Afterword: The ‘grounds’ of the Shakespeare–Gothic relationship

doi:10.4324/9780203885741-17

ABSTRACT

Ever since Horace Walpole ‘sheltered my own daring under the canon’ of the ‘genius’ Shakespeare in his 1765 Preface to the Second Edition of The Castle of Otranto (Walpole 2003: 70), there has been no doubt that the ‘Gothic Story’, in nearly all the forms it has taken then and since, has been deeply inﬂuenced by Shakespeare’s plays. Nonetheless, the preceding essays have still revealed many hitherto unnoticed relationships between Shakespeare and the Gothic mode. We shall henceforth have to view both ‘the Bard’ and ‘the Gothic’ quite diﬀerently than we have – and very much by way of how they illuminate each other. We now see, for example, that the Gothic can help us retroactively deﬁne some of Shakespeare’s own dramatic and symbolic choices. On the one hand: while we know that many Walpole contemporaries and the eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare took ideologically motivated liberties with the already ﬂoating term ‘Gothic’, transposing it from a ‘barbarous’ negative into an ‘authentically old English’ positive (see Clery 2002: 25-30), Steven Craig has reminded us that Shakespeare’s ideological sense of what ‘Gothic’ encompasses, as in the Goth characters of Titus Andronicus (1593-94), is ‘a set of superstitions and enchantments’ imposed by ‘migrant barbarians who plunged the civilized world into darkness’, however complex their actual history, much as Italian Renaissance historiographers had already said in trying to rescue the best of classical Rome from what they thought had decimated and degraded it. The counter-movement that valued up a greatly recast ‘Gothic’ in England after 1740, Craig helps us recall, was part of an anti-Royalist eﬀort of that time to reconstitute the English past and then label its National Poet ‘Gothic’ so as to re-present both as symbolizing values that some British Whigs, including Walpole among others, were claiming to restore in the face of what they saw as Continental corruptions infecting the English crown. On the other hand: Elisabeth Bronfen has convinced us here that ‘night’

is a ‘privileged stage for transgressions’ of daytime oﬃcial culture in

Shakespeare and therefore serves as a wide-ranging ‘heterotopic countersite’ for him. In his night, there are just as many blurrings of boundaries and beings and just as much drifting of desires across wildly diﬀerent bodies and images as there are in the most sequestered, unlit, antiquated and dream-like spaces, often the ‘subterraneous regions’ or primeval woods (Walpole 2003: 82-86 and 127-33), of Gothic ﬁctions from Otranto to Frankenstein to Night of the Living Dead. We do not realize how thoroughly pre-Gothic Shakespeare is, in other words, until we look back through the Gothic to his most similar motifs and tendencies. That is why Robert Miles and Michael Gamer can see the Bard’s blatant skewing of historical sources to serve Tudor-era concerns and his own world view appearing behind the same tendencies in W. H. Ireland’s Vortigern of 1796. After it was presented as one of Shakespeare’s recovered plays and once this ‘forgery’ was discovered, it turns out, Vortigern was condemned for being both ‘Germanic’ and ‘Jacobin’, as well as too Gothic, in orientation precisely because it really does echo Shakespeare’s partial deference and half-resistance to the most settled ideologies of his own day. A similar retrospection also explains why Peter Hutchings can see the generic instability increasingly apparent in post-1930 ﬁlms that rework Shakespeare and the Gothic, often both of them at once, as reminding us of a near-breakdown of genreboundaries already there in Shakespeare’s own works, the very one about which there were complaints from strict neo-classicists of his time (Greenblatt 2004: 296-98) as well as those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Retrospective revelations even appear in the daring ‘Gothspeare’ essay by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. True, for them the most current, uprooted, commodiﬁed and widely circulating fragments from both Shakespeare and the Gothic keep combining and recombining in our cyberspace world, even to the point of blending into ‘Gothspeare’ at times. By doing so, they show the potentials in these remnants for turning into a cross-cultural mixture of discourses retroactively rewriting the very cultural foundations of the Bard himself. But that is only because Shakespeare, Botting and Wilson admit, crossing between supposedly ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of his culture by slipping between the many diﬀerent genres of writing and performing he knew, played out to an unusual degree the struggle between the symbolic schemes by which his and any culture always tries to stabilize itself, using both older forms, on the one hand, and the cross-generic re-combination of signs that enables the very reworking of past symbols upon which stability depends, on the other. At the same time, these and other essays in this collection are equally

