SOURCE: Cox, Jeffrey N. Introduction to Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825, edited by Jeffrey N. Cox, pp. 1-77. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Cox provides an overview of the history of Gothic drama and an examination of its main features and themes.]

On 14 December 1797, Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis's The Castle Spectre was played for the first time at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Rarely did Drury Lane have such a success. Opening half-way through the season, The Castle Spectre was performed forty-seven more times before the theater closed for the summer in June, an extraordinary run at a repertory theater of the day. It was offered another nineteen times during the next season at Drury Lane; and, in eloquent testimony to the play's popularity, the rival Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, also presented the play on 30 April 1799 during a period when it was still being offered on almost a weekly basis at Drury Lane.

The Castle Spectre long continued as part of the repertoire, receiving regular performances until the 1820s and revivals in 1838 (Drury Lane), 1840 (Sadler's Wells), and 1880 (Gaiety). It opened in New York on the first of June 1798 and was still being performed there thirty-six years later, in 1834. Lewis's biographer and best critic, Louis F. Peck, records the comments on the Drury Lane playbills that testify to the audience's infatuation with the play: “The Fatigue attending the representation of some of the Characters renders it impossible to repeat the performance every night in the week” (18 December 1797); “Notwithstanding the great demand for places for the Castle-Spectre; the system of giving as much Novelty as possible at this Theatre necessarily prevents its repetition till Monday next, when it will be performed for the 22nd. time” (15 January 1798). John Waldie, D. Lit. and indefatigable theater enthusiast, might stand for many other avid theater-goers in his continued delight in the play, which lead him to see it at least four times at different theaters over a ten-year period.¹

The Biographia Dramatica tells us that “Except, perhaps, Pizarro and Blue Beard, this piece was, we believe, more productive of profit to the theatre than any other for twenty years preceding it.” Of course, the Biographia Dramatica goes on to relate an anecdote about a disagreement between Lewis and Sheridan: “about the end of the season, Sheridan and Lewis had some dispute in the green-room; when the latter offered, in confirmation of his arguments, to bet Sheridan all the money which the Castle Spectre had brought, that he was right—no, said Sheridan, I cannot afford to bet so much; but I'll tell you what I'll do—I'll bet you all it is worth!”²

Immense popularity and little critical respect—this might be the epitaph for the Gothic drama that filled the London stages in the decades around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. We almost completely ignore these plays, that found such favor with audiences of the day, not yet finding in them the interest we have discovered in the Gothic romances which also sit at the margins of the “great tradition.” It is ironic, given the obscurity of the Gothic drama, that the Gothic romance provides a key example of the new processes of canon reformation within the academy. A core of masterworks has been established, led by Radcliffe's Italian, Lewis's The Monk, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and backed up by many obscure popular novels that demonstrate the breadth of the Gothic's appeal. To demonstrate the importance of the Gothic to works within the traditional canon, scholars have located the Gothic impulse in as varied practitioners as Percy Shelley, Lawrence, Austen, and the Brontës. Criticism also reminds us of the Gothic presence still lurking within the horror movies and romances of contemporary culture. The Gothic novel is thus established as an important area of academic study, one valuable in its own right and having significance for the examination of the novelistic tradition as a whole and the exploration of our own culture.

But the Gothic drama has received no comprehensive attention since Bertrand Evans's Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (1947). This neglect has persisted despite the fact that Lewis was at least as well known for his Castle Spectre as for The Monk, that Maturin was made famous by his tragedy Bertram, or that the popular image of Frankenstein probably owes more to a number of melodramas (and the films that grew out of them) than to the novel they purported to stage. We note the importance of the Gothic to the romantic poets but not the fact that Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Byron were more engaged in the Gothic drama than the novel. The Gothic drama has for the most part simply dropped out of our vision of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Gothic drama's disappearance down a vampire trap of dramatic history is perhaps not so very surprising given the traditional scholarly treatment of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century drama. The history of the drama—particularly as it is embodied in anthologies and survey courses—leaps over the nineteenth century, or at least that part of it that precedes the advent of Ibsen, Strindberg, Checkov, and Shaw. However refined specific scholarly analyses of early nineteenth-century plays are, we teach a vastly simplified version of the history of the drama of which they are a part and, by doing so, perpetuate a devaluation of the past.

As Jerome McGann identifies a “romantic ideology” permeating the criticism of early nineteenth-century poetry which he believes has made it impossible for us to view this poetry objectively,³ we might postulate a “dramatic ideology” found in the treatment of this period's drama which makes it nearly impossible for us to perceive it at all. We might define this “dramatic ideology” through two key features. First, there is what we might call the “peak phenomenon”: a small number of great figures are seen as speaking to one another across the ages, from the rare mountaintops of dramatic excellence—essentially Classical Athens, Renaissance and Baroque England, Spain, and France, and modern Europe from Ibsen to Brecht, Beckett, and Pinter. The rest of dramatic history is largely condemned to silence. The second underlying tenet might be termed the “culture gap”: canonized plays are presented as having more in common with their great precursors and descendents than with the dramatic and theatrical cultures within which they were created. An account of dramatic history based on such precepts offers neither a synchronic grasp of the institution of drama during a particular period nor a diachronic sense of the drama's development. Such a “dramatic ideology” creates a deeply ahistorical conception of dramatic art, a “great man” account of the drama.

Of course, not all scholars of the drama or the theater have been captured by this “dramatic ideology”; we have many important studies that place plays within their context or that trace the slow evolution of dramatic features and forms. However, within this dominant critical perspective, the drama of the nineteenth century must always be a “valley” when compared to the celebrated “peaks” of dramatic history. Most anthologies, most survey courses, and even many histories of the drama skip from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteen-hundreds, with perhaps a glance at Sheridan, a glimpse of Diderot, or a nod at the great German drama of Goethe, Schiller, and Keist. Even collections drawn specifically from nineteenth-century drama (such as those by Rowell and Corrigan) focus on Victorian plays and slight the earlier part of the century. The presence of the “culture gap” is even more striking in such selections of nineteenth-century plays, for these volumes tend to enforce the split between “high” and “low” culture that we are all told exists during the period. Thus, Kauvar and Sorenson's collection includes only verse dramas by major romantic and Victorian poets, from Wordsworth's The Borderers to Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, while Michael Booth's two volumes of nineteenth-century drama eschew the works of the poets for those of popular writers such as Pocock and Boucicault.⁴

This distorts our sense of the development of nineteenth-century drama. The concentration upon dramatic “peaks” results in a tendency to see nineteenth-century drama from the perspective of the great works of realism and naturalism that arise at the close of the era. The enforcement of the “culture gap” then artificially divides the drama of the period, relegating the works of the great writers of the day to the “closet” and finding in the popular works the preconditions for late nineteenth-century drama. The “peak” at the end of the century imposes a teleology on histories of the period: everything is presented as working towards the realistic drama—otherwise, it is dismissed as retrograde, mere “Elizabethanizing.” The “gap” insures that our best dramatic and theatrical histories of the period provide a place for the Boadens, Kotzebues, and Pixérécourts, but not the Byrons, Schillers, and Hugos—let alone the Lewises, Baillies, and Maturins.

In order to have a fuller and more accurate history of nineteenth-century drama, we need to have before us the plays obscured by this “dramatic ideology.” The Gothic drama provides one central set of texts that challenge the controlling preconceptions about nineteenth-century drama. These plays provide an opportunity to explore the complex interactions between authors, texts, genre, the literary institution of the theater, and larger cultural or ideological constructs during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That is, they force us to move beyond an account of “great” dramatists and “key” texts to investigate the entire dramatic and theatrical scene as part of the even larger literary, cultural, and political landscape. The Gothic—as a meeting point between high and low culture negotiated by both popular writers such as James Boaden and J. C. Cross and canonized poets such as Byron and Shelley, as a mode that extends throughout much of the period's dramatic and nondramatic writing, and as a particular response to the literary, theatrical, and political pressures of the age of revolution—can tell us much about the drama and culture of its day. The story of the Gothic drama contradicts standard dramatic and theatrical histories, closing the gap between high and low forms, linking poetry and the novel to the theater, and establishing an alternative tradition to the movement towards late nineteenth-century realism.

This collection of Gothic dramas argues for a reconsideration of these all-but-lost plays. The volume includes works interesting in their own right and that also offer a framework for a history of the Gothic drama. While the Gothic arose as early as Walpole's Mysterious Mother (1768), the present collection begins with the explosion of Gothic works in the 1790s, offering the texts of Francis North's Kentish Barons (1791) and J. C. Cross's Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty (1797). These plays can help us to define the Gothic drama during its first period of widespread success and to understand how it fit within the generic, institutional, and ideological structures of its day; more specifically, we will see that the Gothic becomes the dramatic form for the revolutionary years of the 1790s. Matthew Lewis's The Castle Spectre (1797), as I have already noted, stands as the greatest theatrical success of the Gothic drama, and it also serves as an exemplary model of Gothic dramatic techniques and tactics. Together with Lewis's The Captive (1807), The Castle Spectre enables us to explore the generic permutations of the Gothic, for these plays embody the two poles of dramatic practice at the turn of the century—the monodrama and the melodrama—and they suggest how Lewis, among others, would work to convert the Gothic into tragedy. We will also see how this move to transform the Gothic into “high” culture worked to limit its radical potential.

Joanna Baillie's De Monfort (1798) demonstrates that the Gothic was open to lines of development other than this conservative reformation. Like Lewis's plays, De Monfort comes at a point within the evolution of the Gothic that enables its author to reflect upon Gothic conventions, but Baillie does so not to render the Gothic ideologically tame but to raise potentially radical questions about its portrayal of women. The final two plays in the volume, Charles Robert Maturin's Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (1815) and Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) provide a sketch of the second major phase of the Gothic drama, during the post-Napoleonic period. We find these plays continuing and extending Gothic conventions, but they do so within a changed literary and ideological moment. The Gothic drama after Waterloo is no longer the key theatrical resolution of the generic and political questions facing the dramatist; it is instead a protest against the dominant ideology of the day and against the rise of the new dominant popular form, the domestic melodrama. As a group, these plays outline a history of the Gothic drama and point to its importance to romantic literature, to subsequent drama, and to the transformations we identify with the age of democratic revolution.

Before examining the Gothic drama and theater in particular, we need a sense of what Gothicism has come to mean in general. Not surprisingly, our understanding of Gothic literature is derived almost solely from the study of the novel. There have been attempts (for example, Peter Thorslev's) to see the Gothic as representing a distinct vision of life within the culture of the romantic era, and some scholars have worked to sort out the relationship between the fiction and Gothic architecture. But, with the exception of Evans's ground-breaking study of the Gothic drama, the novel has dominated the discussion of the Gothic.⁵ While these approaches to the Gothic through the novel will be useful in recovering the Gothic drama, we will only understand these plays and the literary history of which they are a part when we place them within their own particular generic and institutional context. Any discussion of the Gothic must begin with the ground-breaking work done on the romance, but any discussion of the Gothic drama must go beyond these studies.

