorts to fraud and then robbery. Another thief, Rawbold in The Iron Chest, says, “Fortune has thrust me forth to prowl, like the wolf” (8). Other passages in these plays briefly raise the possibility that such individualism is “natural” and, thereby, suggest that the ideological conflict represented by the characters extends to nature. For instance, the marquis in Fontainville Forest explains, “The savage unperverted follows nature, / And stabs his unsuspecting enemy, / Pursues occasion of secure revenge, / And strikes the blow, when harmless to himself” (54).

The marquis's will to power becomes a desire for Adeline, his murdered brother's child, and then transforms itself again into the desire for her murder. Like Osmond in Lewis's Castle Spectre, he desires the daughter because she resembles her mother, the woman originally loved and lost, and because she, as the legitimate heir, would secure the usurped property. Like Raymond, these men want to possess the woman in the same way they want the land: utterly, permanently—consuming both and obliterating all possibility of rivals. They display the conservative, restrictive interests of finance capital rather than the capitalistic drive to expand and compete in an open market, a difference Foucault characterized as knowledge of wealth rather than knowledge of production.⁴³ They are completely willing to kill again and to violate the most prohibited taboos. Incest is almost always planned, and that they constantly threaten rape, entombment, and murder introduces hints of cannibalism and necrophilia as well.

The Regency Crisis brought the nature of authority, its fragility, and the implications of it painfully to the attention of a nation that was already engaging such issues. Gothic drama concentrated these anxieties in the protagonist and encoded other structures of feeling as well. In modern times of crisis, popular literature serves major hegemonic functions. Its potential for strengthening the status quo has long been recognized; more important, however, than its alleged ability to forestall independent thinking and to become Thorstein Veblen's anesthetizing technology for managing consensus or Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's “irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order”⁴⁴ is its existence as a mediator between lived experience and utopian desires. As Fredric Jameson says of all memorable art, “[It] proves to unite a lived experience of some kind, as its content, with an implied question as to the very possibilities of Experience itself, as its form.”⁴⁵

To become mass art, literature must appeal enough to become popular; to do this, it must speak to the hopes and fears of its audience at a particular moment in their history even as it does what popular art always does: entertain. Evidence suggests that most satisfying entertainment literature indulges deep fantasies and fears; that it enthralls—often by providing superficial delights to the senses—but finally delivers the satisfactions of poetic justice. In times of turmoil and stress, above all, it must exercise, release, and contain powerful feelings. This last sequence helps explain the pleasure of repetition, the secret to drawing the same individuals time after time to the same play with the same cast. It is certainly necessary for literature to become popular before it can be a highly effective modern hegemonic apparatus, and it may also be necessary for it to become formulaic.

Gothic drama undoubtedly succeeded as mass art so prodigiously because it managed to unite nearly unprecedented spectacle and excitement with the elements we now know consumers find most satisfying in entertainment art. It depended upon spectacular settings, mood music, and acting in specific styles as much—or even more than—it did upon a predictable set of characters, conflicts, icons, and resolutions. These plays could be deeply appreciated by the lover of English theatrical music, by the devotée of great actors and actresses, by the student of landscape painting, and by the fan of melodrama and other popular dramatic forms. The audience in the late eighteenth century included true connoisseurs, able by experience and even study to be highly discriminating in all of these aspects. Even the least educated of the audience had been conditioned to react to many of the effects in sophisticated ways. Most of the audience would share the enjoyment of what Martin Meisel calls “the wonder of the machinery and the enchantment of the transformations,” but it is surely more accurate to think in terms of Bernard Bergonzi's participants in a “field of force” than of Adorno's passive consumers in whom consciousness has become mindless conformity. Bergonzi imagines a model in which author, genre, the ideology of the author's group, and other factors are on a parity with the audience's desires, expectations, and ideology and in which all constitute the text.⁴⁶ As such, it can actualize literature's potential to become a hegemonic apparatus through its artful strategies of exercise and containment.

In many ways, gothic drama, like the novel, was a new literary kind born of the orchestrated languages of other popular forms. These recognizable traces enhanced the form's ability to please and to soothe its audience. The Battle of Hexham is a good example, and because it is in the first wave of gothic plays highly instructive. Colman called it a comedy, but it begins with the defeat of Henry VI and Queen Margaret by Edward IV, and this familiar history and the opening scene would have been experienced as historical romance or even tragedy. One of Adeline's first expositions reads, “My house is wretchedness—The wars I seek have made it so—they have robb'd me of my husband—comfort now is lost to me, My very children, whose pretty frolic round our hearth, charm'd even time and made the lagging winter's night fly … I kiss them thro' my tears. … Oh Gondibert, too faithful to weak cause” (6). An early scene between Margaret and a Shakespeare-style tragic fool whose wit is caustic and worldly marks the play's antecedents, but other scenes involving Margaret are even more sentimental than Adeline's speech. Recalling the historical time, the despair and dark forests of Home's Douglas, Hexham brings the fear of unknown places, of storms, discomfort, violence, robbery, and death before the audience through scene changes and special effects. In a touch foreshadowing the gothic novel to come, all of the characters imagine and describe far worse things than they experience. The bandit lord talks of how “imagination discovers to the dull and feverous sense mishapen forms ghastly and horrible” (50). Colman also included many of the conventions of comic opera, and he may have used the word “comedy” to prepare the audience for the excessive sentiment, for bandits that are soon revealed to be more picturesque and miserable than threatening, and especially for the number and variety of the songs. The improbable happy ending is sealed with a patriotic speech and a rousing chorus celebrating the end of wars. Today this play with its mixture of carefully coordinated if contrasting forms is often inappropriately located as early melodrama rather than within the strain of pre-1790s gothic literature, an emergent form composed of reaccentuated art forms.

Before turning to a discussion of the encoded philosophical issues and the political dynamic beneath the surface of these plays, I shall attempt to illustrate what the major components of gothic drama were like and how its dramaturgy participated in the exercise, release, and containment of personal and social anxieties. I shall organize the rest of this chapter by some of the plays' components and limit it by focusing primarily upon the aspects likely to be least familiar to modern readers and upon the stress most fully integrated and openly expressed in gothic drama—the sense of power gone berserk.

Unfortunately, gothic drama is almost as difficult as street pageants to reconstruct, and more difficult still for modern readers to integrate imaginatively so that effects appear before the mind's eye. To understand this drama, its success, and how it contained the most pressing fears and hopes of its audience, modern readers must recognize the coordinated art forms and bring perspectives from them all to bear simultaneously upon the printed text. To a large extent, this theater did depend upon the bombardment of the senses and the use of techniques that fixed manipulative tableaux in the audiences' memories. Thus, just as exercise and containment alternate, so do periods of intense activity with “freeze-frames.” The playwrights gave precedence to form over reality and even plausibility, and charges that gothic drama was low on narrative and high on iconic manipulation are legitimate. It did, however, express people's legitimate concerns as they encountered the world, fulfilled needs and desires ranging from entertainment to education, and came to give pleasure as ritual and repetition.⁴⁷ The modern student of this drama, then, must exercise unusual re-creative imagination.