powerful in redeﬁning what occurs in the Gothic itself when it re-uses Shakespearean ingredients, particularly as they oﬀer the Gothic both the attraction of long-standing traditions and a tradition of transforming older

sources to suit newer systems of belief. Dale Townshend traces the reappearances of the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, a proto-Gothic symbol of the supposedly quintessential Shakespeare (since the Bard probably played the part), as it keeps asserting itself amid the many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century attempts to bowdlerize Shakespeare’s plays to emerge, particularly in the Gothic, as a ﬁgure for the ‘culturally patriotic’ and ‘familiar and native’ even as it is also ‘emptied out of spiritual meaning and handed over to the commercial economies of spectacle and popular entertainment’ in a Europe increasingly controlled by the bourgeois middle-class market. The nostalgia in this image, heavily used by Walpole in particular, urges its post-1760 employers to seek a re-grounding of it in veriﬁable deaths and bodies that can actually be mourned, rather than in older religious principles, Townshend shows. Yet this same quest, he goes on to reveal, turns the neo-Gothic reuuses of such images into marketable ‘veilings and sublimations of death’ that never really satisfy the longings underlying them in the modern subject’s movement across symbols so perceptively analysed in the twentieth century by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, among others. Sue Chaplin, in turn, starts with how theatrical performances in Shakespeare are often like juridical trials, whether or not they are out-and-out courtroom scenes, and how these are refashioned in Walpole’s Gothic as ‘spectral juridico-literary spaces’ pressuring characters to uncover or reveal long-hidden guilty secrets. For her, the conﬁgurations of these spaces, in part because they refer back to Shakespeare to authorize them, announce the ﬁctiveness of their construction – and hence the fabricated nature of law and jurisprudence, despite their claims of a deep-rooted ‘authenticity’ – even more than Shakespearean theatricality did. Such Gothic spaces, in fact, need to be rooted in some prior and invisible crime, retrospectively if not originally, because that same supposition has proved to be necessary in the ‘juridical discourse’ of the eighteenth century (as in Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries) which seeks to ‘transform’ a supposedly ‘authentic national legal romance tradition’ (the mythical ‘Gothic constitution’ of England) into a seemingly ‘enlightened modern rule of law’ much as Walpole proposes to ‘blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’. These insights, thankfully, reveal the Gothic, from the eighteenth

through to the twenty-ﬁrst century, as being far more unsettled, complex, and in touch with cultural changes (the way we currently see Shakespeare) than many of its explicators once thought it to be. Angela Wright can now show us that Ann Radcliﬀe’s frequent uses of Shakespeare during the tempestuous transition of the 1790s into the 1800s are not as singleminded and anti-supernatural as some critics have assumed. Wright recovers evidence that Radcliﬀe’s deployments of Shakespeare changed

considerably with her reactions to a Western cultural landscape in constant transformation. What her epigraphs from him suggest in The Romance of the Forest (1791) is greatly altered in the more internal echoes of the Bard in her late Gaston de Blondeville (ca. 1802-3) published posthumously in 1826 with her important dialogue on the legacy of Shakespeare excerpted in the New Monthly Magazine as ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’. In both Gaston and the dialogue, Radcliﬀe embraces, ﬁrst, even a Hamlet-esque ghost as a sign of her sense that the current English government has broken from a more just past that now haunts it and, second, a more deliberate, quasiShakespearean staginess in her writing as a hint that a social ‘authenticity’ has decayed in favour of a sheer ‘performativity and artiﬁce’ in England as it is coming to be. To be sure, Glennis Byron may seem to be redirecting our attention to a more simpliﬁed use of the Gothic and Shakespeare when she turns to the recent and still ongoing ‘Twilight’ series of teen vampire romances by Stephenie Meyer, which began in 2005. But instead Byron shows that the ideological conﬂicts embedded into this new cross between Romeo and Juliet (1595-96) and an ever-changing Gothic vampire tradition are, however current, just as vexed and unresolved as we ﬁnd in Radcliﬀe’s self-revisions or in many parts of Shakespeare’s own most preGothic dramas. After all, Byron reminds us, Shakespeare’s own Romeo ﬁnds his and

