ABSTRACT
Writing in 1762, Bishop Hurd adopts the eighteenth century’s most enduring polemic on the topic of historiography: assess the past on its own terms, for there is something inherently lacking in our rational present. As Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance progresses, the reader is presented with a feudal chivalric ‘Gothic system’, histories of tyrannical barons and questing knights which, despite losing cultural currency with the passage of time, retain a certain spirit transmitted through romance literature. Horace Walpole summarizes this ‘spirit’ in the second preface to The Castle of Otranto (1765). Walpole’s innovation in blending ‘two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’, widely regarded as the foundational statement of early Gothic writing, is inspired by a sense of present discontent: in the ancient romance, ‘all was imagination and improbability’; in the modern romance – what we now know of as the ‘novel’, itself an example of Hurd’s ‘short and commodious philosophy’ – ‘nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting but the great resources of fancy have been damned up, by a strict adherence to common life’ (Walpole 1996b: 9). What is at stake is the well-being of Literature (as we might term it) itself, a greater freedom to ‘invent’ truly poetical works. As Hurd suggests, the great precedent is William Shakespeare, but this association of the ‘Gothic’ and the ‘Shakespearean’ is no arbitrary one. As the inheritor of ‘the Gothic system of prodigy and enchantment’ (Hurd 1972: 254), Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate the operations of a curious agency that supersedes all questions of authorial intention. Hurd then turns to Shakespeare’s contemporary,
Ben Jonson, whose witch scenes in The Masque of Queens were written ‘in emulation’ of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘but certainly with the view (for so he tells us himself) of reconciling the practice of antiquity to the Neoteric, and making it familiar with our popular witchcraft’ (Hurd 1972: 258). Jonson’s printed text, furthermore, complements his intention to accord due privilege to the ‘practice of antiquity’ as its sourcing of classic texts attests to his learnedness. For Hurd, however, the agency of ‘Gothic enchantments’ surpasses even the printed text’s learned qualities, for Jonson’s emulation of the Gothic Shakespeare already deems it inevitable that the Gothic sway exerts its influence to its fullest. As Hurd concludes:
And though, as he was an idolater of the antients [sic], you will expect him to draw freely from that source, yet from the large use he makes, too, of his other more recent authorities, you will perceive that some of the darkest shades of his picture are owing to hints and circumstances which he had catched, and could only catch, from the Gothic enchantments.