Horror art has always called for technical innovation, and today some of the men who designed the sets are better known than the playwrights. The intention was to create Stimmung, “moments when a landscape seems charged with alien meaning,” the experience of what came to be Romantic epiphany,⁴⁸ most often to remind the audience of nature's moodiness and awesome power and to create scenes that reflected and dwarfed the protagonist's awesome and changing nature. Opening scenes made power, loneliness, desolation, and threat visceral. Contemporary witnesses record that certain scenes infallibly elicited gasps of wonder and appreciation from the audience. On stages as large as 108 feet high, 83 feet wide, and 92 feet long (Drury Lane after 1791), designers were able to produce landscapes accurately called “sublime,” some based on familiar illustrations to which members of the audience had already learned “appropriate” responses.⁴⁹ Some scenes, like the “strong dismantled lonely Fort upon the Sea-side” in The Italian Monk and the “View of the City of Messina, the Bay, Mount aetna, & c. & c.” in The Mysteries of the Castle, are archetypally sublime. Nature's awesome power and beauty provide the background for constructions of buildings, many of which are depicted as crumbling. Thus, for instance, the disintegrating manmade buildings, in spite of their vast and massive size, provide a contrast to the divinely created, apparently immutable Italian Alps and are reminders of nature's great and potentially destructive power as the mountains are of its strength and permanence.

Major advances in set building, stage machinery, special effects, and lighting allowed designers like Philippe De Loutherberg, William Capon, and Thomas Greenwood the Younger to go somewhat beyond participating in the audience's willing acceptance of the premises of the play to offering an impressive demonstration of sublime art in its own right. Mountain landscapes, massive castles, and vast forests emphasized human weakness and insignificance; as early as 1770 playgoers commented on the skill with which they could be lit to show, for instance, the gradual coming of dawn, storms with lightning and thunder, and eerily foggy twilight. Jean Georges Noverre explained, “The art lies in knowing how to distribute the lamps in uneven groups, so as to bring out the parts which require full lighting and to leave in shadow or darkness … the other parts.”⁵⁰

At least by the 1770s English people had rejected the discipline of French art in favor of the “extravagantly heroic and sublime Sturm und Drang movement”; gothic sets showed the influence of the Neapolitan, “savage” Salvator Rosa, as James Thomson described him, over the very popular Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. Robert Rosenblum points out that English art came to be characterized by a blending of pictorial realism and “a style of visionary fantasy,”⁵¹ and set designers learned to give the impression of fog with lights and reflectors and to produce dreamlike sequences against a background that might have come from an artist's on-site sketchbook. In the best plays, scenery and props contribute greatly to the mood of each segment of the play and even express the situation or mood of major characters. Colman's Blue-Beard has a “brilliantly and fancifully illuminated” garden with a working fountain. His set using the Sierra de Ronda in The Mountaineers is not unpredictable but seems to intensify the characters' mingled feelings of danger and exodus.

Many of these scenes with blended realism and nightmare join nature's dangers with man's evil in order to evoke elemental fears: confinement, perpetual surveillance, and death, especially in horrible ways such as falling great distances onto rocks or starvation in an underground vault. One of the best gothic sets is the one Sophia Lee devised for Almeyda, Queen of Granada (1796). The villain, Abdallah, has a “dark vault irregularly hewn in a rock, extending out of sight on one side, in a vista of rude imperfect pillars.—A small gate leads on the other side, through an enormous crag of the rock” (40). Abdallah tells him that beneath a large stone is a “chasm / Thro' jagged rocks—imperious—horrible—/ A stream, oblivious as the fabled Lethe, / Washes to many an undiscover'd hollow, / The victims of my will” (41). He chains Alonzo there, and throughout the next scenes the sound of the rushing water is a constant reminder of the danger. The stage directions for The Castle Spectre were especially lavish and are memorable even for a modern reader. One of the most famous reads:

A gloomy subterraneous Dungeon, wide and lofty: The upper part of it has in several places fallen in, and left large chasms. On one side are various passages leading to other Caverns: On the other is an Iron Door with steps leading to it. … Reginald, pale and emaciated, in coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain bound round his body, lies sleeping upon a bed of straw.

(88)

Eternal imprisonment in a kind of labyrinth, human loneliness and vulnerability, the fears of midnight and of nightmares are given concrete expression in the “wide and lofty” set that dwarfs the chained being whose thin frame and wild hair show the ravages upon body and mind.

As is characteristic of the gothic—and, indeed, of much popular art—the suspense and dread are pleasurable partly because the audience has always at hand ways to remind themselves that the danger is art they can give themselves to or pull back from. The means of containing anxiety at least equal those allowing the exercise of fear. Playwrights and designers composed pastoral, picturesque scenes—the beautiful—as carefully as they did the sublime.⁵² Lovely open fields and neat rural cottages shown at dawn or in daylight break the gloom and storm of convents, caves, and jagged mountains. Act 3 of The Battle of Hexham opens with a village that gradually displaces the image of the dark groves and robbers' cave. Scenes that call attention to the Sierra de Ronda alternate with those featuring the goatherds and their simple cottage in The Mountaineers. These juxtapositions regulated the intensity of the mood and reminded the audience of the gentle side of nature, but more importantly they captured the Janus-face of the world that seemed gothic. In replying to a friend recently bereaved, Walpole wrote, “Life seems to me as if we were dancing on a sunny plain on the edge of a gloomy forest, where we pass in a moment from glare to gloom to darkness.”⁵³

The plays and sets were, after all, manmade. In fact, in contrast to playgoers who may have wanted maximum illusion, playwrights seem to have shared the desire of eighteenth-century novelists for analytical and reflective auditors; James Boaden, for example, wrote, “It would not be desirable that the spectator should lose his senses to the point of forgetting that he is in a regular theatre, and enjoying a work of art invented for his amusement and instruction by a poet, and acted by another artist of corresponding talent called a player.”⁵⁴ Spectators at any production periodically remember that they are watching a play and then give themselves over again to the experience, and aspects of eighteenth-century production made it quite difficult to sustain extended illusions. The proscenium arch stage framed the production, and therefore distanced the audience from the action. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, a playgoer complained that he could see “the broken portions” of a tower designed to crumble and fall “working smoothly on a hinge.”⁵⁵ That hearty workmen changed the sets without closing the curtains and that such machinery as runners in the floor were clearly visible also worked against audience absorption in the mood.⁵⁶

There is even evidence that some members of the audience believed that the sets were educational, and this mind-set would have inclined audiences to study the sets in a somewhat detached, analytical mode. One theatergoer is reputed to have said, “There is nothing like a playhouse for fine prospects; and … without fatigue, and trouble, one can see all Europe, well lighted for a shilling.”⁵⁷ These plays were performed at the time when the delight in picturesque landscapes and some of the ideas in books such as Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) had reached large segments of the population. Sets done in the styles of Rosa, Poussin, or Gaspar would have been recognized as such by some people. Middle-class people collected reproductions of landscape paintings, and the fact that even cheap, everyday household utensils and working-class taverns were decorated with famous scenes proves that such pleasures were not open to the educated alone.⁵⁸ Periodical reviews record the fact that people enjoyed and attended for the scenery in its own right; a Morning Chronicle article for 1776 noted, “Those who delight in a representation teeming with instances of the sublime, the beautiful, and the surprising in scenery and machinery, will be highly entertained.”⁵⁹ Others could have compared Michael Angelo Rooker's famous paintings of architectural ruins with his theatrical scenes of the same places. In fact, it was common for scene designers to use familiar, published travel literature as models, and their creations were clearly recognizable. Some members of the audience would certainly have evaluated Inigo Richards's model of Netley Abbey or William Capon's re-creations of real ruins and, for The Iron Chest, of the vaulting from St. Stephens Westminster. As early as 1772, Harlequin in Ireland had carefully reproduced a set of impressive local landscapes, Killarney, Turk Mountain, and the Glena Mountains among them. Even the numerous bandit bands found in these plays had an artistic counterpoint: the popular paintings and drawings of them by John Henry Mortimer.⁶⁰