Juliet’s conﬂicted situation so draining that he laments how much ‘Dry sorrow drinks our blood’ (3.5.59), and Meyer combines this hint anew with the recent phenomenon of adolescents being rendered as vampires so as to make her young lovers and rivals seem both truly post-Shakespearean and highly marketable as embodiments of present-day cultural quandaries aﬀecting teens especially. Indeed, by linking the Gothicized marketability of a somewhat hollowed-out Romeo and Juliet to the very modern belief that teen rebellion and sexuality are just naturally ‘in the blood’, Meyer can oﬀer us complicated girls and boys caught right now, not just between updated versions of old class or family conﬂicts, but between ‘love as a cultural construction’ in popular representations that suck the life out of what they counterfeit and ‘love as instinctual, spontaneous, and experienced on the body’, an agonizing tug-of-war between very diﬀerent inclinations. It is no wonder, then, that the essays immediately surrounding Byron’s near the close of this collection draw out the ‘reversal and dissolution of’ as well as the renewed search for ‘cultural values’ in Gothic ﬁctions of the last sixty years (to quote Botting and Wilson), particularly as those ‘Gothics’ simultaneously lose many of their old anchors in Shakespeare and yet play oﬀ his works as ‘points of demarcation that delegitimize any form of popular cultural expression’ (again Botting and Wilson) much as the Bard often did on his own. That tug-of-war is what

enables Hutchings to celebrate Gothic ﬁlms since 1930 as both expressing an ‘elegy for a lost style’ and enacting cross-generic disruptions that address inconsistent ‘commercial pressures and audience tastes’. It is also what encourages Botting and Wilson to see the post-modern Gothic as well as revivals of the Bard as ‘turning the war machine of modern progress and enlightenment inward’, as Shakespeare himself began to in halfaﬃrming and half-questioning the dominant ideologies and class-boundaries of his day, to critique and break down the war-inducing ‘borders of all contemporary pseudo-innovations’ so as to move them towards the new cultural interrelations that might really change the world for the better. Even so, I now have to wonder, what are the factors that most funda-

mentally make these newly revealing arguments about the ShakespeareGothic relationship possible from the start? Why, in fact, has this relationship remained so basic both to the genesis of the post-Renaissance ‘Gothic’ in Walpole and his many successors and to the development of the numerous variations on the Gothic since that never quite silence the echo of Shakespeare in them? I want to bring these discussions to a momentary close by suggesting some of the possible answers to those questions. What I here propose, in fact, may help ‘bookend’ the pieces between this Afterword and John Drakakis’s Introduction by furthering the powerful suggestions that Drakakis makes there as he provides an overarching history of the diﬀerent forms taken by the Gothic re-use of Shakespeare. These forms, Drakakis rightly shows, when examined closely, are almost always dialectal and ironic, countering one tendency in them with its opposite or near-opposite, whatever their diﬀerent emphases. Gothic replays of Shakespeare, to summarize Drakakis’s examples, can ‘historicize’ themselves by alluding to the Bard and yet ‘de-historicize’ both his work and themselves by presenting their combination as ‘universal’ in transcending (while invoking) the time-gap between Shakespeare and the Gothic; they can use him to resurrect a past ‘ground’ that gives the Gothic cultural capital to do what it does, but they can still uproot that source to make it refer to more contemporary concerns, thereby echoing the very Shakespeare the Gothic thus violates; they can invoke a Gothic-ized Bard to call up the ideology of a more ‘natural’ old England yet also to emphasize the theatrical artiﬁciality of the words and postures being recast; and they can both venerate Shakespeare as a point of departure and proceed to dismantle his assumptions, bringing forward an initially ‘canonical’ set of quotations to then appropriate them in a way that rejects at least part of the Shakespeare ‘canon’. In all these dialectical actions in the Gothic, I ﬁnd, this literature of terror and horror reveals an interplay of contradictions very much in Shakespeare in partly similar and partly diﬀerent ways. There is a tug-of-war at levels of both ideology and