Two main approaches to the Gothic novel have been pursued. The most prevalent strategy is to define the Gothic through its appurtenances—particularly the almost obligatory castle and its resident villain but also dungeons, monasteries, bands of robbers, gloomy forests, supernatural or monstrous creatures, rain-swept seacoasts, madwomen, suits of dusty armor, and mysterious strangers. Such definitions discover the Gothic in its settings, stock characters, and conventionalized situations; in the works of Montague Summers and Eino Railo, for example, we are offered massive compendia of Gothic devices. At its most limited such an approach can produce merely a list of atmospherics, but other studies, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, emphasize the recurrence of motifs in order to understand the way they structure a comprehensible literary world, virtually a modern, popular myth. When these conventions are taken seriously for themselves, this approach offers a semiotics of the Gothic as a closed and self-coherent system of atmospheric signs.⁶

The second approach, which might be termed thematic rather than atmospheric, arises from the interpretation of this myth, when the focus shifts from these signs to what they signify. There have been three major attempts to thematize the Gothic. First, from Devendra Varma to Judith Wilt and R. D. Stock, the Gothic has been defined as a revelation of the holy, or numinous, whether it be defined as the providential, the demonic, or Dread. Another group of critics—William Patrick Day is one excellent example—explores the Gothic as a fantasy that uncovers the desires repressed by modern culture; this essentially psychological reading is particularly concerned with the ways in which the Gothic novel configures the self, gender, and sexuality. A third approach identifies the Gothic as a political myth, as a way of imagining the terrors of the French Revolution (Ronald Paulson, Peter Brooks), for example, or as a means to image the threatening rise of proletarian power (Chris Baldick).⁷

All of these are powerful approaches to the Gothic novel and ones that will be useful in understanding the Gothic drama. While they locate the meaning of the Gothic in different realms—the numinous, the psychological, the political—they share a common structure; for each of these approaches sees the Gothic as unveiling or recovering some unmediated absolute that stands outside the boundaries of the natural and social orders, whether it be the supernatural that miraculously disrupts these orders in The Monk or Melmoth, the psychologically repressed that returns in Turn of the Screw or Frankenstein, or the politically oppressed that threatens to erupt in Caleb Williams or, again, read differently, in Frankenstein. What this shared structure reveals is the extremism of the Gothic, its attempt to embody exactly those features of the psyche, the social order, or the cosmos that are least susceptible to representation and least liable to be controlled and assimilated. If the “great tradition” of the novel is concerned with minute particulars, with circumstancing characters and events within specifically defined social, psychic, and providential orders, then the Gothic novel seeks to explore the Absolute or the Chaos (depending upon one's vision) that can never be contained by those orders. It is not surprising that the masterworks of the Gothic arise at moments when the “great tradition” suffers ruptures in its development, with the key moment of the Gothic novel coming between the providential novels of the eighteenth century and the historically and socially grounded novels of the nineteenth and with later Gothic moments occurring in the rifts prior to the advent of both the modern and postmodern novel. The Gothic is an attempt to thematize exactly those features that resist containment within the various explanatory systems and contextualizations of the main novelistic tradition.

The Gothic drama shares with the novel the same appurtenances, and it embraces the same thematics of the extreme in its exploration of the supernatural, the psychological, and the political. However, the Gothic drama arises to resolve different problems than does the Gothic novel, for it takes its place in a different immediate institutional context—that of the theater—and its rather rapid rise and fall occur within a specific historical period defined by particular ideological pressures. More specifically, the Gothic drama—while it arises with Walpole and continues as a theatrical form throughout the nineteenth century—has two key historical moments, one during the 1790s and one around 1815. While it may seem too easy to link the Gothic to the two most symbolically charged events of the era—the fall of the Bastille and the fall of Napoleon—I contend that it is only during the period organized around these two events that the Gothic drama achieved its full power.

The first problem facing the dramatist inhered in the contemporary institution of theater: how to deal with a changing theatrical environment marked by both new and redesigned theatrical spaces. Second, the dramatist had to confront a perceived crisis in the hierarchy of dramatic forms, as tragedy and the comedy of manners, the traditional summits of the dramatist's art, no longer seemed to command large audiences or to be able to represent the issues of the day. Interwoven with these institutional and generic issues are the ideological struggles of the day. The Gothic, particularly in the drama and the theater, is a collective, historical construct, even if we may be more interested in either the Gothic's turn to the interior life or its interest in the atemporal supernatural. The ideological component of these plays reminds us that the drama more than any other literary form is a social product, an attempt to resolve social problems, here understood as involving ideological, generic or formal, and institutional components. In order to understand the development of the Gothic drama, we need first to have a firm sense of what these problems were. Neither the semiotics of Gothic atmosphere nor the thematics of Gothic structure will help us understand the Gothic drama until they are placed within the context that gave Gothic signs and structures their power.

The immediate world of the Gothic drama was the physical space of the English stage. Both Drury Lane and Covent Garden, the two patent or “major” theaters in London, were enlarged during the 1790s. In 1792, Covent Garden was expanded to hold 3,013 people, about a fifty-percent increase over its size of 2,170 seats after its 1782 redesign. In 1794, Drury Lane was rebuilt. It had held 2,300, but it was reconstructed to hold at least 3,600 people and perhaps as many as 3,900.⁸ As has often been noted, this change of scale had an immediate impact upon dramatic composition, acting, and staging techniques. Richard Cumberland's contemporary comments can be taken as typical:

Since the stages of Drury Lane and Covent Garden have been so enlarged in their dimensions to be henceforward theatres for spectators rather than playhouses for hearers, it is hardly to be wondered at if their managers and directors encourage those representations, to which their structure is best adapted. The splendour of the scenes, the ingenuity of the machinist and the rich display of dresses, aided by the captivating charms of music now in a great degree supercede the labours of the poet. There can be nothing very gratifying in watching the movements of an actor's lips, when we cannot hear the words that proceed from them; but when the animating march strikes up, and the stage lays open its recesses to the depth of a hundred feet for the procession to advance, even the most distant spectator can enjoy his shilling's-worth of show. What then is the poet's chance?⁹

Cumberland laments the days of Garrick when what mattered was the text and the actor's subtle interpretation of it. It was now impossible for an actor or actress to rely upon small effects of voice or movement in such cavernous halls. To give one indication of change, the 1794 Drury Lane required the actor to project over 100 feet from the front of the stage while the earlier theater had had a depth of only 60 feet. While some still felt that the relatively small (1,500) Haymarket theater offered a fine showcase for the details of acting, Covent Garden and Drury Lane demanded new, larger gestures and effects.

Of course, the enlargement of theatrical space during the 1790s did not occur only within Drury Lane and Covent Garden; it also occurred outside their walls and their will, through the opening of new theatres. The two theatres royal had had patents granted to them in 1660, and their control of dramatic representation in London had been reinforced by the Licensing Act of 1737. The eighteenth century had seen the success of two other theaters, but they were not direct threats: the “little theater” in the Haymarket was licensed to perform plays during the summer when the two “major” theaters were closed; and the King's Theatre became the home to Italian opera. The cultural monopoly of the two main theaters was still the central fact for the institution of the theater at the moment of the Gothic drama's arrival, but there were increasingly important challenges to the patent houses as the century came to a close. In 1791, when the King's Theatre opened to perform opera, the Sans Souci offered one-man musicals; it was not the last time that the use of music would be essential to the survival of rivals to the theatres royal. Other theaters relied upon alternative modes of entertainment. Astley's Royal Grove (one of its many names) opened in 1777 as a site of equestrian shows that had been given in the open air since 1768; it was outfitted with a stage as well as a circus ring in the 1780s and was reconstructed with perhaps the largest and finest stage in London in 1803. Its equestrian entertainments were matched by those of its main competitor, The Royal Circus, which opened in 1782. Sadler's Wells was offering nautical shows as early as 1765 and became under Charles Dibdin a major theatrical force at the very close of the century. These were so-called transpontine theaters, across the river from the city and the major theaters; but John Palmer tried a direct confrontation with the control of the “major” theaters in opening the Royalty Theatre offering plays at Wellclose Square in 1787. He hoped that a theater for Eastern London away from the Western theaters of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket would be allowed, but the managers of the patent theaters forced his closure.¹⁰

Such new theaters—when they survived—did not just offer more seats to the ever growing population of London. They did not just compete with the “major” theaters for patrons. They offered a competing form of drama. Theaters specializing in naval spectaculars, equestrian shows, or pantomimes did not depend upon the spoken word. Of course, they were blocked by statute from offering the spoken drama, which was reserved for the patent theatres royal. Music, gesture, scenery, and spectacle thus became the basic theatrical tools for those “minor” houses. This form of the drama is best represented in the current volume by J. C. Cross's Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty offered at The Royal Circus in 1797. The play is a pantomime that relies upon songs and sets for dramatic effect, though banners with simple messages are used at several key moments to make sure the audience understands a crux in the plot. Such plays and the non-verbal effects upon which they of necessity relied drew enthusiastic audiences. The enlarged theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, the legally protected bastions of the spoken word, ironically came to rely upon these same new techniques not only because they were suitable to their cavernous auditoriums but also because the audiences increasingly demanded such fare. It is the new importance of sets, costumes, effects, and music that Cumberland laments, but these features provided the artists who collectively created dramatic events a whole new arsenal of theatrical techniques.

The nature of the new drama that arose in this expanded theatrical world can be suggested in a number of ways. One can point to the enormous advances in theatrical techniques, with the major innovations in lighting, scene painting, traps, and special effects being so important that one might want to find the true dramatic genius of the day not in the ranks of authors but in the company of such scenic artists as Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, Thomas Greenwood, and William Capon. One might also note the shifts in acting styles. While the period is sometimes referred to as the Age of Kemble, it would make more sense to name it after his sister, Sarah Siddons, whose passionate and apparently overwhelming performances marked the new taste in acting that would also produce Edmund Kean. Again, one can note the dramatic types that come to dominate not only the “minor” stages but the “major” theaters as well. The melodrama became the key new form of the day, and as its name implies, music was essential to its success. The burletta, as Joseph Donohue has shown,¹¹ also began as a musical form, arising as it did from the comic opera; it became a device for the minor theaters to challenge the theatres royal, first by offering burletta versions of traditional plays such as Macbeth and then by slowly dropping the musical accompaniment to the spoken word. Pantomimes, spectaculars, and extravaganzas all filled the stage with non-verbal effects.¹²

There is, then, a “revolution” in the institution of the theater at the very concrete level of its material means of stage production—the structure of the theaters, the stage techniques, the acting styles. Such changes questioned the traditional theatrical means used to master theatrical space and to attract an audience. They also tended to undermine traditional generic distinctions. As the proliferation of new forms suggests, this transformation of theatrical techniques is matched by a shift in the hierarchy of dramatic types. John Genest's descriptions of plays of the period testify to the erosion of the traditional definitions of dramatic forms. We repeatedly find him making the complaint he lodges against Francis North's Kentish Barons, included in this volume, that a play is “a jumble of Tragedy, Comedy and Opera.”¹³ The collapse of the earlier hierarchy of dramatic types is testified to in the struggle between what comes to be termed the “legitimate” and the “illegitimate” drama. As Barry Sutcliffe among others has shown,¹⁴ the “legitimate” drama—primarily tragedy and the comedy of manners—came to be seen not only as the legally protected form of the spoken drama controlled by the patent theaters but also as an embodiment of traditional moral, cultural, and social values. Questions about the “legitimate” drama were inevitably linked to questions of “legitimacy” in the political realm. The “illegitimate” drama was thus felt to be not only a threat to aesthetic quality—as pantomimes or equestrian spectacles edged Shakespeare or Congreve from the stage—but also as a challenge to the political and cultural order.