Among its major orchestrated voices, especially in gothic drama's early years, was pantomime. Beginning in the mid-1720s, the landscape painter George Lambert had designed sets for pantomimes at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden that put on stage erupting volcanoes and thick woods opening to lighted, open fields. In one of his designs for Harlequin Sorcerer (1753), “a scene drops and gives us a prospect of ruinous rugged cliffs, with two trees hanging over them.” De Loutherbourg's first pantomime, A Christmas Tale (1773), had “forbidding mountains, [a] distant view of a romantic ruined castle perched on a crag, and a broken foreground of rocks.”⁶¹ Surely gothic theatergoers' reactions to scenery and effects were conditioned by the debt gothic design owed pantomime, and that would have tended to work against absorption in a gothic universe. Managers trotted out the same sets for comedies and tragedies, but pantomimes and the gothic often included elaborate original sets. Pantomime habitually mingled the mythic, the grotesque, and the magic. It routinely included a “dark scene,” in which Harlequin lost his magic wand and the young couple became vulnerable to phantasmagorical horrors.⁶² As early as 1727, hell rose from below in one of Lambert's sets for The Rape of Proserpine, heaven descended to dance on earth, a palace collapsed, and a cornfield was set afire and burned to ashes on stage. Eruptions of volcanoes, spectacular storms, and ascendable mountains were easily within the designers' and machinists' abilities.⁶³ Through all of this, the audience could trust the happy ending, the gardens, and the lighted meadows as well as the threatening gloom.

Similarly, gothic drama used music in sophisticated ways to engage the senses while subliminally both exercising and containing anxieties. One of the most popular scenes in all of gothic drama, a famous moment in Lewis's Castle Spectre, depended entirely upon music and pantomime:

The set scene had an oratory with a perforated door of pure Gothic …, and Mrs. Jordan, who played Angela, being on the stage, a brilliant illumination suddenly took place, and the doors of the oratory opened—the light was perfectly celestial, and a majestic and lovely, but melancholy image stood before us; at this moment, in a low but sweet and thrilling harmony, the band played the strain of Jomelli's Chaconne, in his celebrated overture in three flats. … And the figure began slowly to advance; it was the spirit of Angela's mother, Mrs. Powell, in all her beauty.

A spectator wrote that “no other scene of the kind ever made” the impression that that one had with “the solemn music to which she moved slowly forward to give a silent blessing to her kneeling daughter” and with the scene's closing chorus of female voices chanting, “Jubilate.”⁶⁴ Audiences could expect ominous background music as well as such special effects as lightning and thunder cued to the music at crucial moments. The coordination of effects enthralled audiences. Some plays established musical themes for major characters. In the last scene of Thomas Holcroft's Life of Mystery (1802), Romaldi, the villain, enters accompanied by his ominous, mournful music, “pursued as it were by the storm.” The Monthly Mirror reviewer wrote, “The last scene … has a most striking effect; the trees are represented in actual motion from the storm which, with the accompanying music, is well suited to Romaldi's state of mind, whose dreadful guilt has made him a fit object of both earthly and divine vengeance.” His soliloquy is broken by intervals of music and the sounds of the storm. When the simple, good Michelli enters, the music becomes “a cheerful pastorale.”⁶⁵ Michelli's music displacing Romaldi's mirrors the reliability of the favorable balance between good and evil in the theatrical gothic world and the certainty of the pleasing resolution. In some of the plays, the music is the first and primary means of containing the fears called up and exercised. The songs in The Battle of Hexham decisively contradict the early genre signals. Adeline, Gregory, and the soldiers all have songs in the first act that defuse the anxiety raised by civil war and the women's circumstances. The soldiers, for instance, sing, “Fight away for the cause of the jolly red rose; / Never flinch while you live, shou'd you meet with your death / There's no fear that you'll run, you'll be quite out of breath” (13).

As one of the observers of The Haunted Tower remarked, composers and librettists had learned to tell “the story of the scene in music” (emphasis mine, Fiske 505). Music, like painting, had become a fashionable leisure time activity and object of study. Sociable recitals, Catch Clubs, Harmonic Societies, and musical dinner party entertainment flourished, and audiences were prepared to enjoy music of high quality and rich variety. The music in plays such as Colman the Younger's Blue-Beard and Lewis's Castle Spectre included haunting love songs, stirring marches, and intricate duets and quartets. Andrews's Mysteries of the Castle opens with a chorus accompanied by Sicilian instruments that is worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan: “Gaily tripping to and fro' / We village maids to market go” (5). The Haunted Tower included an aria with oboe obbligato, the Mozartian “Be mine, tender passion,” and a rendition of the ever-popular “Roast Beef of Old England” (Fiske, 501-5).

In The Iron Chest the robbers sing a long ensemble: “Listen, it is the owl that hoots upon the mouldering tower.” This song moves from the gloomy opening to become a rowdy drinking song as robbers enter at intervals to augment the singers. Several of Barbara's songs in the same work develop important aspects of the play or carry the weight of character development. For instance, she and her brother Samson have several highly original duets that blend his innocent stupidity with her domestic good-heartedness; one is sung to the accompaniment and interruption of the younger children crying for food (12-14). She also has a haunting ballad that begins,

Down by the ri - ver there grows a green wil - low, Sing
O! for my true love, my true—love O!

It was a time when the quality of each theatrical house's music frequently came in for critical comment. People practiced and sang the songs they heard; the songs from The Haunted Tower were sung all over Great Britain and America for half a century. Some songs are still being sung; an example is Shield's “Lord, Dismiss us with Thy Blessing” from The Mysteries of the Castle.

The acting was a major part of any late eighteenth-century play, and many of the most effective leading men had experience in pantomime. Perhaps surprising to the modern reader is the fact that the techniques of pantomime had by the last quarter of the eighteenth century blended with great tragic acting. Indeed, some of the existing conventions of both became essential to gothic drama. From the time of David Garrick and the leading tragic actresses of his time, Hannah Pritchard and Mary Ann Yates, audiences expected emotional performances. To voice modulation, facial expressiveness, and gesture, the players added strong body language. Especially in the parts of Shakespeare's greatest tragic heroes and villains, actors came to exploit opportunities to express intense emotions and, in a development that would especially benefit gothic drama, to extend the time within and between speeches to portray through pantomime techniques a succession of strong passions. Masters of pantomime, especially Christopher Rich, had perfected a style that was “so perfectly expressive of his meaning that every motion of his hand or head, or of any part of his body, was a kind of dumb eloquence that was readily understood by the audience.” Such great actors as Henry Woodward and Edmund Kean had been Harlequins.⁶⁶

As John Mullan has demonstrated, it was an age that believed that the body acted out emotions and had greater representative powers than words.⁶⁷ One contemporary observed, “You heard what they spoke, but you learned more from the agitation of mind displayed in their action and deportment.”⁶⁸ John Genest described Garrick: “The passions rose in rapid succession, and, before he uttered a word, were legible in every feature of that various face—his look, his voice, his attitude changed with every sentiment” (4:14). The power of Sarah Siddons became legendary. Like Garrick's Lear, her Lady Macbeth could hypnotize an audience. James Sheridan Knowles recalled her movements and gestures more vividly than any spoken lines:

Though pit, gallery, and boxes were crowded to suffocation, the chill of the grave seemed about you while you looked on her;—there was the hush and the damp of the charnel-house at midnight; you had a feeling as if you and the medical attendant, and lady-in-waiting, were alone with her; your flesh crept and your breathing became uneasy.

