SOURCE: "Three Tyrants in The Castle of Otranto," English Language Notes, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, September, 1988, pp. 26-35.

[In the following essay, Dole suggests that Walpole borrowed a number of Shakespearean characters, themes, and motifs in writing The Castle of Otranto in response to current political events.]

Horace Walpole's well-known account of the genesis of The Castle of Otranto indicates that he wrote the first Gothic romance in an effort to distract himself from disturbing political events:

I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics—In short I was … engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months.¹

A member of Parliament for twenty-seven years, Walpole was often deeply involved in political intrigue, usually to promote the causes of friends such as his cousin Henry Conway, to whom he was deeply devoted. When Walpole began his novel in June 1764, he was obsessed with a controversy surrounding Conway. The previous year John Wilkes, a member of the House of Commons, had published an article attacking George III. Wilkes was arrested on a General Warrant, a warrant not unlike the notorious French lettres de cachet. At Walpole's instigation, Conway, a member of Parliament as well as an army officer, voted against the General Warrants and related issues. As a consequence, he was dismissed in April 1764 from his positions as regimental commander and Groom of the King's Bedchamber. Walpole, enraged at these tyrannous actions against his cousin and others who spoke their minds, wrote a pamphlet on the subject in June, and throughout the summer tried to organize active opposition.² As his Memoirs attest, tyranny was Walpole's bete noire. In his bedroom he hung a copy of the warrant for the execution of Charles I, which he inscribed "Major Charta."³ Walpole did not oppose monarchy, but he detested a monarch who overstepped his powers—as George III had just done.⁴ Therefore tyrants were very much on Walpole's mind in June 1764 when he conceived The Castle of Otranto.

It is hardly surprising that tyranny, imaged as a giant armored hand, should be one of the elements of Walpole's feverish dream and, in the person of the tyrant Manfred, of Walpole's Gothic romance. But Walpole could hardly model his fictional tyrant openly on his own monarch.⁵ I will argue that in creating the powerful, passion-ridden Manfred, a monstrous personification of his vision of his own monarch at this period, Walpole drew on two other tyrants, one fictional and one historical: Leontes and Henry VIII.

Walpole's second preface to the novel, written in 1765 after the popularity of the first edition had convinced him to reveal his authorship, attests that he copied "that great master of nature, Shakespeare," especially in creating the comic foibles of the domestics of Otranto. Walpole repeatedly invokes England's "brightest genius" as his model:

I might have pleaded, that having created a new species of romance, I was at liberty to lay down what rules I thought fit for the conduct of it: but I should be more proud of having imitated, however faintly, weakly, and at a distance, so masterly a pattern, than to enjoy the entire merit of invention.⁶

Taking this cue, critics have pointed to Walpole's borrowing of scenes and motifs from a number of Shakespearean plays.⁷ It is possible to make too much of Walpole's use of the supernatural, which probably had more to do with his desire to recreate the Middle Ages than it did with his admiration of the Bard, but the plot parallels between Otranto and one of the late plays are too numerous to be coincidental.⁸The Winter's Tale, like Otranto a romance set in Italy in the distant past, chronicles the consequences of the tyrannical acts of a monarch very like Manfred.

But The Winter's Tale, one immediately objects, seems not at all like Otranto, for its effect is that of the wondrous, not the terrible. The magical mood of the later acts of Shakespeare's play, however, is very different from that of the first half of his tale "Of sprites and goblins,"⁹ which is replete with the "pity" and "terror" that Walpole, in his first preface, attributes to his own story (p. 4). When The Castle of Otranto closes, Manfred is in the same state in which we see Leontes just before the action shifts to Bohemia: horrified, repentant, and alone.

