ABSTRACT
A comparative analysis may be expedient to prove the existence of a continuum in eighteenth-century textual practices as well as to broaden our perception of the stage appropriations of the Gothic. The generic bending typical of stage Gothic is turned into bland supernaturalism with didactic undertones. In Wilkinson's reassuringly domestic revision of M. G. Lewis's Gothic drama the epithalamic dénouement dispenses reassurances and promises of a better future to everybody, be they among the living or the dead. The dramatic structure of the action of Lewis's The Castle Spectre is built on one main dramatic line: Percy's release of Angela, imprisoned by her uncle Osmond who wants to marry the girl against her will. An Ancient Baronial Romance, a six-pence abridgment of Lewis's The Castle Spectre published in London in 1820. Osmond's black servants, arguably Lewis's most overt and, at the time, controversial political statement, are relegated to the side-lines of action.