“I smelt blood! I swear I smelt blood!” he wrote (Sprague, 67).

Players also came to assume picturesque poses, thereby freezing a moment of particular significance or emotional resonance. They assumed “readable configurations visually conceived” that encapsulated a charged moment and made the theatrical experience one of “achieved situations.”⁶⁹ The masterful conclusion of Lewis's Castle Spectre manages just this effect. Reginald is asleep on his straw, as described above. He awakens and walks about, then hears Angela and the priest who are escaping through the dungeons. The father runs away from the sight of Reginald. When Angela sees Reginald with his wild hair and the chain around his body, she gazes. He thinks she is the ghost of his beloved, murdered wife. He gazes. They recognize each other, embrace, and hold that position for an instant. They hear Osmond, and Reginald hides Angela and assumes his sleeping position on the straw. Osmond enters and stares at Reginald for a moment and then says, “Wake, Reginald.” And so the act proceeds until the final tableau when all of the characters surround and gaze upon Osmond, now bleeding on the ground.

The playwrights of the eighties and nineties took this acting style for granted and built their reliance on it into their plays. Colman's outraged attack on John Philip Kemble, who played Edward Mortimer in the premiere of The Iron Chest, gives a good idea of the kind of performance expected. Colman expected “a man of whom it might be said, ‘There's something in his soul / O'er which his melancholy sits, and broods,’” He wanted “passion over-leaping it's [sic] customary bound, movements of the soul, sullen, or violent, very rarely seen in the common course of things, yet still may be seen” (viii-ix). Colman insisted that he had provided scenes that “afford an opportunity to the Performer of playing off his mimick emotions, his transitions of passion, his starts, and all the trickeries of his trade” (xvii). The part of Wilford in the same play was also written to exploit the ability of actors like Bannister to make riveting the scene in which he hesitates, shows fear, horror, and compelling curiosity, and then, in spite of solemn orders and threats, opens Edward Mortimer's iron chest. Innumerable speeches were constructed to be broken, as Garrick had Richard III's and Charles Macklin had Shylock's, and to be accompanied by the pantomime of wild swings in emotion and rapid transitions from mood to mood.

In this age of great actors and actresses, playwrights usually wrote parts with specific performers in mind, and audiences could “read” the story by the assignment of parts as surely as by the ages, social classes, and opening speeches of the characters. Rather ironically, the very power and distinctiveness of leading performers' styles acted to contain the gothic in the plays. Like some of the sets and music, they became art in their own right and drew the attention of connoisseurs. Anecdotes about people who praise one actor for three acts of a play and then explain their preference for another actor's interpretation of the final two acts, making specific, detailed comparisons, suggest the degree of expertise extant. Seeing Mrs. Powell, Mr. Kemble, Miss De Camp, or Mr. Suett competed with seeing “Mortimer,” “the spectre,” “Judith,” or “Samson,” and the characters came in and out of focus. Therefore, the drama marshaled yet another fashionable social and aesthetic experience that audiences had been conditioned to read and experience in specific ways.

English preferences in painting influenced acting as well as set design. De Loutherbourg conceived his sets as pictures, and many dramatists and technicians of the time described their achieved effects that way. Noverre discussed his idea of the stage as a “picture in which the actors were the moving figures.”⁷⁰ Boaden wrote that “the sublimest of painting” is Fuseli's Hamlet and The Ghost, which he believed he had duplicated successfully in the staging of Fontainville Forest. He explained Fuseli's success as “recollecting some of the known principles of the sublime. By the artifices of the pallet; by keeping down all too positive indications of substance; by the choice of a cold slaty prevalent colour, touched slightly with the pale silvery tone of moonlight … and action of the most venerable dignity and command.” For the performance, Boaden even demanded that the tall, thin John Follet replace the short, stocky James Thompson as the ghost, that the armor be made close-fitting, and that an additional gauze screen be erected.⁷¹

The proscenium arch provided the frame, and the contemporary acting style and direction with its frequent tableaux contributed to the impression that the gothic world was safely contained. The audience would have been at least subliminally aware of director, designer, playwright, and performers cooperatively creating a work of art that at individual moments became a “still” and deliberately resembled popular painting subjects and styles; at times they would have been insistently brought to admire its art. As Michael Wilson has pointed out in “Columbine's Picturesque Passage,” “Dramatic action could be conceived as a sequence of sustained, emotionally-charged pictorial situations whose voyeuristic qualities were sublimated in the mutual testing by character and audience of aesthetic sensibilities, converting the sensual to the sensuous for the gaze of the connoisseur” (205).

At the same time that spectacle overwhelmed the intellect and assured times of unified, powerful effect, the tableaux acted to summarize each segment of the play and to superimpose themselves on the tableaux experienced before. These tableaux represented relationships among characters and among their symbolic meanings and reinforced deep structures in the texts that were being presented as the nature of the universe. Like the Restoration street pageants, they drew upon and reinforced symbolic “landscapes,” stories, and cultural myths that people were currently using to organize and interpret experience—in short, to construct reality. From Kenneth Burke's conception of the “fog of symbols” that “‘locates’ the various aspects of experience,” they sorted out social and ethical values.⁷² Boaden's Aurelio and Miranda, for example, concludes with the brothers and sisters (Lorenzo and Agnes; Miranda and Christoval), the loyal friends (Raymond and Lorenzo), the reunited lovers (Raymond and Agnes), and the new lovers (Aurelio and Miranda) foregrounded. Previously each has been the center of a set piece, as Agnes was beside her infant in the sepulcher and as Miranda was in disguise as Eugenio with a basket of flowers in the door to Aurelio's cell. The sets carefully enhance each mood; in a rather Radcliffean construction, Aurelio searches for “firmness and tranquillity” in the garden with a “rustic hermitage” on one side and the abbey in the distance, and his retreat to his cell symbolizes his painful awareness that his actions have imprisoned and isolated him.

This play presents a panoply of human suffering. Antonia and Aurelio are orphans; Agnes has been forced into a convent, and Raymond and Lorenzo fear that Agnes is dead. This suffering caused by dislocation and loss spoke directly to the experiences and anxieties of many in the audience. As the Marquis de Sade said, ordinary people felt that they had experienced more misfortune in a few years than novelists could portray in dozens of books. The ideas that they held about the nature of the world and the probable experiences of human existence were under stress. It has been argued that the universe that the gothic novel relentlessly creates and re-creates is amoral at best and evil at worst.⁷³ In contrast to the novel, the gothic drama represents a world that can be suspected of allowing hideous suffering and unrequited virtuous and villainous acts but finally reassures audiences that a benign order infuses every aspect of the universe and, incidentally, provides the poetic justice that consumers of popular literature demand.

