ABSTRACT
Immense popularity and little critical respect – this might be the epitaph for the Gothic drama that filled the London stages in the decades around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. It may be argued that the long-standing disparaging view of the Gothic theatre recalled by Jeffrey Cox may be connected with three particular issues, which operated at both the synchronic and diachronic levels. These are the end-of-the-century rise of spectacle; assumptions about originality; and dramatic ideology. These factors, in turn, must be analysed in connection with the changing patterns of reception of the Gothic in England in the aftermath of the 1793–1794 post-revolutionary events in France. At the turn of the century the critical divide between higher and lower dramatic forms reached an extreme. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentators have been inclined to point out the debt Gothic drama owes to its English dramatic forebears.