The striking plot parallels testify to Walpole's debt to the play.¹⁰ Each work centers on a ruler and his wife—in Shakespeare, Leontes and Hermione, King and Queen of Sicilia; in Walpole, Manfred and Hippolita, Prince and Princess of Otranto. Each couple has a daughter and a son; the mother loves both children but the father loves only the son. Leontes has evident cause to love his charming little boy, Mamillius, "a gallant child" who "makes old hearts fresh" (I.i.36-37). He hates his newborn daughter, later named Perdita, for an even stronger reason: he believes her to be the child of his friend Polixenes. Manfred's similar feelings are unmotivated: he dotes on his son Conrad, "a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition" (p. 15), while showing no affection for his beautiful and virtuous daughter, Matilda. In each tale, the son dies unexpectedly at a moment of crisis—Mamillius, as his mother is undergoing trial for adultery; Conrad, moments before his marriage to a woman Manfred has chosen to strengthen his claim to Otranto.

For each ruler, the loss of the son means the loss of an heir. Since Hippolita is too old to bear children and since Hermione dies (ostensibly) when she learns of her son's death, each father is left with no issue other than one daughter. Yet each father, under a misapprehension, violently disposes of his daughter: Leontes orders his to be abandoned because he believes her to be another man's child, and Manfred kills his in a fit of jealousy, mistaking her for Isabella, his son's betrothed and the object of his own passion. Neither man can remarry to obtain a new heir; Manfred cannot get rid of his wife, and Leontes cannot get rid of his wife's memory.

Loving and dutiful, the two rejected wives are similar in character. Leontes' daughter, Perdita, and Manfred's foster daughter, Isabella, are similar not only in personality but in situation. Both are lost from infancy but at last restored to fathers they do not recognize. Both are faced with the incestuous attentions of a parental figure: for Perdita this is no more than Leontes' remark to Florizel that "I'd beg your precious mistress" (V.i.222), but for Isabella it is a desperate flight from the passions of Manfred, who has raised her and who claims, when it serves him, "I am her parent" (p. 47). And both are virtuous young women in love with a prince disguised as a peasant.

In working out these similar plots, Walpole and Shakespeare select the same motifs from romance tradition. One is the token by which a lost child might be known. In The Castle of Otranto, Theodore, lost to his father since age five when he was taken by pirates from Sicily—the setting also of The Winter's Tale—is identified as Jerome's son by his birthmark and by the writings his mother bound to him. Likewise, in The Winter's Tale, Perdita is identified by her mother's jewel and the letters of Antigonus. A second motif is that of innate aristocracy. Just as the supposed shepherdess Perdita seems to Polixenes "something greater than herself (IV.iv.158), the disguised Theodore strikes Manfred as animated by sentiments unusual for a "peasant within the sight of death" (p. 52). A third motif is that of art come to life. In The Winter's Tale, the statue of Hermione turns out to be the living woman; in Otranto, a statue bleeds, and a portrait descends from its frame and walks away.

The two troubled kingdoms are restored to right order in the same way: through the miraculous. Supernatural portents reveal Theodore to be the legitimate ruler of Otranto; and the seemingly miraculous animation of the "statue" of Hermione (who has been hidden for the sixteen years she was believed dead) and the unlikely return of the long-lost Perdita restore harmony to Sicilia.

The most compelling parallel between these two works is the resemblance of Manfred to Leontes. As Shakespeare's play opens, Leontes appears to be a devoted husband, father, and friend. The reactions of his courtiers to the sudden on-set of his jealous tyranny suggest that they are accustomed to a rational, moderate king. His abrupt transformation is the result of an action which he himself has urged: Hernione's successful plea to her husband's friend Polixenes that he prolong his visit. Leontes' jealousy is as extreme as it is quick. When his secret attempt to murder Polixenes fails, he denounces and imprisons the queen, in spite of her advanced pregnancy, refusing to listen to her or to anyone else. Yet his people still seek to excuse their king as the victim of passion, madness, or deception rather than judge him a tyrant. After bringing him his new-born daughter, whom he rejects in spite of her obvious resemblance to him, Paulina moves a step closer to the dreadful epithet: "I'll not call you tyrant; / But this most cruel usage of your queen … something savors / Of tyranny" (II.iii.1 15-19). In spite of the warning, Leontes sends the baby to be bumt or abandoned. But he remains conscious of the accusation, for he opens his wife's trial by saying, "Let us be cleared / Of being tyrannous, since we so openly / Proceed injustice" (III.ii.4-6). Nonetheless, the queen speaks of his tyranny and calls on Apollo to judge her. Although he himself had sent for the oracle to judge the case, Leontes rejects it when it pronounces him a "jealous tyrant" (III.ii. 132). His blasphemy is answered with the immediate announcement of his son's death.