Among the most obvious strategies of containment aimed at presenting a safely ordered world are the happy endings (and almost all gothic plays have them) and the use of comedy. Dramatists almost entirely avoid complications resulting from accidents and coincidences, those strategies so important in tragedy and so much a part of our experiencing the world as beyond our control. In a number of them, the protagonist repents as Schedoni, Bulcazin, Lamotte, and Aurelio do. In other plays, armies arrive led by the romantic hero or, more frequently, an older male relative of a female character. In Fontainville Forest, Nemours, an ideally virtuous man who clearly knows the economic and political affairs of the world, appears and resolves everything, including the redemption of Lamotte. Plays characteristically end with scenes of great activity, often fights or entrances of armies, but conclude with a tableau that fixes relationships in an orderly world. Most important, in almost every case, the heroine marries a brave young hero, the poor are given good employment, and long-suffering, good servants are rewarded; Lewis's formula holds, and every part of the audience is gratified.

Plot and characterization are as important to comedy as acting styles are to tragedy and pantomime. One of the most reliable ways that readers and spectators can anticipate the experience that literature will give them is to determine the tone or the mode of the work. That gothic playwrights include numerous comic elements, many not there simply as comic relief or as parody of any aspect of the form, works to contain those elements of the plot that express contemporary anxieties and to reassure the audience about the nature of the world (at least the “world” of that play). Much of the comedy comes from character types. Following the publication of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, it was a commonplace to include characters modeled on Shakespeare's low characters, a fact that Lewis's prologue also acknowledges. Even in the gothic plays that are not comedies or musical romances, such characters abound. Their functions, however, are different from Shakespeare's. These characters express fear at the same time their higher-ranked or more intelligent companions obviously feel it. Thus, they articulate that which contributes to the physiological experience, the feeling James Twitchell has identified in Dreadful Pleasures as “horripilation,” the zoological term for the response that causes gooseflesh or even nape hair “standing on end,” and is associated with the moment when the person is poised “between fight and flight” (10-11).

Gregory in The Battle of Hexham is the epitome of such characters; a typical reaction occurs when he sees the tents massed before a battle and tells his mistress, “I cou'd turn about again directly, and walk back brisker by half than I came” (Hexham, 8). Similarly, Hilario freely expresses fear as he and Carlos approach the castle in Andrew's play. Such characters usually have realistic fears but exhibit them in such inappropriate settings or in such rustic or idiomatic language that we laugh. These low characters may also voice elemental feelings in undignified terms; for instance, Christoval certainly speaks for Raymond and Lorenzo when he exclaims, “My joy's worth a million times the damage.” In his hurry to give good news, he confesses he may have done such things as rolled an old woman into a kennel (Aurelio and Miranda, 46).

Other comic characters manifest their fears in terms of basic human needs or comment on the villain's lack of charity, and thereby represent and express anxieties held by at least some of the audience. The servant Valoury in The Mysteries of the Castle, for instance, often worries about food. Such moments work to contain horror, first by locating it in statements of basic physical desires and consequences rather than in expressions of spiritual or social threat and, second, by providing one of the most common releases for fear. After all, what do children in the dark or adults at a horror movie laugh at more often than at the member of the group whose fear is most obvious and extreme? By identifying someone more afraid, the others once again feel themselves within tolerable limits and, therefore, in control.

Comic characters add dimensions to the anti-aristocratic bias common to these plays. Martin in The Castle of Otranto rebukes a gatekeeper for asking their business: “We've no business, fellow, we're gentlemen.” Colman's Fool in Hexham explains that “your true court-bred fool always cuts the cloth of his conscience to the fashion of the times,” and the robbers agree on a toast that “suits your soldier, your tithe-parson, your lawyer, your politician, just as well as your robber,” and it is “Plunder!” The Rawbold family in The Iron Chest provides humor of this type, but they are decidedly unsettling. Samson explains, “The cottage was blown down—the barn fired—father undone—Well, landlords are flinty hearted—no help!” He and his father are “up early, and down late, in the exercise of our industry,” which is to “purloin every single thing” that the family has.

Many comic characters are neither servants nor poor. Acted by the greatest performers of their time, they satirize the acquisitive, authoritarian ideology of the villain. For example, Quick played Fractioso, the heroine's father, in The Mysteries of the Castle. His small size and squeaky voice must have made his self-important posturing as he orders his daughters about hilarious. Ibrahim, who is too dense to see that the husband he has chosen for his daughter is a serial killer, optimistically begs a place in Bluebeard's court and spouts what he thinks is the wisdom of the world: “Throw Riches and Power into the scale, and … Merit soon kicks the beam” (3). Because the comic elements are so carefully integrated, they work subliminally to signal to the audience that there is no lasting threat.

The songs and activities of these characters and others often act as counterpoint to the protagonist's fretted world. They draw a contrast common to eighteenth-century poetry between the lives and unquiet minds of the ambitious and the untroubled sleep of those “far from the madding crowd.” Their brief scenes open other possibilities for experience in this world and prevent the claustrophobic gloom of many gothic novels. These dramatists were not afraid to use some farce and slapstick as comic effects. Both Andrews and Lewis stage excellent scenes in which characters fall or jump in and out of windows. Lewis's Percy, the romantic hero played by John Philip Kemble, not only jumped from a window but, in this uncharacteristically farcical and undignified part, had to flop back and forth on a sofa in order to delude his guards. That this scene is played out in a situation highly suggestive of possible murderous violence when two of Osmond's slaves gamble for their captive's money suggests the sophistication of these playwrights' use of juxtaposition.

The final structural means of containing the idea of evil in the world that I want to discuss is, perhaps, the most likely orchestrated language to be ignored today. It is the author's self-conscious, deliberate linking of gothic drama with children's nursery tales. Colman says that he took the plot for Blue-Beard from “the celebrated Mrs. goose” (in fact, from Charles Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec des moralités, 1697), and most of the early gothic playwrights at one time or another deliberately brought the visceral recollection of nursery tales to the audience. Lamotte asks if “A school-boy's terror” should make him shrink from opportunity; when Sophia Lee's Alonzo is chained in an underground vault, he exclaims, “By heav'n I feel an infant once again, / When thus insulted with an infant's terrors!” (Almeyda, 42); Gondibert, in Cowley's Albina, observes, “How dark the night! … And dismal fancy, in yon shadowy ailes, / Might conjure up an hundred phantoms. / How strong th'impression of our dawning years! / The tales … that did awe / My infancy, all rush upon my mind, And, spite of haughty reason, make it shrink” (40). Andrews, too, reminds his audience of the vestiges “of Enthusiasm or Superstition … which Reason smiles at, but cannot prevail over” (preface, The Enchanted Castle, iv-v). So steady a character as Paullo denies superstition but admits to “a certain odd sympathy of the nerves, which the vulgar would call trembling.” He says, “The place itself makes a man rummage among the relics of the nursery … and such desolation as Paluzzi, make a child of me” (The Italian Monk, 7). This canny recognition of the limits of reason served the dramatists well.

In Spectator no. 419, Joseph Addison had recognized the value of playing upon recollections of terror; he recommended that writers know “Legends and Fables, antiquated Romances, and the Traditions of Nurses and old Women, that he may fall in with our natural Prejudices, and humour those Notions which we have imbibed in our Infancy.”⁷⁴ Addison goes on to say that these stories draw their power from “those secret Terrours and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject.” He finds correlative primeval fears aroused by some of Shakespeare's writing (“something so wild and yet so solemn”) and in such personifications as Milton's Sin and Death and Ovid's Hunger and Envy. This recognition of the relationship between nursery tales and the attempts to represent the lurking evil and passion behind the human face increasingly found expression in the late century gothic.

