Shakespeare and the Gothic Strain

IT MAY NOT SEEM IMMEDIATELY OBVIOUS that Shakespearean drama and literature should share scholarly space. Shakespeare represents apex of literary culture, while there is still a whiff of something slightly disreputable or pulpy about texts. They are, however, deeply intertwined, and this review essay will explore some of implications of that interlocutorship through an expanded review of recent anthology 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 texts and herewith offer some further reflections on topic that, hopefully, will add to and complicate conversation fruitfully begun Shakespeares. For many years, literary studies at least, term has been associated primarily with 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 attics, angry poor relations, and debauched former aristocrats), novel developed a trajectory separate from, but parallel to, more canonically respectable later Victorian novel. The novel's baptism England is often (arguably, as we will see) attributed to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Story (1765); its successive tradition has ventured into terrain as sophisticated as novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Consequently term 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 Opera) to noir detective stories; and, of course, to recent explosion of vampire novels, films, and television serials. To avoid wandering, Melmoth-like, through 150 years during which literature has developed, I will concentrate on some key thematics that link these genres, a thread that often includes one or more of following: a shameful secret of some sort, often intergenerational; an enemy (external or internal) whose outlines are blurry or vague; and a dwelling or location decay--often an old family estate or even a geographic region, as with HBO's recent Southern vampire serial True Blood, set post-Katrina Louisiana. Whereas many genres, including science fiction, involve enemy or alien invasions, invokes its own special brand of dread: of something or someone already in house as it were (or under stage, or ground, or lake, or floorboards), issuing audible but indecipherable demands. Aside from Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III, few of Shakespeare's plays seem especially proto-Gothic. However, Shakespeares brings together a group of British, American and Canadian scholars who attempt to define the Gothic conceptual, aesthetic, historical, and generic terms, and collectively to argue that Shakespeare is not only himself but a cause that is others. Speaking to elasticity of term his introduction, John Drakakis points out that even at most superficial level, a predilection for spectres, graveyards, paraphernalia of death, as well as the emphasis on 'non-rational' as a category of human experience, renders Shakespeare's plays to descriptive term (1). There is, I would add, a difference between rendering Shakespeare open to charge, and delineating what is singularly as a genre or aesthetic category. After all, an investment resources of supernatural (ibid.) has been a literary feature since dawn of storytelling and does not alone define Gothic. …

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