The characterization of Leontes, then, mingles hatred of tyranny with a fundamental faith in monarchy—both elements of Walpole's attitude toward his own king. Walpole, though a Whig who "approve[d] the name of King" only "when it exclude[d] the essence,"¹¹ was nonetheless committed to the Hanoverian line that his father (Sir Robert Walpole) had served and the people had chosen, and was, as an antiquary, keenly interested in courts and castles. Leontes provided a model for both the attractive and the dangerous faces of kingship, with the latter predominant—an emphasis particularly suitable to Walpole's anger at George III in 1764.

Walpole's mixed attitude toward monarchy, along with his adoption of the Janus-like Leontes as a model for his own fictional tyrant, helps explain the oddity of characterization that critics, most recently Elizabeth Napier, have remarked in Manfred.¹² The novel waffles on whether Manfred is a tyrannous villain or a just ruler gone wrong. The descriptions of Manfred's "severe temper" in the opening pages seem to brand him a tyrant even before we witness his many wrongdoings (p. 15): his cruelty to his wife, his pursuit of Isabella, his unjust condemnation of Theodore, and finally the murder of his own daughter. Yet Manfred's family and retinue, like Leontes', are slow to admit his tyranny; they attribute his excesses to his disordering by grief. The narrator too tries to excuse him:

Manfred was not one of those savage tyrants who wanton in cruelty unprovoked. The circumstances of his fortune had given an asperity to his temper, which was naturally humane; and his virtues were always ready to operate, when his passions did not obscure his reason. (p. 30)

But finally Theodore pronounces him a tyrant, and in later chapters Manfred is referred to as "the Tyrant" in exposition as well as in dialogue. A clumsy narrative device at the end of Chapter I frees Walpole to paint Manfred as thoroughly villainous in the rest of the novel:

Ashamed too of his inhuman treatment of a princess, who returned every injury with new marks of tendemess and duty, he felt returning love forcing itself into his eyes—but not less ashamed of feeling remorse towards one, against whom he was inwardly meditating a yet more bitter outrage, he curbed the yearnings of his heart, and did not dare to lean even towards pity. The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy. (p. 35)

The metamorphosis from despot to hyperbolic villain gives Walpole the opportunity to indulge in a fantasy of revenge against his own tyrannous king. That fantasy too borrows its shape from The Winter's Tale. Both Leontes and Manfred are punished when they refuse to heed the criticism of others (as had George III) or even to respect supernatural portents. Just as Leontes insists the oracle is false, Manfred defies gigantic ghosts and walking portraits, vowing, "Heaven nor hell shall impede my designs" (p. 23). After both tyrants ignore enigmatic prophecies regarding the succession to their dominions, supernatural agents finally force them to acknowledge their wrongs. Each ruler finally commits himself to a long period of celibate repentance: Leontes mourns at the chapel containing his wife's purported tomb every day for sixteen years, and Manfred enters the convent.

The extraordinary number of similarities between The Winter's Tale and Otranto testifies that Walpole turned to Shakespeare for a model when fashioning his dream, and his obsession with a king's tyranny, into a novel. Whether Walpole's use of The Winter's Tale was deliberate, or unconscious—as would befit a romance bred of a dream—is less certain. After all, why would Walpole deliberately adopt a fictional despot as the model for his exaggerated portrait of George III, when there were so many English kings he regarded as reprehensible tyrants?

