‗OUR GOTHIC BARD‘: SHAKESPEARE AND APPROPRIATION 1764-1800 Steven Craig Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy English Studies University of Stirling January 2011 ii ABSTRACT In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. Desmet and Williams, 2009), both of which base their analyses of the Shakespeare-Gothic intersection on the premise that Shakespearean quotations, characters and events are valuable objects in their own right which mediate on behalf of the ‗present‘ concerns of the agents of textual appropriation. In light of this scholarship, this thesis argues the case for the presence of ‗Gothic Shakespeare‘ in Gothic writing during the latter half of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, it acknowledges the conceptual gap whereby literary borrowings were often denounced as acts of plagiarism. Despite this conceptual problem, it is possible to trace distinct ‗Gothic‘ Shakespeares that dismantle the concept of Shakespeare as a singular ineffable genius by virtue of a textual practice that challenges the concept of the ‗genius‘ Shakespeare as the figurehead of genuine emotion and textual authenticity. This thesis begins by acknowledging the eighteenth-century provenance of Shakespeare‘s ‗Genius‘, thereby distinguishing between the malevolent barbarian Gothic of Shakespeare‘s own time and the eighteenth-century Gothic Shakespeares discussed under the term ‗appropriation‘ . It proceeds to examine the Shakespeares of canonical Gothic writers (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) as well as their lesser-known contemporaries (T.J. Horsley Curties and W.H. Ireland). For instance, Walpole conscripts Hamlet in order to mediate his experience of living in England after the death of his father, the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The thesis then argues for the centrality of Shakespeare in the Gothic romance‘s undercutting of the emergent discourses of emotion (or ‗passion‘), as represented by the fictions of Radcliffe and Lewis, before moving on to consider Curties‘s attempted recuperation – in Ethelwina; or, the House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) - of authentic passion, which is mediated through the authenticity apparatus of Edmond Malone‘s 1790 editions of Shakespeare‘s plays. It concludes with W.H. Ireland‘s dismantling of Malone‘s concept of the ‗authentic‘ Shakespeare through the contemporary iii transgressions of literary forgery and the evocation of an illicit Shakespeare in his first Gothic romance, The Abbess, also published in 1799. iv CONTENTS Acknowledgements and Declaration v Introduction 1 Shakespeare Among the Goths Chapter One 48 ‗Ghost. Adieu, Adieu‘: Horace Walpole, Hamlet, Macbeth, and the Limits of Shakespeare Appropriation Chapter Two 84 Countenancing Gothic Shakespeare: Physiognomy and Passion in Gothic Romance and Drama Chapter Three 139 Re-sexing ‗Woman‘: T.J. Horsley Curties‘s ‗Gothic Shakespeare‘ Chapter Four 182 (In)Authentic Shakespeare: The Case of W.H. Ireland Conclusion 220 ‗Shakspeare‘s Sanction‘ Bibliography 225 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to extend my gratitude to the Department of English Studies and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding this doctoral dissertation. Their generous financial support enabled me to conduct research which would not otherwise have been undertaken. I am profoundly indebted to my supervisor, Dr Dale Townshend, for the time and encouragement he offered not only during my time as a doctoral student, but also as a Masters student on the MLitt in The Gothic Imagination. His knowledge of the Gothic and the eighteenth century inspired me throughout, and I am especially grateful for his patience and continued faith in me when times were tough. My second supervisor, Professor John Drakakis, must also be acknowledged for sharing with me his insights in all things Shakespearean during the early stages of the period of research. Finally I would like to thank my family for their unfailing love and support during the period of research. In particular, my parents, William and Helen Craig, supported me despite their own personal grief for recently departed loved ones. This thesis is dedicated to William McCourt Calder (1928-2009) and Dorothy Fletcher McGuire (1963-2009) DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is my own work and that all critical and other sources (literary and electronic) have been specifically and properly acknowledges, as and when they occur in the body of my text. Signed: Date: 1 INTRODUCTION SHAKESPEARE AMONG THE GOTHS This, you see, is a short and commodious philosophy. Yet barbarians have their own, such as it is, if they are not enlightened