ABSTRACT
British Gothic drama was indebted to other influences, of course, most obviously the German Sturm und Drang drama of Schiller and von Kotzebue, as well as to the indigenous Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Mary Anne Radcliffe and others. In Gothic drama there are notably strong women, like Nancy in James Cross’s Black Beard, or The Captive Princess or Lady Roskelyn in Polack’s St Clair of the Isles. Gothic speaks to the age politically, its agitations and tumults reflecting those in the political sphere. Many of the key facets of the Gothic drama are to be found in Thomas Holcroft’s pivotal play, A Tale of Mystery. Gothic drama made a clean break from the comedies of the Enlightenment, a Dionysian assertion of the power of the imagination and the validity of emotional experience. The final critical ingredient in the Gothic drama is the supernatural, which takes the tale out of the everyday and introduces the sublime or the demonic.
