ABSTRACT
Francis William Blagdon’s review of W. H. Ireland’s Gothic novel Gondez the Monk affirms explicitly a connection between ‘Shakespeare’ and Gothic writing of the early nineteenth century, one in which the authority of the national poet is invoked as a legitimizing strategy to recommend the fiction of a writer who, for some time, passed off forged documents as Shakespearean manuscripts. Within a larger context, Shakespeare’s investment in the resources of the supernatural, his predilection for spectres, graveyards, the paraphernalia of death, moving statues, magical transformations and the emphasis upon the ‘non-rational’ as a category of human experience all render his plays open to the descriptive term ‘Gothic’. In addition to forming part of the pre-history of a movement that only
comes into its own at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Shakespearean texts function as a resource for a particular style of writing that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, had become sufficiently established as a literary genre to attract parody. For example, at the beginning of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817/18) the young Catherine Morland’s life undergoes a momentous transformation. The narrator tells us that up to the age of fourteen she ‘had by nature nothing heroic about her’ and that she ‘should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback and running about the
country’ (Austen 2003: 7). Catherine had no objection to books ‘provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them’ and ‘provided they were all story and no reflection’, but this was about to change:
from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.