by our reason. Shall we then condemn them unheard, or will it not be fair to let them have the telling of their own story? (Hurd, 1972, pp.194-195) Bishop Richard Hurd‘s ultimatum, in his Moral and Political Dialogues; with Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), to permit Gothic barbarians ‗the telling of their own story‘ or ‗condemn them unheard‘, resonates with the modern critic, whose exposure to the myriad stories on all things ‗Gothic‘ and ‗Shakespearean‘ is the effect of the ethical stance whereby hitherto silenced voices must be amplified if criticism is to justify its claim as a democratic mode. As critics such as Richard Wilson, David Salter and Allan Lloyd Smith have shown, Shakespeare and the Gothic are implicated in a number of stories, some of which co-exist in the same temporal space, while others are told as part of a continuum of Gothic discourse. For Wilson, what he dubs ‗Gothic Shakespeare‘ is ‗the uncanny prefiguration of the unpoliced revolutionary mob‘ in France at the end of the eighteenth century; more specifically, it is the discourse of the French philosopher Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, who maintained that Shakespeare‘s commitment in his plays to plebeian culture – with its fools, gravediggers, and the bard of Avon‘s own subversive commingling of tragedy and comedy – signalled the monstrous birth of Shakespeare as a democrat in a royal state (Wilson, 2007, pp.38-39). Moreover, for Wilson, this French ‗Gothic Shakespeare‘ has endured through Victor Hugo‘s ‗socialist‘ appropriation of 2 Shakespeare into the present day, where cultural theorists such as Jacques Derrida read into Shakespeare‘s plays the promise of the ‗democracy to come‘, albeit ushered in by the ineffable monstrosity of violence (Wilson, 2007, pp.68-73). If Gothic Shakespeare in France warns (Voltaire) or embraces (Derrida) authentic democracy, its English counterpart, by contrast, is signalled by its veneration of the rule of constitutional monarchy and its commitment to Protestantism. David Salter has argued that Matthew Lewis‘s referencing of Shakespeare in The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe‘s deployment of Shakespeare in The Italian (1797) ‗authorize, legitimize and even shore up that sense of Englishness that defines itself not simply as Protestant, but as virulently anti-Catholic in character‘ (Salter, 2009, p.54). Thus Radcliffe rewrites the benevolent Friar Lawrence, from Romeo and Juliet, as the malignant monk purportedly responsible for the death of Ellena di Rosalba‘s guardian, Signora Bianchi, in what Salter terms as Radcliffe‘s ‗unquestioning assumption of Shakespeare‘s Protestantism‘ (Salter, 2009, p.56). Lewis‘s similarly unquestioning assumption of Shakespeare‘s sectarian affiliation is evidenced by Lewis‘s equation of the sexually depraved Catholic monk Ambrosio and Angelo in Measure for Measure. If during the so-called ‗first wave‘ of Gothic writing, Gothic was inscribed as the transcendental signified of things ‗English‘, ‗Protestant‘ and ‗Whiggish‘, the publication of Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) advanced yet another story whereby, as Allan Lloyd Smith suggests in his citation of Paul Gilroy, Gothic discourse turned from its eighteenth- century identification with religiosity to the ‗dislocating dazzle of ―whiteness‖‘ (Smith, 2004, p.209). In the case of Frankenstein, Smith observes that the Monster, described in colonial discourse by Victor Frankenstein as the racial other, acquires an eloquent voice which ruptures the period‘s insistence on white superiority (Smith, 3 2004, p.210). Unlike the Catholic priests of Radcliffe and Lewis, the Monster not only speaks, but speaks in his own voice, thereby positing him as an intertextual echo of Caliban from The Tempest. The Shakespeares accounted for above attest to his endurance across history, but it is only Wilson‘s account that gestures at the possibility of a Shakespeare (or set of Shakespeares) that exists as the culmination of intentional literary appropriation. While Salter‘s essay acknowledges the act of appropriation, his commitment to the morality of highlighting historical difference leads him to conclude that Radcliffe fundamentally misunderstood Romeo and Juliet, further leading him to retract his acknowledgement of literary borrowing in favour of the thesis that Radcliffe‘s Shakespeare is the product of ‗unconscious ideological conditioning‘ (Salter, 2009, p.58). Smith‘s essay suggests a Shakespeare that recurs unconsciously, for his reference to Caliban functions merely as an allusion to the Monster‘s verbal skill that exceeds Mary Shelley‘s declared interest in Paradise Lost. While Shakespearean