symbology in his plays that the Gothic both repeats and transforms in its own variations on an ‘ancient-modern’ dialectic. Indeed, we can see selfquestioning dialectics always active in both Shakespeare and the Gothic separately and together, at a number of diﬀerent levels I would now like to specify. These make up the ‘common ground’ of the Shakespeare-Gothic relationship, I would argue, precisely because each dialectic ‘un-grounds’ its own ‘grounds’ internally. Each is driven, after all, by the inconsistent cultural pressures of its time and place and by the creative or re-creative capacities and the conﬂicted beliefs of the authors involved, be they Shakespeare himself or the most inﬂuential ﬁgures (including ﬁlmmakers) in the long, unstable, and ever-shifting lineage of the ‘Gothic Story’. Walpole’s interplays of what he calls ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, we must

remember, point in his second Preface and Otranto not just to the diﬀerent styles and assumptions of the once-aristocratic and supernatural romance, such as The Fairie Queene of Shakespeare’s time, and the middle-classoriented ‘realism’ of the eighteenth-century novel from Defoe to Smollett. They also help indicate what Otranto is most basically about, as E. J. Clery has shown us: a ‘contradiction between the traditional [aristocratic] claims of landed property and the new [increasingly bourgeois] claims of the modern family; a conﬂict between two versions of economic “personality” that provoke a hesitation over what rightly determines the foundations of the early modern self’ (Clery 1995: 77). Within this quandary so key to the genesis of the modern Gothic, which goes on to nearly always combine backward-looking and future-oriented longings all at once, Walpole’s enlarged, armoured, fragmented ghost of Alfonso, Otranto’s original owner, and the reanimated, silent ghost of the portrait of Prince Manfred’s grandfather, ultimately exposed as Alfonso’s poisoner, usurper and the counterfeiter of his false will – both of which recall the more fully embodied and speaking Ghost in Hamlet – are at best hollowed-out, entirely artiﬁcial, and mostly voiceless bearers of the ‘true’ aristocratic inheritance and descent that are trying to resurface from decades of burial. As such, Walpole’s Gothic ghosts oﬀer, in the words of John Allen

Stevenson, ‘an image of the immortality of kingship [or at least landed nobility] and of the necessity and justice of removing bad kings’ (Stevenson 1990: 107) who may have violated such ‘social contracts’ as the Magna Carta of 1215, which the Whig Horace Walpole proudly hung near his bed in his quasi-Gothic house at Strawberry Hill (Kallich 1971: 34). Walpole manifestly reworks the ‘old but by no means dead idea of a king with two bodies’ (Stevenson 1990: 93) that distinguished the natural person of a particular monarch or noble from the ongoing idea or general image of the monarchy itself. This image, as in the encrypted eﬃgy of Alfonso or the portrait of Manfred’s grandsire, ensures perpetual social continuity,

but with the option for the people to replace any occupant viewed as ‘usurping’ the role. Walpole in one of his many letters, we ﬁnd, saw himself as a ‘quiet republican’ who preferred that the ‘shadow of monarchy, like Banquo’s ghost [in Shakespeare’s Macbeth], ﬁll the empty chair of state’, and thus maintain a vague grounding in a continuous order of traditions (cit., Clery 1995: 72), instead of its being occupied by a tyrannical denier of legitimate public rights and entrepreneurial initiative. Otherwise, Walpole could hardly say what he does in his second Otranto Preface. There he justiﬁes his anachronistic use of ‘unnatural … machines’ (Walpole 2003: 65), including the medieval Catholic images, such as the eﬃgy, that are declared to be empty ‘superstition’ in his more guarded (but clearly Anglican) ﬁrst Preface (2003: 59). He declares that he has the entrepreneur’s ‘liberty to expatiate [with such anachronisms] through the boundless realms of invention’ (2003: 65) using a ‘fancy’ now ‘reinstrumentalized by the operations of the [largely middle-class] market’ to create a ‘new route’ in ﬁction that is ‘commercially up-and-coming’ (Clery 1995: 65) while not a total rejection of the Shakespearean images that it re-uses in attractive and nostalgic, but also emptied-out, ways. Shakespeare’s Ghost of the Father in the original Hamlet (1600-1601), as