We should be very careful about paralleling “revolutions” in artistic styles with revolutions in the economic, social, and political orders. The troubled relations between the artistic avant-garde and radical politics in our century teach us to be skeptical of easy links between artistic and political innovations; the French Revolution's reinvigoration of classicist motifs in an age we label romantic is another challenge to such connections. Still, the 1790s do offer a moment when radical transformations in the institution of the theater and in the hierarchy of dramatic forms are seen as parallels to the revolutionary events of the day; or, perhaps more precisely, the changes within the theater and the drama offer an opportunity for writers to work out in artistic terms the ideological struggles of the era of Burke and Paine.

I want to make the rather surprising claim that the Gothic drama is the most subtle theatrical attempt of the 1790s to resolve the ideological, generic, and institutional problems facing playwrights of the day. At least for a moment, the Gothic drama offered a way to overcome the strains placed upon theatrical representation—essentially through a new aesthetic of sensationalism. It seemed to resolve the tensions within the hierarchy of genres—essentially by discovering a new ground of high tragedy in the tactics of popular drama. And the Gothic provided the means to represent the ideological struggles of the day in a way that would not arouse the wrath and thus the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, John Larpent. The Gothic is the theatrical form in the 1790s because it could contain all of pressures placed upon the drama.

Of course, the Gothic drama did not arise with the Fall of the Bastille, though it is only after 1789—the year not only of the Bastille but also of Ann Radcliffe's first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne—that the Gothic drama becomes a real force in the theater.¹⁵ Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother (1768; printed privately and not performed) is usually cited as the first Gothic drama. While plays such as Home's Douglas (Edinburgh, 1756; Covent Garden, 1757) are cited by Evans as examples of even earlier works with Gothic tendencies and while one can trace elements within Gothic plays back to Otway, Southerne, and Lee, to the heroic drama, and to Elizabethan and Jacobean works, The Mysterious Mother marks a convenient point of origin, especially as it can then be matched with Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel. This “first” Gothic play already includes many of the surface features that would continue to mark the Gothic drama, and its author already understood the innovations of the Gothic that would be empowered by the charged atmosphere of the 1790s.

We find in Walpole's play much of the machinery that would comprise the Gothic. The play opens upon a desolate castle, described as having “antique towers / And vacant courts [that] dull the suspended soul, / Till expectation wears the cast of fear”(I, i).¹⁶ The appropriately fearful atmosphere established, we are introduced to the reclusive countess, clearly consumed by guilt and remorse for some unnamed past crime. Her only neighbors are the friars of a nearby convent, one of whom—Friar Benedict—will seek revenge for her refusal to find comfort in confession and the Church. The climax of the play hinges upon the revelation of a series of past family relations—that the countess has, on the night of her husband's death and in order to prevent her son from consummating an affair, found her way to her son's bed and later borne him a child; and that the son—banished all these years—has secretly returned to marry, unknowingly, his sister/daughter. The countess goes mad with guilt upon revealing her secret, and the son exits to die in war after telling his wife/sister/daughter to enter a convent. The castle, the reclusive hero or heroine, the guilty past, the accumulation of appalling horrors and deaths—these would continue to be the hallmarks of the Gothic drama.

The most controversial feature of Walpole's play—and the one that marks its participation in the Gothic's thematics of the extreme—is the incest at the center of his plot. In recognizing in the postscript to his play that incest would serve primarily to disturb his audience (“The subject is more truly horrid than even that of Oedipus,” he wrote), Walpole points to the link between thematic extremism and the key stylistic feature of the Gothic drama, its sensationalism, its status as a theater of shock, surprise, seduction, and terror:

… I found it so truly tragic in the essential springs of terror and pity, that I could not resist the impulse of adapting it to the scene, though it could never be practicable to produce it there. I saw, too, that it would admit of great situation, of lofty characters, of those unforeseen strokes, which have a singular effect in operating a revolution in the passions, and in interesting the spectator: it was capable of furnishing not only a contrast of characters, but a contrast of virtue and vice in the same character; and by laying the scene in what age and country I pleased pictures of manners might be drawn, and many allusions to historic events introduced. …¹⁷

Walpole seems to find the Gothic to be a free-floating signifier that can be attached to “what age and country I pleased,” the chosen time and place providing the appropriate historical allusions. What I will suggest is that the later Gothic drama becomes at least temporarily fixed after the taking of the Bastille, that its free-floating signifiers drift to the shore of revolutionary history. Walpole's analysis of his play as embodying a form that is clearly at odds with the ideological and aesthetic structures that underpin the notions of decorum and moral sentiment already suggests the reasons why the Gothic could serve playwrights confronting the aesthetic, institutional, and ideological problems of the 1790s.

At the center of Walpole's defense of his representation of incest is his claim for its sensationalist emotional appeal, its ability to create a “revolution in the passions.” This sensationalism is different from both sentimentalism and sensibility, hallmarks of the earlier eighteenth-century drama. Janet Todd has defined a “sentiment” as “a moral reflection, a rational opinion usually about the rights and wrongs of human conduct … a ‘sentiment’ is also a thought, often an elevated one, influenced by emotion, a combining of heart with head or an emotional impulse leading to an opinion or a principle.” As Todd's definition suggests, the literature of sentiment evokes emotions as complements not opponents to the reason appealed to in other eighteenth-century works, for both reason and sentiment are providentially ordered paths to moral truths. Todd then argues that “sensibility” “came to denote the faculty of feeling, the capacity for extremely refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for suffering.”¹⁸ While sensibility is often linked to the physical structure of the nervous system and while it can easily become excessive, it too is normatively seen as moral, as the exercise of refined emotions leading to compassion. Walpole's passage on The Mysterious Mother calls upon neither sentiment nor emotional sensibility but the passions—which are often seen as opposed to rather than working with reason; and it calls for a revolution in these passions, or a complete overthrow of the normal emotional order. Walpole is not offering a work that will link emotion to reason in a providential pattern issuing in a didactic moral lesson; his work is meant to shock, to overcome our conventional responses, to elicit passion outside of any providential or moral order.

This move beyond conventional moral response is also revealed in his account of the characters to be portrayed in his work, which he tells us will be morally mixed with “virtue and vice in the same character.” This ambiguity surrounding the moral valence of the Gothic characters creates a tension between the sympathy and judgment that were in harmony in the literature of sentiment and sensibility. Walpole declares war here upon the decorous ideas of morally classified characters and of poetic justice. This creation of characters who escape the moral vision of the work that contains them was to be one of the most controversial features of the Gothic drama, decried by Coleridge and Scott among many others.

This sensationalist and perhaps amoral drama was seen as particularly dangerous, for—as Walpole's statement again suggests—the Gothic could be offered as a new form of tragedy: the “illegitimate” drama threatened to replace the central form of the “legitimate” drama. Within the charged context of the years following the French Revolution, the Gothic would arise as a new form of serious drama. In the hands of writers such as Baillie, Lewis, and Maturin—not to mention Shelley and Byron—it would for a moment seem to create a new, at times subversive form of tragedy. Walpole, then, already outlines a potentially revolutionary form that would challenge conventional aesthetics and launch an assault upon the tragic summit of the dramatic hierarchy. Within the context of the 1790s, this revolutionary form would be seen to move to the rhythms of the Revolution itself.

Between Walpole's Mysterious Mother and 1789 a few plays appeared that clearly belong to the Gothic drama, most importantly works by Hannah More (Percy; Covent Garden, 1777) and Hannah Cowley (Albina, Countess of Raimond; Covent Garden, 1779). The Gothic was familiar enough by the late 1780s for James Cobb to offer his comic opera The Haunted Tower (Drury Lane, 1789) which burlesques Gothic motifs, and yet new enough for Miles Peter Andrews to call the supernatural effects of The Enchanted Castle (Covent Garden, 1786) an “experiment” that “hitherto … has not been made.”¹⁹ Still, it is in the 1790s that the Gothic drama truly comes to dominate the theater.

The drama of the 1790s is represented in this volume by Francis North's The Kentish Barons, offered at the Haymarket in June of 1791, J. C. Cross's Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty, staged at the Royal Circus in 1797, and Lewis's The Castle Spectre, first played at Covent Garden in the same year. These dramas offer a sense of the Gothic across the decade and across the theatrical landscape, from the patent theatre royal at Covent Garden to the “little” theater in the Haymarket and the Royal Circus, a “minor” theater. While in formal terms, these plays range from a verse play with hints of tragedy (The Kentish Barons) to a pantomime (Julia of Louvain), they engage a strikingly similar set of dramatic conventions and tactics. Together they suggest the ways in which the Gothic drama of the 1790s served as a popular solution to a series of problems facing the dramatist.