The kind of nursery experience eighteenth-century people meant has probably been widely misunderstood. Rather than full-fledged lengthy ghost stories, perhaps of the kind the modern scholar associates with Defoe's Mrs. Veal, they meant “spooky stories,” which were short and dependent upon a sudden shock. Some of them were for very young children and involved the teller's fingers “creeping” around the toddler's body until suddenly the teller cried, “Gotcha” and pinched or tickled the child. Others used the icons of gothic horror and might involve a person going through a dark wood to a dark house with a dark room with a dark cupboard holding a closed box; then the teller says, “In that box was a—” and yells, for example, “Skull!” Bluebeard is a classic example of the forbidden room holding a horrible secret. As Vita Sackville-West noted, “Baby had been taught to fear everything he possibly could, tangible and intangible.” Among the rhymes she collected is one about a lady who went to church where

She saw a dead man on the ground,
And from his nose unto his chin
The worms crawled out, the worms crawled in.
Then she unto the parson said
Shall I be so when I am dead?
Oh yes! oh yes! the parson said,
You will be so when you are dead.(75)

Many nursery tales encode the sexual fears that inform the gothic; in one, a young girl hears or dreams that if she goes to a nearby large, ornate house, she could get “a treasure” simply by asking for it. She goes to the house and knocks on the door; the door swings open, she enters, and she sees a man seated at a large desk. She asks if he has a treasure for her. The man looks up at her; he has dark, intense eyes, and he says, “yes!” The final confrontation in Perrault's “Little Red Riding Hood” is similarly structured. The little girl has been invited to “come up on the bed with me” by the wolf-grandma. The wolf tells her to undress. As Red Riding Hood removes each garment, she asks what to do with it and is told to throw it in the fire because she won't need it again. Once there, she remarks, “What big eyes you have, Grandma.” “The better to see you with,” the disguised wolf answers. “What big ears you have, Grandma …” “The better to hear …” And so on, until—delivered in the same innocent tone—what has been anticipated with dreadful expectation: “What big teeth you have, Grandma.” Then the answer and the leap, “The better to eat you with!”⁷⁶ The thrill of these stories is in the waiting for the inevitable shock; that it was coming, but that the exact moment and content could not be predicted, kept the listeners tense and fearful.

In many ways, Colman's Blue-Beard is the archetypal gothic drama. Still bearing some of the zaniness of Walpole's novel, a text in which, as Inverso says, Conrad is born to be squashed, Blue-Beard carried its viewers on a Disney-style ride through suspenseful dread, romance, magic, and comic opera. What is distinctive about the gothic is that its orchestrated languages come from dramaturgy as well as text. Tragic acting styles, pantomime forests, theatrical songstyles, Shakespearean low characters, and landscape painting are reaccentuated and absorbed as surely as are the elements of pathetic tragedy and nursery tales. Colman mentions Mother Goose, Johnston—whom he calls “a classical Machinist”—pantomime, the composer Michael Kelly, and the scene painter Greenwood; and he calls his play “dramatick romance,” “Magick,” “an Enchantment,” and “my Syllabub.”

The play begins with the scene of a “romantick, mountainous country” beyond a village, in which Selim and Fatima are singing a lovers' duet. It ends with a sunrise and a grand cavalcade across the mountains; stage directions show that the sound of the martial music was to grow stronger as Abomelique and his “magnificent train” draw nearer. Contemporary descriptions show that great pains were taken to have the group appear larger as they approach and that the scene was constructed so that they would occasionally be “lost to the sight” and would even cross footbridges. This procession took half an hour. In early productions, clever figures by Johnston were used; later, extras of varying heights were recruited, and the shortest crossed the stage in the distance to be gradually replaced by the taller; later yet, live animals were added to the procession and to the battle scenes. Careful coordination of text, scenes, and music contribute to each mood and turn in the plot.

The discovery of the blue room delivers the most extravagant fears of the forbidden room:

The Blue Chamber appears streaked with vivid streams of Blood. The figures in the Picture, over the door, change their position, and Abomelique is represented in the action of beheading the Beauty he was, before, supplicating. The Pictures, and Devices, of Love, change to subjects of Horror and Death. The interior apartment … exhibits various Tombs, in a sepulchral building;—in the midst of which ghastly and supernatural forms are seen;—some in motion, some fix'd—In the centre, is a large Skeleton seated on a tomb, (with a Dart in his hand).

(17)

That Abomelique and Shacabac (who dreads but has seen the room before) visit the room before the two young women increases the suspense and makes the horror dreadfully predictable.⁷⁷ As in nursery tales, sex and death are strongly identified. The room has pictures showing lovers in conventional poses shift to execution scenes, and the juxtaposition of the consummation of marriage and murder is constantly reinforced. Later, as Abomelique repeatedly moves toward and then postpones entering Fatima's room, the audience is not sure if he intends to consummate the marriage (and thereby rape her) or to kill her. One of the songs includes the line, “When he falls on her Neck, 'tis to cut off her head” (22).

Colman and his contemporaries praised the players' performances. The comic Dicky Suett as Ibrahim “punned, shivered, and ran away,” and Bannister as Shacabac vacillated between heroic indignation at his master's murders and comic fear.⁷⁸ Palmer and Mrs. Crouch, veterans of tragedy and melodrama, played Abomelique and Fatima, and playgoers like the Countess of Bessborough cried as DeCamp as Irene stood on the castle tower and sang of her hope for rescue.⁷⁹ Crammed in are dances and songs, spectacular processions of actors and extras in exotic costumes. The conclusion featured the skeleton killing Abomelique, crashing walls, and the blue room swallowed “beneath the earth” with a “volume of Flame” arising as the “earth closes.” By 1811, John Philip Kemble punched up the excitement with camels, horses, and elephants from Astley's Amphitheatre, and Hazlitt described the conclusion as filled with dismounted warriors fighting across the horses' bodies, “drums, trumpets, smoke, and confusion.”⁸⁰

The content and the experience of nursery tales were familiar and “safe”; as well as the dread, the stories evoked where the tales were told—in a safe place, in the nurse's lap, in front of a warm fire, in a nurturing, mothering place. Gothic fiction, however, developed strategies for horrifying readers out of violations of nursery tale patterns. In Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, the patriarchs are hideously transformed into monsters, and one “with horrid unnatural force” tears food from his starving grandchildren's hands, gobbles it, and leers at them. A child asks him, “Are you the wolf?” In contrast, gothic drama followed nursery tales more closely but provided happy endings, thereby returning the auditor to an ordered and safe world. Unlike the readers of gothic novels, playgoers could trust dramatic gothic strategies to deliver thrills and yet contain and dissolve the fear.

