ABSTRACT
In 1798, Nathan Drake in Literary Hours made a brief reference to the reputation of Ann Radcliffe, hailing her as ‘the Shakspeare of Romance writers’ (Drake 1798: 249). He did not, however, pause to justify the terms of his praise, nor to explain what he meant by forging this intimate connection between Shakespeare and the writer of romance. Earlier in the same work, Drake grouped together the works of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe, amongst others, in order to argue that while their romances ‘still powerfully arrest attention, and keep an ardent curiosity alive, yet is their machinery, by no means, an object of popular belief’ (Drake 1798: 37-38). Whereas ‘in the times of Tasso, Shakspeare and even Milton, witches and wizards, spectres and fairies, were nearly as important subjects of faith as the most serious doctrines of religion’, Drake was satisfied that ‘In the present century when science and literature have spread so extensively, the heavy clouds of superstition have dispersed, and have assumed a lighter, and less formidable hue’ (Drake 1798: 37-38). For Drake, then, an admiration of romance writers such as Radcliffe seemed to be contingent upon the levity of their engagement with ‘terrific’ incident. Drake’s celebration of Ann Radcliffe as ‘the Shakspeare of Romance writers’ suggests that romance writing at its best should sanitize the horror and superstition that characterized Shakespeare’s tragedies. Such a use of Shakespeare, removing the terrifying aspect of his supernatural characters,
becomes conservatively synonymous with Radcliffe’s nomination as ‘the Shakspeare of Romance writers’. Without doubt, the terms of Drake’s praise for Radcliffe were generated
by the first recognized attempt at Gothic romance, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764. Walpole’s self-confessed ‘attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’ led him to push beyond the boundaries of the ‘strict adherence to common life’ so prevalent in the mid-eighteenth-century novel by introducing a supernatural agent into his tale (Walpole 1996a: 9). As E. J. Clery argues, Walpole’s tale, and the terms of his argument, presented ‘an outright challenge to [the orthodoxy] that novelists should remain within the bounds of ‘natural horror’ (Clery 2002: 23). Walpole was all too aware of the risks of his literary enterprise, however, and chose to ‘shelter [his] own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced’ (Walpole 1996a: 14). He was, of course, referring to Shakespeare. The military register of his language here – ‘shelter’ and ‘cannon’ – are immediately suggestive of a literary battle. This battle was two-fold: earlier, in this same Preface, Walpole had defended Shakespeare from attack by the French critic Voltaire. By carrying out this defence of England’s ‘brightest genius’ first, he placated his readership’s anxieties regarding the boldness of his own experimentation. After this patriotically-driven defence of Shakespeare, Walpole was then able to excuse his own literary experiment by arguing that ‘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, unless I could have marked my work with genius as well as originality’ (Walpole 1996a: 14). In this invocation of Shakespeare as a national treasure to be defended against foreign criticism, Walpole was then covertly able to import into England, under the ‘masterly pattern’ of Shakespeare, his own use of the supernatural.2 Walpole’s literary experimentation was quick to establish Shakespeare as a cherished national precedent for Gothic romance. Thus, when Drake grouped together the fictions of Walpole, Reeve and Radcliffe, nominating Radcliffe herself as ‘the Shakspeare of Romance writers’, he consolidated her reputation as the guardian of a nationally founded literary tradition deemed appropriate for a British readership in the 1790s.3