As noted above, the first problem was simply that of winning an audience. North's Kentish Barons was, according to the Biographia Dramatica, “well written, and was favourably received”; the Morning Chronicle (26 June 1791) reported that the drama was performed “to a most crowded audience and received with very marked and rapturous applause.” Genest tells us the play was performed ten times, a respectable run; it opened on 25 June and had its final performance a month later on 25 July. This is, of course, far short of the success of The Castle Spectre with its initial run of forty-seven performances and its continuing presence in the repertoire.²⁰

In order to be successful, a play had to be able to command its theatrical space and compete with other theaters all trying to fill their halls with spectators. As I have already suggested, this challenge was largely met by creating a new theater of shock and sensation. As in the current horror or Gothic film, special effects could make or break a new Gothic drama. It was clearly the appearance of the ghost in The Castle Spectre, for example, that made Lewis's play such a success. Writing in 1825, Boaden could still say that this play “is too strongly impressed upon the memories of all my readers to require in this place any detail of its story.” It is the ghost that particularly fills Boaden's memory:

… I yet bring before me, with delight, the waving form of Mrs. Powell, advancing from the suddenly illuminated chapel, and bending over Angela (Mrs. Jordan) in maternal benediction; during which slow and solemn action, the band played a few bars, or rather the full subject at all events, of Jomelli's Chaconne, in his celebrated overture in three flats.²¹

It is important to remember how much of the effect of the Gothic drama (and its cinematic descendants) is generated through simply having something jump out at us unexpectedly. Whether it is North's Mortimer charging on stage to prevent the captured Elina from escaping in The Kentish Barons or the fight between the hero and villain as a storm erupts overhead in Julia of Louvain or the editing cut to a slashing knife in Psycho, the Gothic relies upon the jolts and joys of sensationalism. We are so used to such effects that I think we forget their radical departure from conventional stagecraft. Most drama is structured to fulfill our expectations; even dramatic irony is a reordering of our expectations, a move to force us to see that what we had been perceiving one way actually makes sense in another way. Thus, Oedipus, which in one way has as sensational a content as any Gothic drama, does not shock us through the unexpected, but instead offers us the awe-ful truth of the providentially ordered: what happens to Oedipus is exactly what has been expected and predicted by the oracle. Macbeth, for all its witches and supernatural aura, does not rely upon shock tactics. Macbeth, like all traditional tragedy, may evoke terror and pity, but it moves to purge them from the audience even as they are experienced within the play. The Gothic drama, however, even when it reaches for the tragic heights, provokes terror in the audience. Macbeth is terrified by the witches; we are terrorized by the spectres and madmen of the Gothic.

Critics and audiences found this sensationalism new and disturbing, and not merely for aesthetic reasons. As the attack upon the Gothic through the satiric Rovers (1798) in The Anti-Jacobin indicates, the new drama was linked to political innovation. The fictitious Jacobin author of The Rovers explains that what is called by The Anti-Jacobin the “German drama” requires a new “SYSTEM comprehending not Politics only, and Religion, but Morals and Manners, and generally whatever goes to the composition or holding together of Human Society; in all of which a total change and Revolution is absolutely necessary.”²² Wordsworth seems in agreement with The Anti-Jacobin when he attacks “frantic novels” and “sickly and stupid German Tragedies” in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (1800); for this complaint about Gothic novels and dramas occurs in the midst of a discussion of the destruction of the public's ability to respond to life imaginatively, a reduction of the people to a “savage torpor” brought on by “the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident.”²³ Coleridge, too, would attack the Gothic for political as well as aesthetic reasons, recalling the The Anti-Jacobin's assault in defining the Gothic as “the modern jacobinical drama”:

Eighteen years ago [in Satyrane's Letters of 1798] I observed, that the whole secret of the modern jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects: namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the quality of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour … in persons and in classes where experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem.²⁴

We hear stated in this passage the central objection to the Gothic, that it confuses our judgment by offering sympathy to immoral characters; and this too is linked to sensationalism (“the excitement of surprise”) and seen primarily in political and class terms. Scott would follow Coleridge and others of his generation in finding in the Gothic “a sort of intellectual jacobinism.”²⁵ The claim that literary choices have ideological implications would not have surprised these writers.

Such comments suggest that, at the time, political and theatrical change were seen to mirror one another. James Boaden claimed that “The present was the age of revolutions. The most surprising events had occurred on the stage of real life, and the mimic world followed. …”²⁶ Boaden commented more specifically upon the theatrical representations of the taking of the Bastille: “The French Revolution had now opened upon the world in all its horrors; and the stage, ‘which echoes but the public voice,’ was now destined to rave about that cage of tyranny, the Bastile [sic], which, like Newgate in the year 1780, had been besieged by a virtuous populace, and all its dark secrets returned to the light of day and the blessings of freedom.”²⁷ It is in the context of such close links between theatrical innovation and political change that Elizabeth Inchbald's statement on the O.P. or Old Price riots makes sense: “If the public force the managers to reduce their prices a revolution in England is effected.”²⁸

Or, to follow the analogy in the other direction, we might note some of the theatrical images used by Burke to describe revolutionary events: “the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. … Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.” Burke sounds here like Genest protesting the mixture of genres in the contemporary drama. Again, Burke finds the demand for revolution itself to be parallel to the demand for novelty and effect in the theater: “Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouze [sic] the imagination. …”²⁹ At this point, it is not clear whether the “mimic world” is mirroring the Revolution or whether the Revolution itself is a result of a “debased” taste most clearly seen in the theatrical fare of the day.

What I want to suggest is that, for a moment in the 1790s, the separable histories of the institution of the theater, of dramatic forms, and of ideological struggle follow the same course. More specifically, the essentials of the Gothic setting and plot—the castle, the villain, the heroine's capture and escape—could be read as embodying the rhythms of the Revolution and its liberation of enclosed spaces from the powers of the past.

The castle is seen as so conventional a feature of the Gothic as to rate little more than obligatory notice, but in the 1790s the castle takes on a particular significance. It certainly is the case that the castle—or some other enclosed space—is a virtual necessity in the Gothic drama. Of the plays included here, two works—The Castle Spectre and Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand—announce the presence of castles in their titles; North opens The Kentish Barons with the hero and his confidant Bertram within an “Old Castle.” Julia of Louvain offers a convent with a horrifying sepulchre, and Lewis's The Captive transpires within an asylum/prison. While Baillie's De Monfort is an important example of a play without a castle, it still places its murder on a “wild path in a wood, shaded with trees” and closes in a convent. Later, Peake's dramatization of Frankenstein also offers wild natural scenery but, as we will see, presents a new sinister Gothic locale, the laboratory.

We could obviously extend the list with references to such plays as James Cobb's The Haunted Tower (Drury Lane, 1789), Miles Peter Andrews's The Mysteries of the Castle (Covent Garden, 1795), or George Charles Carr's The Towers of Urbandine (York and Hull, 1805); other Gothic sites can be found in James Boaden's Fontainville Forest (Covent Garden, 1794), the anonymous Mystic Cavern (Norwich, 1803), and Lewis's Venomi; or, The Novice of St. Mark's (Drury Lane, 1808). Manfred's “Gothic Chamber,” the Castle of Petralla in Shelley's The Cenci, and the Borderlands of Wordsworth's The Borderers are all conventional Gothic scenes.

The significance of the castle can be quickly seen if we consider for a moment the actual physical appearance of these ancient fortresses. The castle is presented as a feature of the past being represented on stage. However, as the ruined nature of many of these castles suggests, this is not a depiction of the past as it was, since that would require the castles to be new; what we have instead is an emblem of the past's influence in the present, the hold that the old world—even in decay—has upon the future. In his preface to The Castle of Otranto, Walpole jests about his moral being “that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation”;³⁰ but he here illuminates a key feature of the Gothic, the representation of the past's attempt to control the present and the future. It is no accident that the Gothic drama with its imposing castles becomes increasingly popular on the London stage after 1789 and the Fall of the Bastille. Like the ruined Gothic castle, the Bastille might no longer be an actual tool of an oppressive ancien regime, but it stood as the emblem of a past that needed to be overcome. And, in fact, in the early days of the Revolution before the censor John Larpent moved to prohibit plays dealing directly with revolutionary events, several works such as John Dent's The Bastille (Royal Circus, 1789) and John St. John's The Island of St. Marguerite (Drury Lane, 1789) about the Man in the Iron Mask adopted Gothic formulas to enact recent history. When history appears to playwrights to move to a Gothic plot, we are encouraged to read Gothic devices in historical terms.

The plays that deal directly with the Revolution share with the Gothic drama a basic pattern of movement, from an enclosed space—a prison, a castle, a convent—to an open one. This dramatic trajectory may have its roots in conventions of dramatic romance (one thinks of the movement to a “green world” in Shakespeare's romances and romantic comedies),³¹ but during the 1790s the pattern would be read as moving from the closed world of the past into the open world of a free future. The historical ground of this pattern can be seen in The Bastille, in which the taking of the Bastille and its horrific (if purely fictional) torture chambers is followed by a celebration on the Place de Dauphin; the very sets embody a move from imprisonment to liberation. In its final celebratory scene, Dent's play attempts to reenact a specific moment of revolutionary history, a speech given by Moreau de St. Mery to the French troops; but more interestingly, this Gothic history play predicts in its rhythms the pattern of later festivals enacted in revolutionary France.

This pattern is perhaps even clearer in a play included here, Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty, a pantomime taken, the published text tells us, “from a paragraph in a Newspaper during the French Revolution.”³² The plot of Cross's play is simple. Julia is engaged to Clifford, but also sought by the aristocratic Gothic villain, St. Pierre. When she pledges herself to Clifford, St. Pierre offers her the choice of marriage to him or a convent. She chooses the convent, where she discovers she is at the mercy of St. Pierre's accomplices, Father Bonesse and the Abbess. When she continues to refuse St. Pierre, the religious entomb her beneath the convent until she is found “under a noisome sack … pale, emaciated, almost expiring, and for a time bereft of reason …” (sc. x). She is freed, St. Pierre is killed, the Abbess and the friar are arrested by the Municipality, and the play ends upon a scene reminiscent of a revolutionary fête: “A splendid and Picturesque View, with the Altar of Hymen at a distance.” The open view and the classical altar mark this as a revolutionary space, where the victory of the lovers and of “Peace and pleasure” over the machinations of the aristocracy and the Church can be celebrated (sc. xi).

Dent's prophetic turn to a revolutionary festival and Cross's evocation of the great fêtes of revolutionary France suggest the links between these Gothic plays and the actual festivals that took place in France. Mona Ozouf's treatment of space in these festivals is extremely suggestive for a map not only of directly political plays but of the Gothic drama as a whole:

… from the beginning of the Revolution a native connivance linked rediscovered liberty with reconquered space. The beating down of gates, the crossing of castle moats, walking at one's ease in places where one was once forbidden to enter: the appropriation of a certain space, which has to be opened and broken into, was the first delight of the Revolution.

In seeking a location for the festival, the organizers never lost sight of this imperative: public enjoyment must be able to extend regularly and without obstacle. What was needed was a festive space that could contain an endless, irrepressible, and peaceful movement like the rise of tidal waters. In this, indeed, the space of the festival was the exact equivalent of the Revolutionary space itself, as described by Fichte in his Considerations: “While the luminous flood irresistibly spreads, the obscure islets grow smaller and break up, abandoned to the bats and owls.”