Spectacular staging, legendary acting, and high-quality music combined with the promise of comic characters, a mesmerizing yet defeated villain, and ideal lovers united in the resolution: the superficial appeal is obvious. Critical reception of these early plays was decidedly mixed. Special effects, individual performances, and technical aspects received praise that often implicitly damned what we think of as “the play.” A representative review said that the best that could be said of Blue-Beard, “the very worst of Colman's very worst productions … a patchwork of buffoonery and bombast,” was that “the author, who had little in view beyond manufacturing a convenient vehicle for the display of gorgeous scenery and shewy processions, has effected his intention with a cleverness, which many who think meanly of the performance, would find some difficulty in equalling.”⁸¹

Were gothic plays mere show, they would have become like circuses—dependent on new spectators and static in form and content. Bakhtin has observed that the more mature and complex a form becomes, the better it remembers its past. “Its past” is also the national skilled readers' langue, and playwrights could use its systems and the nature of other forms to do new things and create genuinely original texts. They were able to reaccentuate the orchestrated languages and each new group of gothic plays, and these plays evolved into several popular literary forms that have survived into our time. The gothic plays can be used to show that, in these times of stress, from the beginning consumers of mass culture have not been passive objects of manipulation but have recognized a transformational work that performs an urgent social function.⁸² It is this aspect of the drama that assured its almost addictive appeal and, with its deeper personal and political elements, is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Typical news items read, “Friday a Meeting convened by the Lord Lieutenant of … Kent [recommended] an immediate invitation to all persons capable of bearing arms, to prepare themselves as Defenders of the country. Every person who has servants is desired to send a list of those who are able …” (Times, 28 March 1798); “Specimens of the accoutrements and cloathing for the use of persons who shall agree to be called into service, were brought for the inspection of the Council [of cabinet ministers], and the model of a pike, ten feet in length, with an iron spike at the end, for the use of the peasantry, was also exhibited” (Times, 4 April 1798); and, “Pikes for arming the Peasantry in the event of invasion were last week deposited in the barracks at Weymouth, Dorchester, Bridport, Wareham and other places along the Southern coast” (Nottingham Journal, 17 March 1798, quoted in Morsley, News from the English Countryside, 145).

2. Some dramatists of the period were highly active and even arrested for political acts; some of these, such as Thomas Holcroft, also wrote gothic drama.

3. Production information is taken primarily from The London Stage; dates indicate initial production, not publication.

4. On the numbers of playhouses outside of London, see David Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England, 222-23 et passim, especially the map of the distribution of theaters in 1790, 4-5.

5. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 1:348-49. Joseph Donohue finds continuities with Fletcher's plays (Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age).

6. Zucker, Fascination of Decay, 195-97, 206-7, 224-25.

7. The Fragment of Sir Bertrand was originally published in Aikin and Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose (London, 1773).

8. Production of Blue-Beard was delayed; see Colman's preface to the play (iii) and the title page as reproduced in The Plays of George Colman the Younger.

9. “Romance” was the Muse; prologue to the second edition of The Castle Spectre.

10. The most recent critical book devoted entirely to gothic drama is Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley. Published in 1947, it is almost uselessly out of date. There are only a few recent articles and introductions to gothic plays. Paul Ranger's “Terror and Pity reign in every Breast” is largely a book of descriptive examples with valuable illustrations of performance practices drawn from the collection of reviews in the London Theatre Museum. Joseph Donohue discusses some gothic plays in Dramatic Character, but his enterprise is different from mine. Moreover, he tends to use setting too heavily to classify these plays and is concerned with features (suppressed information, the “soul sick” hero, opportunity) that I do not believe define the gothic: see, for instance, 27, 67, 69, and 88. Donohue calls the plays and the tradition he analyzes “the affective drama of situation.” MaryBeth Inverso's Gothic Impulse in Contemporary Drama includes useful discussions of early gothic drama and correctly contrasts it to fiction; her interests are primarily in the nineteenth-century drama and in adaptations from novels.

    Because so little exists on the drama, I have had to draw heavily upon and adapt work done on gothic fiction. Although he does not work with drama, David Punter is useful; he notes “a very disparate collection of works” now classified as gothic and their use of “elements drawn from diverse literary and subliterary traditions” (Literature of Terror, 8, 403). See also Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination, 21 and 143-44; William Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire, 4-5, 7-11, 13-15, 43-44, and 72; James Keech, “Survival of the Gothic Response,” 132-36; and Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic, 12. Evans's definition of the gothic (7-12) is inadequate; Michael R. Booth attempts to distinguish the gothic drama from melodrama (English Melodrama).

11. On the social breakdown around 1800, see Roger Simon, Gramsci's Political Thought, 50-52; J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832, 350 and 366; and also Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 24-25.

12. Wilkes refused to stand trial for seditious libel and left England in 1763. He returned in 1768 and was elected to Parliament from Middlesex, but was convicted on the seditious libel charge, sentenced to twenty-two months' imprisonment, and expelled from Commons. Three years of “Wilkes and Liberty” riots ensued.

13. Valenze, “Prophecy and Popular Literature,” 76-77.

14. Sade, “Reflections on the Novel,” 109.

15. Burney is quoted in Doody, Frances Burney, 204.

16. This commonplace is usually traced to Ronald Paulson, but he wisely and correctly notes that the gothic had existed from the 1760s, and in “talking about a particular development in the 1790s, a specific plot … was either at hand for writers to use in the light of the French Revolution, or was in some sense projected by the Revolution and borrowed by writers who may or may not have wished to express anything specifically about the troubles in France” (Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820, 221; see also 37 and 219 for similar statements).

17. John Brooke quotes the king complaining on 26 September 1803 of the slow progress of construction (King George III, 284). By 1811, it was half finished and had cost £500,000. The palace was demolished in 1827-28 (Crook and Port, History of the King's Works, 6:356-59). Wraxall is quoted here (357).

18. Information on Wyatt is from DLB; Middleton and Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth-Century Architecture, especially 168-71 and 320; and Robinson, The Wyatts, 57-89.

19. On the “long history” of the Gothic Revival, see Middleton and Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth-Century Architecture, 316-20. Wyatt built William Beckford's Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire (1796-1807).

20. Negative comments about Kew Palace are quoted in Brooke, King George III, 284.

21. Ayling, George the Third, 283, 305; Hibbert, King Mob, 91; Carretta, George III and the Satirists, 137, respectively; and see Carretta's chapter “The Royal Brute of Britain.”

22. Vincent Carretta describes the contrasting sentiment of the 1760s when George III's subjects believed that “the major threat to the balanced constitution was the aristocracy, not the king, and that the monarch was the natural ally of the people in the struggle to avoid … ‘tyranny in the nobles’” (George III and the Satirists, 47-48).

23. Hibbert, King Mob, 91.

24. Macalpine and Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business, xv, 23-24; they assert that he wrote a last note to his prime minister on 3 November and his next on 23 February.

25. Frances Burney describes these symptoms sympathetically. On at least two occasions she is terrified at meeting him and on one runs away with the sound of his “poor hoarse and altered voice” behind her (Diary, 4:120, 122, 191, 242-45).

26. There is evidence that some of these symptoms, including agitated impatience, lingered after his attack (Long, George III, 312-13).

27. White, Age of George III, 6; Brooke, King George III, 285-86, 298-99; Carretta, George III and the Satirists, 92-93. See the wealth of prints reproduced in the last-named.

28. White, Age of George III, 6-7; Brooke, King George III, 342-43.

29. Macalpine and Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business, 80.

30. Lord Auckland is quoted in Ayling (George the Third, 354).

31. Ayling, George the Third, 347, 350-51. Brooke tells of a band hidden in a bathing machine that played “God Save the King” when the king went in the water (King George III, 343).