it happens, is only slightly more substantial than Walpole’s hollow and more fragmented recastings of it, primarily because it brings with it its own conﬂict of sixteenth-century ideologies. Even this recognizable Ghost, as Hamlet says on ﬁrst seeing him, ‘com’st in such a questionable shape’ that the Prince hesitates between believing that it bears ‘airs from heaven’ that oﬀer ‘charitable’ truth and concluding that it carries ‘blasts from hell’ that might deceive him because of the ‘intents wicked’ of a ‘goblin damn’d’ (Hamlet 1.4.40-43).1 As several scholars have cautioned us (see Curran 2006: 3-14), Shakespeare’s Danish Prince and his play were positioned, like most members of their audience in 1600, as caught between a nowunsanctioned, but still popular, Catholic view of ghosts as speakers of truth, especially if they were returnees from Purgatory (as the Hamlet Ghost claims to be without using the word) – a concept that the Church of England oﬃcially rejected more than many of its members did – and a more Protestant position that sees ghosts as ‘demons in disguise who assumed human form in order to achieve a devilish purpose’ (Frye 1984: 17; see also Greenblatt 2001). Hamlet later feels he must ‘have grounds / More relative than’ what the Ghost has told him to prove that his uncle Claudius usurped the throne after poisoning his father (2.2.603-4), because no one on the stage or in the audience ever resolves the irresolution among beliefs through which the Ghost is viewed. Act V of Hamlet does invoke a vaguely overarching but hidden ‘providence’ that may encompass all or only some of these stances (5.2.219-20), but that mystery

just momentarily suspends more than it decides the basic contention among beliefs at the end of the sixteenth century, and even this CatholicProtestant debate is not the only factor in Hamlet’s quandaries about the Ghost. Just before he decides his method of establishing ‘grounds more relative’, Shakespeare’s Prince acknowledges that a devilish spirit may have come to him ‘Out of my weakness and my melancholy’ (2.2.601). He hesitates again, now between Protestant options whereby such a spectre could be the projection of an internal state of mind, like the ‘dagger’ that Macbeth seems to see before him (2.1.33-35), or could be a way the devil has of externally attaching a ‘shape’ to ‘melancholy’ because he may be ‘potent with such spirits’, as though melancholy were more of a spiritual energy than a personal emotion (2.2.602). To help ‘ground’ its Janus-faced tug-of-war between conﬂicting ideologies and the kinds of ‘personalities’ they envision, Walpole’s inaugural ‘Gothic Story’ alludes to a Ghost in Hamlet that was itself a contested symbol into which was projected an earlier but equally unresolved set of contradictory positions. Indeed, by seeing its primary inspiration as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which

Alexander Pope had already classiﬁed as the Bard’s most ‘Gothick’ work (Pope 1725: xxii-iv), the ﬁrst Gothic Story takes as a principal reference point a play with a title character who is bedevilled by many belief systems pulling in both retrograde and progressive directions. Shortly before he ﬁrst views the Ghost, Shakespeare’s Prince complains about the noisy revels that the new King Claudius has ordered upon his dubious accession to the throne, and he does so by using ideological touchstones of 1600 that could not be more at odds with each other. Hamlet likens this ‘heavyheaded’ practice in the body politic to a ‘vicious mole of nature’ in ‘particular men’ (1.4.17-24). This ‘mole’ can possibly be a predestined ‘stamp of one defect, / Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star’, the preference of an old aristocratic ideology that saw character as predetermined by the class into which Heaven and Nature placed a person. Concurrently, though, the same ‘mole’ can be ‘some habit, that too much o’er-leavens / The form of plausive manners’ and leads to ‘general censure’ by a person’s spectators (1.4.23-36), a more rising bourgeois view in, say, Shakespeare’s class that allowed the developing self to become what he or she can persuade an audience he or she was by how personal behaviour (one’s chosen ‘rhetoric’) led to applause or ‘censure’ for one’s ‘manners’. No wonder Walpole’s Prince Manfred, like many Gothic heroes and