… the open air had the enormous advantage of being a space without memory and was therefore able to symbolize entry into a new world. … sometimes the location of the festival had to be established in a fractured space, and the participants had to travel from the altar of the fatherland along winding paths, through ramparts, past ruined towers, and across drawbridges. It may have been very unusual for the feudal settings to have such an insistent presence. But did it? The official accounts are eager to avoid the issue by reducing it to aesthetic curiosity: “One object contrasted even more with the prevailing atmosphere of the civic festival: this was the picturesque prospect of the crumbling ruins of an ancient castle.”³³

I quote at length from Ozouf because her brilliant analysis of revolutionary space is so suggestive for Gothic spaces. It is interesting how often in the quotations Ozouf uses and in her own account the language of the Gothic arises to describe by way of contrast the space of revolutionary festivals. The citation from Fichte contrasts the open flow of the Revolution with the bat and owl invested islets of the past. Ozouf sees the open spaces of the revolutionary festival contrasted with the twisting, enclosed spaces of a feudal, Gothic past. This movement from the cramped Gothic quarters of the city to an open revolutionary space parallels the movement of the Gothic, a parallel made explicit when the crumbling castle is brought into the view of the revolutionary celebrants. While there is an attempt to make the castle merely an aesthetic object—a picturesque prospect—this in itself is a political statement, a denial of the power of the past, which in its decayed state can only serve as a piquant contrast to the vibrant future. Of course, this displacement of the historical onto the aesthetic can never be complete. The ruined castle is an emblem of the victory of the Revolution; but it is also a reminder of the violence necessary to break with the past, a violence Ozouf argues the revolutionary festivals sought to repress in their celebrations of the future but of which the Gothic is constantly aware.

In Gothic play after play, we see the liberation of enclosed spaces: the storming of a convent in Boaden's adaptation of Lewis's The Monk as Aurelia and Miranda (Drury Lane, 1798) and in Cross's Julia of Louvain; or, Monkish Cruelty, the penetration of the villain's castle in North's Kentish Barons, the mob demanding the release of the Man in the Iron Mask in John St. John's Island of St. Marguerite, and the joint release of an imprisoned wife from her cliff prison and of a pursued maiden from a convent in Henry Siddons's Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliff (performed as The Castle of Otranto, Newcastle, 1793; as Sicilian Romance, Covent Garden, 1794). Lewis's The Castle Spectre offers several escapes, as the hero leaps from the window of the castle, several servants escape through secret passageways, and a long-imprisoned father is finally rescued from a subterranean dungeon; counterpoised to these various incarcerated figures are the peasants and troops accumulating in the forest's free space surrounding the castle. We have here and elsewhere the central movement from enclosure to liberation, with a castle, a dungeon, or a convent standing for the oppressive institutions of the play's world and a natural landscape—the home to the natural rights of peasants, heroic troops, or perhaps a noble robber band—often providing the site of uncovered and recovered identities.

This movement of liberation—from castle to open ground, from enclosed past to open future—provides the backbone of the plot, but it does not really define its shape. We might have a better sense of the total shape of the Gothic drama if we take more seriously Genest's constant comment about Gothic plays, that they are bad because they are a jumble of tragedy, comedy, and opera. Setting aside the aesthetic judgement, we should see that Genest is saying more than that these plays violate the decorous separation of genres. I think that he is getting at the mixed nature of the plots of these plays (his comments are largely plot summaries), which are in fact a combination of tragedy, comedy, and operatic romance (they are mixed media as well, which is part of his comment—there are songs, for example). These three strands will let us view three important aspects of these plays: the romance or quest structure that organizes the broadest outlines of the plot—the movement from confinement to liberation we have been discussing; the comic movement that unites the lovers and joins the thematics of love with those of liberty; and the potential tragedy of the villain-hero. This multiple plot structure also suggests that the ideology of the Gothic drama is not embodied in the simple movement from past to liberated future, that its reaction to revolutionary history is more complex, more deeply conflicted.

The Kentish Barons, for example, is, in the largest terms, organized around a comic movement towards the union of Elina and Clifford and a romance pattern necessitating the victory of Osbert/Auberville over Mortimer. Both these plots engage the movement between open and closed spaces so important to the Gothic, here oscillations between castles and various natural settings. Elina has been taken from her own castle and imprisoned in that of Mortimer. The play opens with Clifford, Elina's true love, discovering her absence and lamenting her loss as he broods in his own “Old Castle.” His problem is to liberate Elina from Mortimer's castle so that he can marry her. If we follow Frye's recipe for comedy we can see Mortimer and his henchman as representing the “blocking” society that attempts to prevent the union of the young lovers, who of course defeat their elders and reorder society around their joyful marriage.³⁴ Clifford is seconded, appropriately enough given this comic pattern, by a blustering but warm-hearted miles gloriosus figure, Bertram, whose stage ancestors run back through eighteenth- and seventeenth-century drama to Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing.

Clifford and Osbert also receive aid from a comic drunk, Gam the gardener, who is only one of many such droll servants in Gothic drama; we need only look in the current volume to Motley in The Castle Spectre or to Fritz in Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein to see the pervasive presence of this type. Much time in the first two acts is spent with Gam and his endless discourse on drinking, and such comic relief often seems as important to the Gothic as terror itself. When we find plays that exclude such comic figures—as in Baillie's De Monfort and Maturin's Bertram—we are involved in works that wish to convert the Gothic wholly to tragedy. These comic scenes—which usually shift verse plays to prose (as in The Kentish Barons) and which treat homely subjects such as eating, drinking, and the travails of marriage—offer a center of conventional domesticity to contrast with the horrors of the central Gothic action. The audience, even as it laughs at Gam with his drunkenness and his problems with his wife, can locate through him a set of everyday concerns that may be threatened by the intrusion of the Gothic universe but which continually reassert themselves. In such scenes, we find the values of the nascent domestic melodrama that would eventually preempt the Gothic drama in the theaters of London. There may also be a wise dramatic tactic at work here: Gothic drama goes for extreme effects in terror, which in themselves can provoke laughter if not handled correctly—there are few things as funny as a botched attempt to invoke horror. By providing laughter—and even at times directing that laughter at the Gothic itself—these playwrights may be insulating their creations from the jeers of the pit. Lewis in particular is the master of a “camp” style in the Gothic, laughing at the very conventions he evokes, having his dramatic confection and eating it too.

North's romance plot, revolving around Osbert's hidden heritage as the kidnapped son of Mortimer's enemy and thus Elina's brother, is introduced within the castle of Mortimer, where Osbert is kept as an oppressed servant. (These devices gave rise to such satiric turns in the Anti-Jacobin's anti-Gothic The Rovers as the moment when a waiter is discovered to be “No waiter, but a Knight Templar.”³⁵) We know that the supposed servant Osbert will prove noble, for Elina feels some strange attraction for this boy who has “a mind / Above the meanness of his low condition … I cou'd recall some features I once lov'd / Which much resembled his” (I, iv). Osbert's heroic charisma is evidenced by the fact that everyone, even Mortimer, is drawn to him. When we hear of a birthmark that had stood out on the arm of Auberville's lost son (I, ii), we immediately know how Osbert will recover his identity.

After Osbert tries to aid Elina's escape, he is dismissed from the castle, but only—Mortimer thinks—to die in the harsh wilderness. He instead finds his way to the comic figure Gam, who is tending a garden in the midst of the forest. Gam recognizes the birthmark and takes Osbert to Clifford to reclaim his title. Here the comic move towards the union of the lovers and the romance quest for Osbert's true identity are joined, as our two heroes collaborate to defeat Mortimer, who intends to force Elina into bed with him, deceiving her through a false wedding involving a former priest now in his employ.

Fulfilling his role as a hero from operatic romance, Osbert/Auberville concocts a plan to enter Mortimer's castle with Clifford and his friend Bertram as minstrels and to communicate with Elina through song—a device found elsewhere in the Gothic drama, for example in an infamous scene in Lewis's Castle Spectre where Kemble playing the hero Percy is urged through song to escape the villain's castle by throwing himself out a window, an athletic feat from a harlequinade deemed by the Morning Herald (16 December 1797) to be beneath Kemble's dignity. In The Kentish Barons, it is through this device that the play's frequent songs (an aspect of the play protested by Genest) are linked to the action. The play closes on a final song celebrating love and music, and there is a sense in which the play enacts the structural victory of operatic romance over the potential tragedy of the villain-hero Mortimer: that is, not only is Mortimer defeated, but his vision of life as a tragic round of violence and revenge is defeated as the cast bursts into a joyful finale when the lovers are united and Osbert finds his rightful identity and place in society. Thus, while the play does not move out of the castle at its close, it does end on a celebration of love—replete with pagan images—that recalls the end of Julia of Louvain and its celebration of “Peace and pleasure” before the altar of Hymen:

Let Cupid shake his sportive wings,
          While round the loves and graces fly;
Apollo touch the trembling strings,
          And Hymen lift his torch on high.
Our fears are gone, the tempest past,
          Here adverse winds no more annoy;
Our vessel, safely moor'd at last,
          Casts anchor in the port of joy.

(III, i)

As is suggested by the close of Dent's Bastille—where the liberator of the prison is united with his love who has been sought by an aristocratic villain—and by the end of Julia of Louvain—where the lovers defeat the powers of both the aristocracy and the Church—erotic freedom is linked in plays such as The Kentish Barons to political freedom, a connection that would continue to have power within the British radical tradition, as Shelley's Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound indicate.

This victory through song also suggests the involvement of the Gothic with the carnivalesque as explored in the eighteenth century by Terry Castle. The final moments of plays such as The Kentish Barons or Julia of Louvain with their festivals of love, their singing and dancing, their unmasking of villains, all seem to partake of the carnival and its utopian dream of liberation from convention. There is, one might suggest, an interesting parallel between the form of the Gothic drama with its “jumble” of various generic levels and the “‘strange Medley’ of persons—a rough mix of high and low” that Castle finds in the masquerade.³⁶ It is in such carnivalesque moments, such hints of utopian enjoyment, such moves to incorporate on stage what had been social celebrations or were revolutionary festivals, that we see the Gothic drama reaching for a vision of liberation open to the resonances of the day. And in this victory of popular song over high tragedy, we may also see the Gothic's stand in the struggle to reorder the hierarchy of genres.

However, for us, the greatest interest in Kentish Barons is generated by the tragic possibilities surrounding the villain, Mortimer. As has often been noted since the point was made by Evans, the focus of the Gothic drama increasingly centered around the villain, who becomes a villain-hero and the precursor of the Byronic hero. As we will see in Maturin's Bertram and as could also be seen in plays such as Byron's Manfred and Shelley's The Cenci, the Gothic villain-hero could be placed at the center of the new brand of tragedy crafted by the romantics. In part, the villain's prominence can be traced to the weakness of the official hero, a weakness that results from his role in the rather conventional comic and romance plots. For example, in Lewis's Castle Spectre, the hero Percy is a romance aristocrat in disguise as a peasant, wooing and then seeking to rescue his beloved Angela; but he is singularly ineffectual in his attempts, finding himself repeatedly outwitted and finally relying upon Angela for the defeat of the villainous Osmond. Osmond, in contrast, is a dynamic and intriguing character, displaying real passion for Angela, proving himself heroic in his confrontations with his foes and even with what he takes to be a ghostly apparition, and undergoing anguished self-examination. North's Clifford is perhaps a stronger figure than Percy, but he would still be moping in his castle were it not for the efforts of Osbert, Bertram, and Gam; and he certainly lacks the powerful attractions of the villain Mortimer.

