Shakespeare and the Gothic Strain (Essay‪)‬

IT MAY NOT SEEM IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS that Shakespearean drama and Gothic literature should share scholarly space. Shakespeare represents the apex of literary culture, while there is still a whiff of something slightly disreputable or "pulpy" about Gothic texts. They are, however, deeply intertwined, and this review essay will explore some of the implications of that interlocutorship through an expanded review of the recent anthology Gothic Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (2008). I make no claims to be an expert on nineteenth-century fiction, but I am a longtime fan of Gothic texts and herewith offer some further reflections on the topic that, hopefully, will add to and complicate the conversation fruitfully begun in Gothic Shakespeares. For many years, in literary studies at least, the term "Gothic" has been associated primarily with the early nineteenth-century novel and particularly with romance or even "ladies'" novels. A hybrid of fairy-tale elements, ghost stories, sagas of families fallen into disrepute and disrepair (madwomen in attics, angry poor relations, and debauched former aristocrats), the Gothic novel developed a trajectory separate from, but parallel to, the more canonically "respectable" later Victorian novel. The Gothic novel's "baptism" in England is often (arguably, as we will see) attributed to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765); its successive tradition has ventured into terrain as sophisticated as the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Consequently the term "Gothic" is now a magician's hat out of which many rabbits may be pulled. (1) It has been applied to films as well as literary texts, ranging from Murnan's Nosferatu to Ridley Scott's Alien and Blade Runner, from classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to recent (Japanese-inspired) horror films such as The Grudge or Dark Water; from melodramatic musicals (Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera) to noir detective stories; and, of course, to the recent explosion of vampire novels, films, and television serials.