heroines after him, is torn between ‘personalities’, questioning whether he should be driven more by the ‘circumstances of his fortune’ or by the ‘natural … temper’ of what seem his own inclinations (Walpole 2003: 87). His and Walpole’s main models are a Prince and a whole setting, vaguely medieval Denmark as reconceived around 1600, that are permeated by

ideological contests about the very basis of character as much as the nature of ghosts – and about a great deal more besides. Hamlet’s many debates with himself include the pull of family-avenging-attacks-on-family by a waning feudal standard, on the one hand, and the central-monarchy-andChurch-of-England pressure to leave revenge to either heaven or the state, on the other, virtually the same imperatives that tear at each other in Romeo and Juliet. Even the idea of the ‘king with two bodies’, though more fully problematized in King Lear (1605), is as contested in Hamlet as it is for Walpole. While Hamlet may feel that his father, the ﬁgure apparently still visible in the Ghost, embodies a ‘combination and a form indeed, / Where every god did seem to set his seal’ to establish a standard by which a man may be a monarch, thus making Claudius too like a ‘mildewed ear’ to embody that divinely-sanctioned idea (3.4.60-64), the same Prince, in endorsing his own royal successor as he dies, ﬁnally accepts the process of the ‘election’ of a King by the same council of representatives that originally put Claudius on the throne, whatever the general standard of the time (5.2.355-56). The main ‘Gothick’ reference points for Walpole’s Gothic, it turns out, are a play, author and cultural milieu that are all as extremely betwixt and between as his new kind of English ﬁction, its would-bearistocratic yet also-entrepreneurial author (Clery 1995: 75), and the likely audience for both in 1764-65. To be sure, being pressured and pulled by conﬂicting ideologies does

not lead Walpole to take exactly the same positions as Shakespeare seems to, even in Hamlet; after all, over a century-and-a-half of social changes have intervened between Shakespeare’s most pre-‘Gothick’ writings and The Castle of Otranto. While Hamlet may defer its ultimate solutions to the workings of a very obscure Providence and at least play with the possibility of some of the Catholic ideas it includes, Walpole in his Castle pointedly declares the groundlessness of all its Catholic anachronisms, even the quasi-Shakespearean ones, in his ﬁrst Preface. As a result, the climactic moment in Otranto where a kind of providence apparently declares itself – the rising and brief pronouncement of the ‘immense’, reuniﬁed Ghost of Alfonso and its ascent ‘towards heaven, where … the form of saint Nicholas was seen … receiving Alfonso’s shade’ as though that scene were in a fresco on a Catholic dome (Walpole 2003: 162) – is a moment where any metaphysical truth in it is absolutely denied in advance by the author. Even the Ghost’s ﬁnal statement about ‘Theodore’ as true heir has to be subsequently veriﬁed by a supposedly ‘authentic writing’ (2003: 164), itself as obscure and invisible as Hamlet’s ‘providence’. The general ‘shadow’ of sanctioned inheritance, like the vague, ghostly outline of ‘monarchy’ endorsed in Walpole’s letters, retains some validity, however problematic, in Otranto while many of this ﬁnal spectacle’s Catholic accoutrements and

other links to older institutions are presented and even longed for but are pre-emptively invalidated. Walpole wrote, not for a Shakespearian audience torn between various