Evans cites Mortimer as one of the earliest and more interesting villain-heroes. Evans stresses Mortimer's moralizing strain, as the playwright forces his villain to recognize and denounce his own evil. However, what actually makes Mortimer interesting is his libertine embrace of pleasure and egotism. His opening speech sets the tone:

How disappointment loves to plague the heart
Of the poor idiot man! who vainly thinks
His reason given to direct and guide him.
The happy brutes, who follow instinct's laws,
Enjoy the blessings of the present hour:
Their daily task perform'd, they lay them down,
And never dream that the approaching morn
Shall wake them to new labours: Man alone
Looks through a flattering and deceitful glass
And vainly strives to view futurity:
Nature has wisely hid it from his sight;
But purblind Reason, curious and inquisitive,
Just sees enough to dazzle and mislead him.
But I'll reflect no more—

(I, iii)

This assault upon reason and admiration for instinct could be found in the mouths of many heroes of Restoration sexual comedy and heroic drama. The Restoration libertine hero is one of the less noted precursors of the Gothic villain-hero. The Gothic figure inherits his ancestor's sexual drives, his egotism, and his anti-rationalist rhetoric. The direct line of inheritance probably comes through Richardson's Lovelace, who like the Gothic villain-hero has the energy necessary to reform a corrupt society but chooses to use it to support a decadent and declining regime. The Gothic villain-hero, thus, belongs with those late eighteenth-century libertines analyzed by Starobinski—Mozart's Don Juan, Laclos's Valmont, and Sade's philosophical hedonists—the brightest lights of a world about to go into eclipse.³⁷

North establishes his villain as a skeptic who doubts reason's ability to guide man's actions or to conceive the consequences of his deeds. Given to gloomy reflection, Mortimer admires the innocent and immediate pleasures of the beasts. Mortimer doubts our ability to know the future and thus to calculate the outcomes of our actions or the judgment that will be made upon them. Turning from the future, he hopes to embrace present pleasure; but more importantly, his dismissal of the future leaves him ironically in the grip of the past. For all of his energy, he can only repeat past ways, not create a distinct future, and thus he is doomed to live out the patterns of traditional tragedy.

We learn that Mortimer is driven by revenge for what he has suffered in the past at the hands of Auberville, the father of the heroine Elina whom Mortimer has abducted. In fact, the tension within Mortimer is less a struggle between villainy and morality, as Evans suggests, than a contest between two drives—his present desire for Elina and his demand for revenge for deeds committed in the past:

Think you that Love, that silly deity,
Can bend my steady nature? Osbert, no.
A brighter, grander passion now enflames me:
One which takes root in noble minds alone;
The soft and common soil of vulgar souls
Could never rear it: 'tis a great Revenge.

(I, iii)

Mortimer—like many subsequent Gothic and romantic figures from Lewis's Osmond to Maturin's Bertram, from Byron's Cain to Hugo's Hernani—is torn between love and violent hate. They are linked for Mortimer in his past, for we learn that the enmity between Mortimer and Elina's father arose over a woman, Alicia, with whom both were in love. Alicia chose Auberville, whom Mortimer then challenged in combat:

Within two days of our intended duel,
The king forbad the combat, and confin'd me
Close pris'ner, Osbert, in these castle-walls,
For nine long winters. Did he think to Conquer
(O foolish Man) the Soul of Mortimer
By Solitude and vile Imprisonment?
'Tis true my anger took a different turn
And grew more deeply rooted by reflection
But to cut short my tale, Alicia's Death
At length releas'd me.

(I, iii)

In a sense, Mortimer has undergone the struggles of a Gothic hero: he has had his love taken from him and been imprisoned. North suggests that the villain arises from the Gothic hero when he is ultimately frustrated: Clifford can remain a hero for he can confront his enemy and win his love, but Mortimer, imprisoned by the king, finds no outlet for his love or his hate and instead finds his emotions “more deeply rooted by reflection,” by the dangerous inward turn to self-consciousness that is found throughout the Gothic and romantic drama.

The psychological dynamics here might be glossed with Blake's “A Poison Tree”: “I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow.”³⁸ Such a dynamic is important, for it suggests that inwardness—a depth psychology itself—is the problem confronted, not celebrated, by the Gothic. The villain-hero interests us deeply, but that interest should not be confused with approval. Blake's poem outlines the pattern of Gothic psychology: the individual who tells his wrath—who externalizes his feelings and thus has no hidden inner life—provides the model for behavior, while he who internalizes his wrath—who creates an inner life from repressed desires and violent feelings—may be of greater interest but is clearly on the wrong path. Psychological readings of the Gothic often argue that these works are interested in exploring the byways of consciousness and the unconscious, but it would seem more accurate to say that having an interesting consciousness, being possessed by unconscious desires, is a mark of villainy. Heroes and heroines tend to be uninteresting in these works because they have no psychology; they are completely outward directed, controlled by conventions of appropriate heroic and moral behavior.

Whatever Mortimer's wrath, his energy is clearly sexual, and his pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh would have seemed extreme on the contemporary stage.

No hated Priest shall join our hands together,
Whose Hearts cou'd never pair. Yet I'll deceive her
With a feign'd Marriage: good, it shall be so:—
The live-long night I'll revel in her beauties,
And in the morning tell her she's undone.

(II, ii)

His desires and his hate are almost always thus intermixed:

Why thinkest thou, Osbert, that I brought her hither?
Thinkest thou 'twas only to enjoy her person?
That were but poor revenge; yet I'll enjoy her
And quickly too. No, I had rather blast
The fame of that detested house, than take
Venus array'd in all the fancy'd beauties
With which the poets deck the fickle goddess,
Kind, warm, and yielding to my ardent bosom.

(I, iii)

Elina finally sees him as a sadist, delighting only in the sufferings of others: “Nature cou'd never form so harsh a fiend, / So barbarous and inhuman, whose delight, / Whose only pleasure centers in the Pain / He can inflict on others” (II, ii). Erotic energy with a sadistic turn will mark many Gothic figures, finding its preeminent dramatic representation in Shelley's Count Cenci.

North, like most Gothic dramatists, sketches in the outlines of a tragedy surrounding his villain. These villains—so much closer than the official heroes to the Shakespearean figures most important to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stage such as the Machiavellian Richard III, the jealous Othello, the brooding Hamlet, or the murderous Macbeth—have the energy, the charismatic presence, and the absolute sense of their own selves that mark the tragic figure. North's hint that Mortimer is a warped Clifford is one clue that within the treatment of the villain-hero is a lament for lost heroic potential, for a titanic energy both needed and feared. Mortimer commands his play, and there is a sense of loss in his defeat. Mortimer also maintains his self-control, his firm sense of himself. While Evans is correct in noting that Mortimer at times reflects upon his villainy and even feels remorse for his crimes, he never comes to the renunciation of his ways, as would be the case in more conventionally melodramatic works.

Remorse is often seen as a key theme in these plays, and Coleridge's play by that title can then be read as a culminating work in the Gothic tradition. However, Coleridge's play is in fact written against one main (and more radical) line of development within the Gothic, and Mortimer finds his place within this alternative vision. At the close of the play, Mortimer seems to have defeated his heroic opponents, Osbert and Clifford, and is about to force Elina to marry him. He is prevented only by the sudden intervention of Clifford's friend Bertram, backed by a troop of soldiers. Mortimer recognizes he is defeated, but he does not repent as he speaks to Osbert:

                                                                                Ne'er till now
Did I despair. Even malice now forsakes me.
Oh! I did hope (fool that I was to spare thee),
That thou at least wou'dst have felt all my vengeance.
But if thy soul is noble, boy, revenge thee;
Insult me not with words; be merciful,
Be merciful, and kill me.

(III, i)

He leaves the stage not expressing remorse but advising Osbert of the necessity of violent revenge: “I cou'dn't kill thee; / It was the only weakness I e'er felt. … Boy, be wise; / Seize on this glorious opportunity, / To rid thee of a foe, whom nought but death / Can render tranquil” (III, i). Mortimer remains true to himself and thus retains his dignity. He has some of the power and grand self-assertion that marks an Othello or a Macbeth.

The attractions granted to a villain-hero such as Mortimer and the drift of Gothic plays towards a tragedy of the aristocrat's destruction should suggest to us that these plays do not embrace an unambiguous attitude towards the revolutionary movements of the day. While I have suggested that the largest pattern organizing these plays is a movement from enclosure to liberation, which mimics that of revolutionary festivals, it is important to remember that these plays also contain this potential tragic lament for a lost past. The overarching movement of these plays is that of liberation from the castle, its aristocratic villain, and the old regime it embodies; but as we watch these plays, we are drawn to the villain, his mysterious milieu, and the power granted him by his position and his heroic hauteur. We are invited to admire these oppressors, for they embody the possibility of an individual revolt counter to the communal liberation celebrated in hymeneal union and uncovered social identities. Shadowing the ideology of liberation is the ideology of the isolated rebel, the suggestion that true liberty lies not in the social rejuvenation captured by comedy and romance but in the isolated pursuit of the individual's fears and desires tracked by tragedy. In its own way, the Gothic stages the central ideological tension within revolutionary politics, that between liberty and equality, between the removal of all restrictions upon the individual and the assertion of communal bonds and thus limits. In a sense, the Gothic already stages the debate between Marat the egalitarian and Sade the aristocratic liberator of the self that Peter Weiss would offer in Marat/Sade.