32. White, Age of George III, 6.

33. Perceptions of the similarities between the English constitution and French ideals remain. In 1989, Margaret Thatcher commented that by 1688 England had peacefully accomplished the constitutional reforms that the French Revolution celebrations credited to France.

34. Macalpine and Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business, 41.

35. Derry, Regency Crisis, 154.

36. This interesting play was performed at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Royal Theatre. The request to license was signed by Stephen Kemble; I have found it in manuscript only, as licensed by Larpent 13 November 1793. A copy is in the Larpent collection. Joseph Donohue notes the “near-insane rage,” psychological inconsistency, and “perversion” of the norms of behavior in Fletcherian dramatic characters, but Fletcher's purposes and resolutions are different from the gothic (Dramatic Character, 21-24).

37. In a very different inquiry, Jon Stratton argues that feudal and capitalist “social structures and economic forms” combined in France at this time to make “desire for intercourse” rather than intercourse and the body important (Virgin Text, 72 ff.). Although capitalism is sometimes identified with the bourgeoisie, I do not think it can be in the eighteenth century; rather, the English bourgeois ideology seems to me to be descended from the London City structures of feeling associated with the “cits” in literary and political discourses.

38. See, for example, Douglas North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World. Other students of the gothic, including Judith Wilt and MaryBeth Inverso, have remarked upon the gothic hero's anachronistic exercise of power; see Inverso, Gothic Impulse, 59-61.

39. Pocock, review of John Brewer's Sinews of Power, 270-72.

40. Carretta, George III, 47.

41. Paulson, Representation of Revolution, 221.

42. See Ross Chambers's illuminating discussion of the contrasts between ancient and modern tyrannies in Room for Maneuver, 184-86.

43. Foucault, Order of Things, chap. 6. See also Jameson, who associates feudalism rather than capitalism with “relations of personal domination” (Political Unconscious, 89-90).

44. Adorno and Horkheimer's classic characterization appears in “The Culture Industry,” 120-67.

45. Jameson, “Metacommentary,” 17.

46. Meisel, Realizations, 33; Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties, 5.

47. See Jameson on repetition in “Reification and Utopia,” 137.

48. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 135.

49. See also Michael S. Wilson's fine article, “Columbine's Picturesque Passage.” I am grateful to him for sharing the manuscript with me. See also Hagstrum, “Pictures to the Heart,” 436-37.

50. Noverre is quoted in Ranger, “Terror and Pity reign in every Breast,” 26. See his useful chapter, appropriately titled “A World Untamed,” 19-41.

51. Rosenblum, “British Art and the Continent,” 12-15.

52. On the picturesque nature of the gothic stage, see Meisel, Realizations, 12, 38-39, 41-45, and 69-72; Rosenfeld, Short History of Scene Design, 87-90; and Russell Thomas, “Contemporary Taste.” Paulson points out that the beautiful “is repose” (Representations of Revolution, 69).

53. Walpole is quoted in Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” 313.

54. Boaden is quoted in Russell Thomas, “Contemporary Taste,” 71-72.

55. Quoted in Ranger, “Terror and Pity reign in every Breast,” 46.

56. Visser, “Scenery and Technical Design”; Rosenfeld, Short History of Scene Design, 85-93; London Stage, 5:1:lvi-lxvi.

57. The 1787 anecdote is quoted in Sutcliffe, Plays by Colman and Morton, 39.

58. On how common these reproductions were, see Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay, 6; Neil McKendrick argues that purchasing power for such objects reached as low “as the skilled factory worker and the domestic servant class” (“Home Demand and Economic Growth,” 172-73, 198 et passim). On the popularity of ruin hunting and viewing, see Ian Ousby, Englishman's England, 92-129.

59. The Morning Chronicle comment on theatrical scenery is quoted in Russell Thomas, “Contemporary Taste,” 77.

60. Russell Thomas, “Contemporary Taste,” 73-74; Rosenfeld, “Landscape in English Scenery,” 174, and Short History of Scene Design, 97; Fiske, English Theatre Music, 454, 554.

61. Rosenfeld, “Landscape in English Scenery,” 174.

62. Beaumont, History of Harlequin, 94.

63. Visser, “Scenery and Technical Design”; Rosenfeld, Short History of Scene Design, 69-70, 82; Niklaus, Harlequin, 142.

64. This contemporary spectator's reaction to The Castle Spectre is cited in Fiske, English Theatre Music, 572.

65. See Ranger, “Terror and Pity reign in every Breast,” 20-22. Quotations are from his discussion and the play.

66. Beaumont, History of Harlequin, 109. Donohue notes Kemble's “famous” use of pauses in Dramatic Character, 249-50; on contemporary acting styles, see 217-18 and 244-45.

67. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, especially chap. 5.

68. Davies, Life of David Garrick, 2:184.

69. Meisel, Realizations, 12, 38-39, 41.

70. Russell Thomas, “Contemporary Taste,” 70.

71. Boaden's quotation appears in his Life of John Philip Kemble, 314. Boaden's demands are described in Reno, “Boaden's Fontainville Forest,” 99.

72. Bruce A. McConachie points out that both Antonio Gramsci and Kenneth Burke argue that human beings “by nature respond to symbols” and demonstrate that language and ritual help establish a “hegemonic we”: see “Concept of Cultural Hegemony,” 37-58. Burke writes that rhetoric is “rooted in … the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Rhetoric of Motives, 43-46). See also Burke's Attitudes toward History, 179-215; the quotation is from 179.

73. Inverso, Gothic Impulse, 1-3, 42.

74. Addison, for 1 July 1712; see also his Spectator no. 12 for 14 March 1711, which explains the long-lasting effect of such tales. David Punter says that horror “confronts” us with “the landscapes of childhood” (“Narrative and Psychology,” 21). James B. Twitchell points out that four of the most popular modern horror writers were “all very successful camp counselors” (Dreadful Pleasures, 74), and Joseph Grixti confesses that “those of us who direct our storytelling into darker channels do so because we are … mindful … regarding our childhood confusions of identity, our conflicts with unpleasant realities and our traumatic encounters with imaginative terrors” (Terrors of Uncertainty, 181). Robert Le Tellier also discusses the “primitive impulses and sources” common to the gothic and to fairy tales (Intensifying Vision of Evil, 236-40).

75. Sackville-West, Nursery Rhymes, 15-16.

76. Perrault, Tales of Passed Times by Mother Goose; see also Opie, Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, 35-37; Alexander, British Folklore, 134-39; and Perrault, Complete Fairy Tales, 75-76.

77. In later productions, the blue room was not revealed until the women enter in Act 2, but Colman notes that he prefers his original composition and the opportunity to milk audience dread as well as surprise and horror.

78. Barry Sutcliffe quotes these descriptions from Adolphus in Plays by Colman and Morton, 40-41.

79. Cited in Ranger, “Terror and Pity reign in every Breast,” 78. Ranger says “Fatima,” but this position is Irene's (47-48).

80. Ranger, “Terror and Pity reign in every Breast,” 79.

81. The review of Blue-Beard is quoted in Sutcliffe, Plays by Colman and Morton, 40.

82. Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” 144, 147.

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Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used for manuscript locations:

BL British Library

CLRO City of London Records Office

CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic

GH Guildhall

PRO Public Record Office

SRO Scottish Record Office

The following abbreviations are used for frequently consulted manuscripts;

HMC Historical Manuscript Collection

LC Lord Chamberlains' records

SP State Papers