Christian interpretations of ghosts and sanctions for kingship, revenge and character, but for an eighteenth-century readership for whom ‘mobile property, bound up in the unstable, “imaginary”, mechanisms of speculation and credit, was [becoming] a threatening alternative to the [old] system of heritable wealth derived from land … which laid claim to the values of stability … by avoiding the abstraction of capital investment and proﬁt’ (Clery 1995: 74). The best ideological solution to this tug-of-war, which Otranto attempts, since mere deference to a general ‘providence’ may now mean an endorsement of ‘speculation’, is an assurance of secure inherited property ﬁctively analogous to older aristocratic guarantees. The resulting analogies thus have to employ the ﬁgures of receding beliefs, but they do so alongside some more modern independence from strictly kingdom-based and Catholic-church-based controls that were only beginning to loosen in Shakespeare’s day. Even so, this way of addressing ‘a speciﬁc crisis in the experience of [Walpole’s] eighteenth-century audience’ that was in danger of distancing the aspirations of the ‘self’ based on older ideologies from the ‘social forms’ now driven by a pre-industrial market (Clery 1995: 79) locates its starting point in an Elizabethan ‘genius’ who struggles with an earlier but similar crisis of understanding where retrospective aristocratic and prospective middle-class beliefs were just as much in conﬂict and just as inclined to divide between them the means by which a viable ‘self’ could ﬁnd self-deﬁnition and inheritable foundations. To put all this in a more traditional way: Shakespeare is the premiere

dramatist of a major, complex transition between the holdovers of medieval schemes for selfhood and social order and the emergence of early-modern aspirations towards freer-standing and more apparently self-determined modes of self-production and self-marketing. He enunciates the dawn of modernity in the West or what Harold Bloom calls the ‘invention of the human’ as we know it (see Bloom 1998: 1-17), often through employing older forms of expression, such as Saxo Grammaticus’ thirteenth-century history of ‘Amleth’. If the Bard does that half-regressively, he also does it at least half-progressively by rejecting some of his sources’ founding assumptions, sometimes violating established generic limits in the process, yet always at least minimally within the boundaries usually acceptable to English Renaissance audiences and censors. For the Gothic to be eﬀectively a ‘new species of writing’ from the 1760s on that can deal imaginatively with what pulls eighteenth-century and subsequent readers towards both ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ beliefs as articulated at their time, it can do no better than start at his most ‘Gothick’ with the best-known and most prestigious

articulator of ‘clashing realizations’ and ‘primal ambivalence’ (Bloom 1998: 7 and 11). Yes, the Gothic Story must resituate what it echoes for a wider readership of greater literacy across more classes in a more printbased culture driven by less censored and more open-market circulation, all after intervening adaptations and critiques of the Bard have questioned the solidity of Shakespeare’s classical and religious groundings and his suitability for emerging middle-class tastes, while also re-establishing him as an English standard both ‘Gothick’-ly ‘natural’ and timelessly enduring. Nevertheless, the Gothic achieves its looking both backwards and forwards by grounding itself in the deracination yet strong recollection of past schemes in Shakespeare when he is at his most inclusive in dramatizing the ideological quandaries of his time. Even though Walpole was addressing a crisis of cultural and ‘economic’

self-deﬁnition in the England and Europe of the 1760s, it is really no accident that the Gothic mode attains its greatest resonance and popularity in the 1790s, the decade of Ann Radcliﬀe and Matthew Lewis, surrounded as they were by the stormy political conﬂicts and changes manifested in revolutions and their aftermaths as well as numerous competitors in ‘terror’ from blatant imitators of them to Continental rivals and popular Gothic dramatists (see Miles 2002c). The 1790s needed the Gothic as never before to address by symbolic displacement an extremely backward-longing and forward-moving era, and the Gothic was ready to meet the need because it harkened back so thoroughly to the most Janusfaced works of Shakespeare, who rose to his own prominence in the 1590s, another decade full of ‘apocalyptic forebodings’ as one century was about to give way to another (Bloom 2003: 139). At that turning point too, Anglo-European hopes and fears for the future, given the potent draw of the still-visible and haunting past, were just as contentious and anxious for Western audiences, albeit in somewhat diﬀerent terms, as they were when Gothic ﬁctions came into their strongest cultural role at another end-ofthe-century transition into yet another emergence of a modernity, now a pre-industrial one, though one still nostalgic for some of the grounds of selfhood it feared to lose. As the foregoing essays have shown, consequently, the centrality of

Shakespeare to the Gothic extends far beyond The Castle of Otranto – and does so precisely because of what my own accounts of these essays have emphasized in them: the Gothic’s drive, basic to its genre-crossing nature, to develop the manifestations in Shakespeare of the most pervasive conﬂicts between divergent ideological claims. For another example, aside from those oﬀered by my colleagues here, I would suggest Lewis’s The Monk of 1796, which quotes Shakespeare several times from various plays but also extensively redevelops his proto-Gothic Tragedy of Macbeth (1606).