Michel Foucault has suggested that the Gothic represents an “appropriation of criminality in acceptable forms,” as the popular criminal represented in broadsheets and viewed in public executions is replaced by the aristocratic villain-hero of the Gothic novel and crime fiction:

… a whole new literature of crime developed: a literature in which crime is glorified, because it is one of the fine arts, because it can be the work only of exceptional natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and powerful, because it reveals villainy is yet another mode of privilege: from the adventure story to de Quincey, or from the Castle of Otranto to Baudelaire, there is a whole aesthetic rewriting of crime, which is also the appropriation of criminality in acceptable forms. In appearance, it is the discovery of the beauty and greatness of crime; in fact, it is the affirmation that greatness too has a right to crime and that it even becomes the exclusive privilege of those who are really great. … The literature of crime transposes to another social class the spectacle that had surrounded the criminal. Meanwhile the newspapers took over the task of recounting the grey, unheroic details of everyday crime and punishment. The split was complete; the people was robbed of its old pride in its crimes; the great murders had become the quiet game of the well behaved.³⁹

In Foucault's version, the Gothic is a tactic of containment, a way for hegemonic social and cultural forces to combat the popular appeal of crime. However, the Gothic drama does not seem so much an art of containment as that of display; its strange “jumble” of forms does not so much contain one ideological vision within another as place them within a generic struggle, offering a kind of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. It is perhaps because the Gothic drama is so aesthetically confused, so “unacceptable” or “illegitimate,” that it does not clearly serve the ideological movement outlined by Foucault where crime is rendered aesthetic and acceptable. It is true that both the libertine, libertarian strain of the villain-hero's tragedy and the egalitarian, erotic theme of the lovers' romance would ultimately be contained within the turn to domestic morality that would mark the melodrama—in a sense, the comic domesticity offered within the Gothic (by Gam and his wife in The Kentish Barons) finally wins out over both aristocratic tragedy and revolutionary romance. But within the Gothic drama of the 1790s, the aristocratic villain and his opponents seem set against the status quo, against convention, against hegemonic containment. In deploying the iconography of the castle and its liberation, in engaging the various plot strands of its mixed form, the early Gothic drama explores private as well as social revolt. It was, as Coleridge saw in linking the Gothic's radicalism to its eroticism, the “modern jacobinical drama” because it offered models of both individual and collective revolt. Until its ultimate displacement by the domestic melodrama, the Gothic drama could be used to stage a protest—both aesthetic and ideological—against convention and containment, against generic and political hierarchy. The later history of the Gothic reveals its transformations as it was now bent to more conservative ends, as it now voiced radical concerns, and as now it wavered before the coming victory of the melodrama and the “realistic” drama.

North's Kentish Barons introduces us to all of the standard features of the Gothic drama except the one we most expect: the use of the supernatural. At least initially the Gothic drama shied away from ghosts and demons. Walpole—who loads The Castle of Otranto with supernatural occurrences—avoids putting them on stage in The Mysterious Mother. Jephson in revising Walpole's novel for the stage relegates its ghostly accoutrements to narrative passages. North follows this pattern in keeping The Kentish Barons strictly within the bounds of the natural, if not the believable; Julia of Louvain also stays clear of the supernatural.

The presence of the ghost within a play did not necessarily guarantee a dramatic excursion into a supernatural realm. Henry Siddons's The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliffs, as its title indicates, is part of the shift in Gothic taste during the 1790s that would climax in the famous ghost of Lewis's Castle Spectre. Throughout Siddons's play, we hear of a ghost stalking the rocks outside a castle. However, Siddons eventually offers a commonplace explanation for his ghost—it is the villain's imprisoned wife walking her rock prison—indicating that he adheres to the conventions established by the novels of Ann Radcliffe in which spirits and spectres are rationalized. This link may explain his decision to rename the play from The Castle of Otranto to The Sicilian Romance, as he tries to attach his play to first one and then the other of the most important Gothic novelists, to neither of whom is his play directly indebted.

We perhaps expect the supernatural in the Gothic drama because it plays such an important role in the Gothic novel from Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis to Stoker or James or Stephen King. However, the stage representation of the supernatural is a quite different thing from its presentation in a narrative, as was recognized by another imitator of Ann Radcliffe, James Boaden, whose Fontainville Forest (adapted from Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest) offered the most famous ghost scene before Lewis's Castle Spectre. Boaden was aware that the novelistic treatment of the supernatural would not work on stage:

[I] admired, as every one else did, the singular address by which Mrs. Radcliffe contrived to impress the mind with all the terrors of the ideal world; and the sportive resolution of all that had excited terror into very common natural appearances; indebted for their false aspect to circumstances and the overstrained feelings of the characters.

But, even in romance, it may be doubtful, whether there be not something ungenerous in thus playing upon poor timid human nature, and agonizing it with false terrors. The disappointment is, I know, always resented, and the laboured explanation commonly deemed the flattest and most uninteresting part of the production. Perhaps when the attention is once secured and the reason yielded, the passion for the marvellous had better remain unchecked; and an interest selected from the olden time be entirely subjected to its gothic machinery. However this may be in respect of romance, when the doubtful of the narrative is to be exhibited in the drama, the decision is a matter of necessity. While description only fixes the inconclusive dreams of the fancy, she may partake the dubious character of her inspirer; but the pen of the dramatic poet must turn everything into shape, and bestow on these “airy nothings a local habitation and a name.”⁴⁰

Boaden confronts directly the status of the supernatural in the novel that has come to occupy so much attention in twentieth-century criticism of the Gothic: the self-conscious, finally psychological exploration of the supernatural, the numinous, the divine. Margaret L. Carter's comments can be taken as typical: “an important use of the supernatural in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction is to provide space for speculation about nonmaterial dimensions of existence, without demanding a positive act of either acceptance or rejection … these stories characteristically use mediated narrative and limited perspective to invite the reader to identify with the protagonist's uncertainty. Thus an agnostic position regarding the supernatural is valorized.”⁴¹ Carter joins with Todorov, Siebers, and others in focusing upon texts that neither assert the reality of the supernatural (Todorov's category of the marvelous) nor explain away all preternatural occurrences (Todorov's uncanny) but instead engage speculative doubt about the more than human (Todorov's fantastic). Within the Gothic tradition, Radcliffe stands as an example of the tactic of offering a rational explanation that dispels the supernatural terror that attends her narratives, while Lewis was perhaps the most infamous example of the direct and unquestioned presentation of the demonic; Maturin in Melmoth the Wanderer, Shelley in Frankenstein, and Hogg in Confessions and Private Memoirs of a Justified Sinner followed the more ambiguous strategy of offering multiple, limited narratives and thus multiple, mediated theories of the supernatural.

Boaden makes the central point that this final option is not available to the dramatist. If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are also no agnostics about the supernatural on the stage. While the novelist engages “the inconclusive dreams of the fancy” and may allow the consciousness and “overstrained emotions” of the characters to mediate between the reader and the supernatural events, the dramatist must decide either to embody the supernatural or to banish it from the stage all together. Boaden himself followed both courses, literalizing Radcliffe's ghosts in Fontainville Forest but banishing Lewis's demons in his adaptation of The Monk into Aurelio and Miranda. Lewis himself would offer the most famous example of the direct presentation of the supernatural in the theater when he allowed his much-protested ghost to glide across the stage in The Castle Spectre.

We find the novel's ambiguous and psychological treatment of the supernatural or demonic—the Gothic version of natural supernaturalism—to be the most interesting, but the drama's turn to either rational explanation of the numinous or direct representation of the spiritual had a more radical potential in the theater of the day. There seems to have been a general critical perception that religion was too serious a matter for literary representation, as we can see in comments ranging from Johnson's claim that any attempt to embellish Biblical texts and stories is “frivolous and vain … not only useless, but in some degree profane” to the attacks on Byron's Cain which, Truman Guy Steffan notes, were grounded on the view that “literature should not deal with theological or controversial matters, nor even with biblical subjects, and that Cain should never have been written or published.”⁴² The problem would seem to have been the greatest on the stage, as we can see from the censor's attempts to exclude all religious language from the texts he licensed. We repeatedly find passages using references to the divine marked for change or omission in the licensing manuscripts; in Lewis's Castle Spectre, for example, we find that even the word “hallelujah” was offensive and had to be replaced by “jubilate.”⁴³ When expressions such as “The Almighty” made it past the censor, then the slip was sure to be remarked upon by some reviewer. For example, the Monthly Mirror had this to say about The Castle Spectre, in complaining about the villain-hero's atheism and the “frequent appeals to Heaven, with a levity unusual to our stage”: “The licenser, if he had known the intention of his office, would have struck his pen across such expressions as ‘Saviour of the world,’ ‘God of Heaven,’ etc.”⁴⁴ This wide criticism of the use of religious language suggests that there was agreement that the divine was not to be represented—or even referred to—upon stage.

We can see this attitude again behind the reactions to Boaden's transformation of The Monk into Aurelia and Miranda. The play's composer, Kelly, reports that the play was objected to because “many thought it indecorous to represent a church on the stage.” Kemble's impersonation of the monk was found inappropriate because it was so believable; the Duke of Leeds complained, for example, that “his religious feelings hardly allowed him to tolerate the powerful effects, which he saw produced upon the stage.”⁴⁵ Shelley's The Cenci was found similarly offensive in its suggestion that religion can coexist with sinful acts. The British Review fumed that “There is something extremely shocking in finding the truths, the threats, and the precepts of religion in the mouth of a wretch, at the very moment that he is planning or perpetrating crimes at which nature shudders. In this intermixture of things, sacred and impure, Mr. Shelley is not inconsistent if he believes that religion is in Protestant countries hypocrisy, and that it is in Roman Catholic countries ‘adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration; not a rule for moral conduct, and that it has no necessary connexion with any one virtue.’—(Preface, p. 13.) Mr. Shelley is in an error. …”⁴⁶ If Byron in Cain reveals the radical potential in reworking the Bible—and thus realizes the fears of the censor who banned religious language—Shelley pushes the kind of indecorous representation of religious behavior that was objected to even in the mild form of Kemble's performance of Boaden's Monk.

There is, then, always a hint of blasphemy in such representations of the spiritual or numinous. Theatrical managers tried to block the appearances of ghosts, even though they proved to be good theater. Boaden insisted upon his ghost in Fontainville Forest, even though the management objected to it; the ghost appeared but only in a scene edited down to meet the complaints. Again, Lewis stubbornly refused to edit out his castle spectre, even though everyone involved with the production opposed its inclusion. The managers were obviously aware of the trouble such scenes could cause with the censors or with censorious critics such as Genest who found that Boaden's ghost rendered the play “contemptible,” the same comment he makes upon The Castle Spectre: “the plot is rendered contemptible by the introduction of the Ghost.”⁴⁷

We can begin to understand the ideological implications of the Gothic's representation of the religious and the numinous if we glance at their treatment of the clergy and of nunneries. Given the range of references, we might assume that the status of ecclesiastical orders and institutions was a central issue in England of the day. Siddons's hero in The Sicilian Romance has called for the abolition of monasteries. Boaden noted that the Gothic “history” play The Island of St. Marguerite contained an allusion “to the dissolution of nunneries [that] was loudly applauded by such as knew nothing but the abuses of such institutions.”⁴⁸ The title character of Julia of Louvain is given a choice between marriage and the convent, the horrors of the latter being painted for her in a song about the trials of being a nun (sc. vii). Lewis's Venomi was an adaptation of the notoriously anti-clerical Les Victimes Cloîtrées, and his portrayal of Father Philip in The Castle Spectre led Genest to observe, “where a Friar was concerned, Lewis's mind was strangely warped.”⁴⁹ One might read these as merely expressing popular anti-Catholic sentiment, but in the charged atmosphere of the 1790s it is likely they were seen as a more general assault upon religion. It is noteworthy that Boaden complains about the audience's quick approval of an attack upon convent life; and it is even more important that this incident immediately brings to his mind the performance in Paris of Chénier's Charles IX, the first important political play performed under the French Revolution and one which Boaden in this passage links directly to the ultimate decision to guillotine the king. If the portrayal of anti-monarchical sentiments could lead to the death of a king, then the representation of anti-clerical feelings could lead to assaults upon the established church.