One answer is that Walpole regarded Leontes not as an imaginary character but as a portrait of an English king. A lengthy digression in Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), a study in which Walpole tries to exonerate Richard III, claims that The Winter's Tale is in reality a veiled historical play, "which was certainly intended (in compliment to Queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother Anne Boleyn." Walpole goes on to compare Leontes to Henry VIII, Hermione to Anne Boleyn, and Mamillius to Anne's "still-born son," concluding that The Winter's Tale "was therefore in reality a second part of Henry the Eighth."¹³

No great leap is needed to move from the similarity between Henry's story and Leontes' to the similarity between Henry's story and Manfred's. "The unreasonable jealousy of Leontes," Walpole claims, "and his violent conduct in consequence, form a true portrait of Henry the Eighth, who generally made the law the engine of his boisterous passions."¹⁴ He alludes, of course, to Henry's possibly unfounded accusation that Anne Boleyn was an adulteress and traitor, for which she was condemned to death—circumstances very like those of Leontes and Hermione. But in fact Henry VIII is more generally remembered for the momentous decision he shares with Manfred: to divorce his first wife for a younger woman who could provide him with a male heir. Henry's dilemma closely paralleled that of Manfred after his son's death: no male heir, one daughter, and a barren wife. Both husbands seized on the same solution, a divorce based on the claim that the first marriage was null because it was a form of incest. Both men argued that the death of the children had proved God's judgment on the marriage. Both presented their suits to the Church (represented in Otranto by Father Jerome), and both were told to wait, only to have their petitions denied in the end. Walpole's characterization of Manfred as a tyrant subject to unruly passions matches his description of Henry VIII as "a tyrant" ruled by "boisterous passions." And like Manfred, Henry was a murderer, "that butchering Husband our Henry 8th."¹⁵

There are also intriguing parallels between Henry's family and Manfred's. Edward, Henry's only son and heir, was, like Manfred's son Conrad, a sickly youth who died at the age of fifteen. Henry's daughter Elizabeth has a counterpart in Isabella (Manfred's foster daughter), whose name is a variant of hers. It is Isabella who, having married Theodore, eventually inherits Manfred's dominion, just as Elizabeth, though last in the line of succession, was the only one of Henry's children to get a firm hold on the throne.

The usurpation theme of Walpole's novel, which is related neither to Leontes nor to George III, has its source in Henry's story. Manfred's villainies stem principally from his attempt to retain the principality that his grandfather had usurped. Henry VIII, who united the long-feuding houses of Lancaster and York, would seem to have a legitimate claim to his title. Not so, in Walpole's view. Walpole defended the claim of Richard III, who lost the throne to Henry's father. Of Henry VII and Henry VIII Walpole remarks, "The former, all the world agrees now, had no title: the latter had none from his father and a very defective one from his mother."¹⁶ Thus Walpole regarded Henry VIII as a usurper as well as a tyrant, just like Manfred.

The association of Manfred with Leontes and Henry VIII is valuable in suggesting reasons for some of the oddities of characterization in Walpole's novel, and intriguing in adding another ingredient to the strange brew of motifs that was to define the Gothic novel tradition. More importantly, the recognition of Manfred's similarity to three tyrants—Leontes, Henry VIII, and George III—alerts us that tyranny is a central concern of The Castle of Otranto. The preface to the first edition identifies the moral of the book differently: "the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation" (p. 5). But this ostensible moral is a red herring, as the preface itself hints. Speaking from the safe vantage of "William Marshal, Gent.," purported translator of a rediscovered Italian manuscript, Walpole doubts whether in Manfred's time, "any more than at present, ambition curbed its appetite of dominion from the dread of so remote a punishment" (p. 5). This veiled thrust at George III suggests that The Castle of Otranto may not be the innocent fantasy Walpole always claimed it to be.¹⁷ With his love of covert political maneuvering, the man who could interpret The Winter's Tale as a Tudor roman a clef was certainly capable of concealing a political tract in a Gothic romance. But whether the novel originated in shrewd plotting or fevered fantasy, the association of Manfred with historical tyrants, and with a fictional tyrant Walpole believed to be the portrait of a historical tyrant, argues that the true moral of the novel is found in Manfred's tormented cry in the concluding pages of the book (p. 109): "List, sirs, and may this bloody record be a warning to future tyrants!"

Notes

¹Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven, 1937-1983), I, 88.