The Monk cites Macbeth directly at the start of its Volume II (Lewis 1998: 129) from a point in the play (3.4.92-106) that clearly intrigued Walpole: the appearance of the Ghost of Banquo at now-King Macbeth’s banquet where only Macbeth can behold the ‘horrible shadow’. While this citation mainly sets the stage for the appearance of the Bleeding Nun ghost in Lewis’s subplot, it also points to deeper recollections of Macbeth at the heart of The Monk’s central story. Just as Macbeth hears a presage of his progress up the noble ranks to the Crown from the seemingly prophetic ‘weird sisters’ – welcomed by Banquo as either ‘fantastical’ or ‘I’ th’ name of truth’ (1.3.52-53) – so the movement of Lewis’s monk, Ambrosio, from apparent sanctity and Catholic obedience to unchecked lust and double murder assisted by Satan himself is apparently prophesied twice in the ﬁrst chapter: in the early dream of Lorenzo (Lewis 1998: 27-28), where a ‘Monster’ in priest’s habit violates his beloved Antonia on a church altar (as Ambrosio will rape Antonia, not knowing she is his sister, on a tomb in the church’s sepulchre), and in the predictions of a weird-sister ‘Gypsy’ telling fortunes in the streets of Madrid, who warns Antonia that ‘Lusty Man and Crafty Devil / Will combine to work your evil’ (Lewis 1998: 3538). Moreover, this last omen appears fulﬁlled when we discover that Ambrosio’s seduction by the succubus Matilda and a ‘beautiful’ Satan have been entirely pre-planned, even to the point of Ambrosio’s incest, by a Satan who had ‘watched the movements of [this monk’s] heart’ and so pre-constructed the means to his venality knowing that he would follow them to his damnation (Lewis 1998: 440). At the same time, it is left unclear in The Monk whether the supernatural

is really independent of psychological projection or more the externalized product of it. Lorenzo as he begins to dream is described as entering his own ‘delusions’ while considering ‘the obstacles that might oppose his wishes’, which could include Antonia’s attraction to the preaching Ambrosio (Lewis 1998: 27); the Gypsy might be referring to a general danger that already exists for Antonia, the severity of which will depend on how any particular suitor of hers chooses to regard her; Satan cannot begin to plot, by his own admission, until Ambrosio has reached a certain state of mind; and all the renderings of Catholic beliefs, with Satan and the supernatural among them, are presented here, as per Walpole’s ﬁrst Preface, as sensuous but false idols, within which a believer, such as Ambrosio, can remain mentally enthralled, especially when he proceeds to resist Catholic authority only within the terms, including Satan, of Catholicism itself. Similarly, Shakespeare in Macbeth, though he gestures towards the writings of King James I, as well as Scottish folklore, about witchcraft (see Kinney 2001: 242-58), thereby manages to link the weird sisters to the suspect Catholicism that James has just disavowed, as well as to a quasi-Celtic old

cult that supposedly served Satan the Deceiver. The Bard thus raises questions about whether these witches have a totally independent reality or are called up by the same ‘imperial’ Satanic impulses in his hero (1.3.129) that later project the mental image of an assassin’s ‘dagger’ (see Frank Kermode on Macbeth in Shakespeare 1974: 1309). Macbeth has wondered, after ﬁrst seeing the sisters, after all, if ‘My thought, whose murther is yet but fantastical,’ leaves him only in a state of ‘surmise’ where ‘nothing is / But what is not’ (1.3.140-42).