Of course, the presence of the supernatural in the Gothic drama is not always so strictly tied to Christianity. Ghosts may or may not have a providential function, and such figures as Lewis's Wood Daemon presumably do not. This move beyond conventional religious images had its own radical potential, however, as Byron's Manfred suggests. His poetic drama is a syncretic attempt to invoke a whole series of alternative religious visions—what the Literary Gazette calls his “heterogeneous assemblage of mythology.”⁵⁰ The very mixed nature of his play's supernatural framework suggests that no single religious system can encompass man and his life. We get a taste of Byron's tactics in the first scene, where four nature spirits appear, apparently representing air, earth, water, and fire; but Byron adds three more spirits to break the traditional pattern of the four elements. Throughout the play, he interrupts or disrupts traditional religious structures, and thus his play finally comes to define a human life outside of religion. Faced with such partial religious visions, Manfred rejects the lure of the supernatural—from the elemental spirits of the first act to Arimanes in the second act and the God of the Abbot in the last act.

That a supernatural play could thus be agnostic or even atheistical would not have surprised the conservative opponents of the Gothic drama. Criticisms like that in the Monthly Mirror about the The Castle Spectre's turn to “German” atheism suggest that the protectors of traditional faith were wary of the intention behind the presentation of the supernatural on stage. Osmond, like Manfred or more directly like Don Giovanni, confronts what he believes to be a spirit (it is, in fact, the hero Percy in disguise), proclaiming, “Hell and fiends! I'll follow him, though lightnings blast me!” (II, i). Osmond can be seen to represent a dangerous inclination not to believe in the power of the supernatural; in fact, a great part of his appeal was his willingness to stand against even supernatural opponents. Coleridge well understood this appeal, while lamenting it, in his attack in the Biographia Literaria upon Maturin's Bertram as a play which offers a “supernatural effect without even a hint of any supernatural agency.”⁵¹

These various treatments of the supernatural and the objections to them again suggest the ideological impact of the Gothic's sensationalist techniques. When these techniques were used to display spectacular effects without a supernatural explanation as in Bertram, there was a suggestion that life, even in its extraordinary moments, can be understood without recourse to religion. When sensationalism was used to depict the supernatural, there was a suggestion that the absolute itself—as revealed through spectres, and wood daemons, and figures like Byron's Arimanes—cannot be comprehended by established religion, that the absolute defies all traditional visions and interpretations. The union of sensationalist techniques and religious or supernatural subject matter may not produce the subtle uncanny effects of self-reflexive narratives, but it did provide a potentially radical message in the days of the Revolution, when the disestablishment of the Church was as central an issue as the dismantling of the monarchy. …

Notes

1. Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 76. John Waldie, Journals and Letters of John Waldie of Hendersyde Park, Kelso, Scotland, University of California at Los Angeles MSS. 169. The first performance Waldie records in his journals is on 26 January 1799 (vol. IV, 169/89, 2), an Edinburgh performance he compares to an earlier staging at Newcastle; he also records seeing the play on 2 September 1805 (vol. XI, 169/14, 331-33) and on 17 April 1809 (vol. XIX, 169/19, 92-93), and makes a reference to the play as late as 7 March 1820 (vol. tXLV, 169/32, 167). For performances in London, see The London Stage 1660-1800, ed. Emmett L Avery, Charles Beecher Hogan, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone, Jr., and William Van Lennep, 5 parts, 11 vols. (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1960-68); for information on revivals, see Victorian Plays: A Record of Significant Productions on the London Stage, 1837-1901, ed. Donald Mullin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987).

2. Biographia Dramatica (London: Longman, Hurst et al., 1812), 2:87.

3. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

4. George Rowell, ed., Nineteenth Century Plays (1953; 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); the earliest play included is Jerrold's Black-Ey'd Susan (Surrey, 1829). Robert W. Corrigan, ed., Laurel British Drama: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Dell, 1967); the earliest play included is Boucicault's London Assurance (Covent Garden, 1841). Gerald B. Kauvar and Gerald C. Sorenson, eds., Nineteenth-Century English Verse Drama (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973). Michael R. Booth, ed., English Plays of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1: Dramas 1800-1850, vol. 2: Dramas 1850-1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Booth does contain verse plays by Knowles and Bulwer-Lytton but no plays by major poets of the century. The most useful anthology for my approach is that of J. O. Bailey, British Plays of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology to Illustrate the Evolution of the Drama (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966); while, as its subtitle indicates, it adopts an evolutionary scheme that necessarily subordinates the early part of the century to the later, the volume contains verse plays (including Bertram) and prose works, tragedies as well as melodramas, plays from the Romantic as well as the Victorian period. There has been one previous anthology of Gothic plays, Stephen Wischhusen's The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas (London: Gordon Fraser, 1975), which contains facsimile reprints of earlier editions of Lewis's The Castle Spectre, Holcroft's Tale of Mystery, Planché's Vampire, Milner's Frankenstein, and Fitzball's The Devil's Elixir and The Flying Dutchman.

5. Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., Romantic Contraries: Freedom Versus Destiny (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama From Walpole To Shelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947).

6. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest (London: The Fortune Press, 1939). Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980; rpt. New York: Methuen, 1986).

7. Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: Arthur Barker, 1957). Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). R. D. Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Peter Brooks, “Virtue and Terror: The Monk,” ELH 40 (1973): 249-63. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). I am indebted to these and many other studies of the Gothic novel; to name only a few additional items: Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel In England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972); Elizabeth McAndrews, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980); and G. R. Thompson, ed., The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1974).

8. See Joseph Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean (Totowa, NJ: Rowan & Littlefield, 1975); Greater London Council, Survey of London, vol. 35: The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden (London: Athlone Press, 1970); R. Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); and The Georgian Playhouse: Actors, Artists, and Architecture 1730-1830, An Exhibition designed by Iain Mackintosh (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975).

9. Memoirs of Richard Cumberland Written by Himself (London: Lackington, Allen, & Co., 1807), 2:384.

10. See Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean, pp. 8-14, 31-38; Dennis Arundell, The Story of Sadler's Wells (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1965); and A. H. Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse: A History of the Hippodrama in England and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

11. Donohue, Theatre in the Age of Kean, pp. 46-50; and his “Burletta and the Early Nineteenth-Century English Theatre,” Nineteenth Century Theatre Research 1 (Spring 1973): 29-53.

12. See David Mayer, Harlequin in His Element (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse; Michael Booth, Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980) and Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850-1910 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); and Marian Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1962).

13. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (1832; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), 7:38.

14. Barry Sutcliffe, “Introduction,” Plays by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 1-8.

15. See the list of plays in Evans, Gothic Drama, pp. 239-45.

16. Walpole, Mysterious Mother, in vol. 1 of The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford (London: Robinson & Edwards, 1798).

17. Walpole, “Postscript,” Mysterious Mother, in Works, 1:125.

18. Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 6-9.

19. James Cobb, The Haunted Tower (Dublin: P. Burne, 1790; Songs, Duets, Trios, and Chorusses, in The Haunted Tower was published in London: J. Jarvis, 1789). Miles Peter Andrews, “Preface,” The Enchanted Castle, 1786, unpublished (The Songs, Recitatives, Airs, Duets, Trios, and Chorusses Introduced in the Pantomime Entertainment, of The Enchanted Castle was published in London, 1786); the play is presumably, as Evans argues, the same as the Larpent Collection play, The Castle of Wonders, Larpent Collection of Licensing Manuscripts, Henry Huntington Library, San Marino, California, LA 536; quoted in Evans, Gothic Drama, p. 67.

20. Biographia Dramatica, 2:354. Genest, English Stage, 7:37. The London Stage is the best resource for information about runs at Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket.

21. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (1825; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 2:206.

22. The Anti-Jacobin, 4 June 1798 (rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1968), p. 236.

23. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1802), in The Oxford Authors William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 599.

24. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:221.

25. Sir Walter Scott, “Drama,” Supplement to … the Encyclopedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1824), 3:669; quoted in Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 148.

26. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (1827; rpt. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1893), p. 435.

27. Boaden, Kemble, 2:11.

28. From a letter (1809), quoted in James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (London, 1833), 2:143.

29. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in vol. 1 of Works (New York: George Dearborn, 1836): 459, 483-84.

30. Walpole, Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 5.

31. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 182-84.

32. Citations from plays included in this collection will be given in the text and will give either act and scene numbers or my page numbers; bibliographic data can be found in the headnote to the respective play.

33. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 126-29.

34. Frye, Anatomy, pp. 163-71.

35. Anti-Jacobin, 11 June 1798, p. 245. Byron would, of course, use this line in the “Addition to the Preface” for Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in vol. 2 of The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

36. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 28.

37. Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1982), pp. 35-40. On Lovelace, see Anthony Winner, “Richardson's Lovelace: Character and Prediction,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 14 (1972): 45-60.

38. Blake, “A Poison Tree,” 11. 1-8, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (1965; rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

39. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 68-69.

40. Boaden, Kemble, 2:97.

41. Margaret L. Carter, Spectre or Delusion? The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction, Studies in Speculative Fiction, 15 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986), pp. 1, 3. See also Tobin Siebers, The Romantic Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

42. Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:49-50; Truman Guy Steffan, Lord Byron's “Cain”: Twelve Essays and a Text with Variants and Annotations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), p. 333.

43. Lewis, Castle Spectre, IV, ii, LA 1187; the manuscript has “Hallelujah” crossed out by Larpent.

44. Monthly Mirror, 1 December 1797: 355.

45. Michael Kelley, Reminiscences, ed. Roger Fiske (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 252. The Duke of Leeds is quoted in Boaden, Kemble, 2:230. Both comments are quoted by Steven Cohan, “Introduction,” The Plays of James Boaden (New York: Garland, 1980), p. xxxix.

46. British Review, 17 June 1821: 380-89; in Romantic Bards and British Reviewers, ed. John O. Hayden (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), p. 393.

47. Genest, English Stage, 7:163, 333.

48. Boaden, Kemble, 2:11-12.

49. Genest, English Stage, 7:333.

50. Literary Gazette, 21 June 1817: 337-38; in Romantic Bards, p. 234.

51. Coleridge, Biographia, 2:222.