² See R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Horace Walpole: A Biography (Ithaca, 1966), 198-203. Walpole's own account of the Wilkes affair appears in his Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, ed. G. F. Russell Barker, 4 vols. (New York, 1894), I, 319-330; II, 1-9.

³Correspondence, IX, 197-198.

⁴ Although the Wilkes incident brought Walpole's anxieties about royal prerogative to a pitch, his concern about the concentration of power at Court had begun in the time of George II and intensified throughout the reign of his successor (Memoirs of King George II, ed. John Brooke, 3 vols. [New Haven, 1985], II, 3). All the measures of George III, Walpole judged, "tended to the sole object of acting by his own will" (Memoirs of George III, IV, 84; see also Correspondence, XXXI, 285).

⁵ Lacking sufficient support among the Opposition, Walpole feared to attack George III openly in spite of his rage at the king's treatment of Conway. His memoirs, which he designed to be published only a quarter-century after his death, record this fear: "I had seen the fate of Wilkes, abandoned by all he had served; and had no mind to accompany him in his exile" (Memoirs of George III, II, 3). Upon Conway's dismissal, Walpole's tactics were characteristically indirect: he secluded himself to conceal his "rage" and vowed revenge, choosing the pen as his weapon (Memoirs of George III, I, 325; II, 3). The pen too he wielded indirectly. His pamphlet, "A Counter Address to the Public on the Late Dismission of a General Officer," is an attack not on the king but on his advisors and on the author of a previous pamphlet. If his novel, written within days of the pamphlet, was also directed at George III, it would be similarly indirect.

⁶The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (New York, 1964), 12. Parenthetical citations of the novel and its prefaces are to this edition.

⁷ In his introduction to the novel (p. xiv), Lewis cites several "conspicuous" borrowings from Macbeth, Hamlet, Cymbeline, and Romeo and Juliet. Eino Railo, in The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism (New York, 1927), and Devendra Varma, in The Gothic Flame (London, 1957), provide numerous Shakespearean analogues to Walpole's novel, many involving use of the supernatural. Both Walter Raleigh (The English Novel [London, 1894]) and Jess Stein ("Horace Walpole and Shakespeare," Studies in Philology, 31 [1934], 51-68) find parallels but object that there are fundamental differences in the effect of the supernatural in Walpole and in Shakespeare.

⁸ Railo notes the plot similarities briefly (pp. 35-36).

⁹The Winter's Tale, II.i.26, in Shakespeare's Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York, 1977).

¹⁰ Although Walpole mentions The Winter's Tale less frequently than he does some of Shakespeare's other plays, his letters suggest that he knew it in considerable detail (Correspondence, XXIX, 11-12; XLI, 291). He may well have seen it performed in 1741 or 1742, the only times during his life prior to the publication of Otranto that Shakespeare's version was performed, for he was in London during that period and very interested in the theater. During the 1750s and 60s only substantially altered versions of the play were staged, notably David Garrick's Florizel and Perdita—which Walpole owned in its 1762 edition. Although Garrick's play may have renewed Walpole's interest in Shakespeare's, Walpole is unlikely to have been influenced by Garrick's version, given his aversion to Garrick's alterations of Shakespeare's plays. See Correspondence, I, 248; and W. S. Lewis, "Edmond Malone, Horace Walpole, and Shakespeare," in Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn, ed. Rene Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford, 1979), 355-360.

¹¹Memoirs of George II, II, 3.

¹² Napier, in The Failure of Gothic (New York, 1987), 94, attributes the mixed characterization of Manfred to Walpole's "willingness to violate character to move the storyline ahead."

¹³Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (London, 1768), 114-116. Walpole is mistaken, of course, about the compliment to Queen Elizabeth. Modern scholars date the play at 1610-11, several years after James I took the throne. Walpole would not have known the date of composition, especially since this particular play was first published in the 1623 folio.

¹⁴Historic Doubts, 115.

¹⁵Reminiscences Written by Mr. Horace Walpole in 1788, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1924), 24.

¹⁶Historic Doubts, 100.

¹⁷ Walpole consistently spoke of his romance as an amusing trifle. See Correspondence, XV, 105; XXXI, 221.