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The Castle of Otranto
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The Gothic Project - The Castle of Otranto - background information
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Very interesting info, thank you! Not surprised that Walpole referred to Shakespeare—the list of character names certainly evokes the Bard.
Mod
I don't know enough Shakespeare to make that connection.
Shakespeare’s character names are often a mashup of classical, British, and Italian with comic and/or servant characters often having Spanish names.
Mod
Good to know, thank you.
The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day gothic books, films, art, music, and the goth subculture.
Walpole was inspired to write the story after a nightmare he had at his Gothic Revival home, Strawberry Hill House, in Twickenham, southwest London. Claiming he saw a ghost in the nightmare—which featured a "gigantic hand in armour"—Walpole incorporated imagery from this into the novel, and also drew on his knowledge of medieval history.
The novel initiated a literary genre that would become extremely popular in the later 18th and early 19th century, with authors such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and George du Maurier.
History
The novel was inspired by a nightmare Walpole had at Strawberry Hill House. The Castle of Otranto was written in 1764 during Horace Walpole's tenure as MP for King's Lynn. Walpole was fascinated with medieval history, in 1749 building a fake gothic castle, Strawberry Hill House.
Strawberry Hill House
The initial edition was titled in full: The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. This first edition purported to be a translation based on a manuscript written at Naples in 1529 and recently rediscovered in the library of "an ancient Catholic family in the north of England". He employed an archaic style of writing to reinforce this conceit.
The Italian manuscript's story, it was claimed, derived from a story still older, dating back perhaps as far as the Crusades. This Italian manuscript, along with alleged author "Onuphrio Muralto", were Walpole's fictional creations, and "William Marshal" his pseudonym.
In the second and subsequent editions, Walpole acknowledged authorship of the work, writing:
"The favourable manner in which this little piece has been received by the public, calls upon the author to explain the grounds on which he composed it" as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success...."
There was some debate at the time about the function of literature; that is, whether works of fiction should be representative of life or more purely imaginative (i.e., natural vs. romantic). The first edition was well received by some reviewers who understood the novel as belonging to medieval fiction, "between 1095, the era of the First Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last", as the first preface states; and some referred to Walpole as an "ingenious translator". Following Walpole's admission of authorship, however, many critics were loth to lavish much praise on the work and dismissed it as absurd, fluffy, romantic fiction, or even unsavory or immoral.
Characters
Manfred – the lord of the Castle of Otranto. He is the father of Conrad and Matilda, and the husband of Hippolita. Manfred serves as the prime antagonist of the novel; he is the dictatorial ruler and father and drives the plot forward in a depiction of deranged cruelty visited upon his children.
Hippolita – the wife of Manfred and the mother of Conrad and Matilda.
Conrad – the fifteen-year-old son of Manfred and Hippolita and the younger brother of Matilda.
Matilda – Matilda is the daughter of Hippolita and the oppressive Manfred.
Isabella – the daughter of Frederic and the fiancée of Conrad
Theodore – at the beginning of the novel, Theodore appears to be a minor character, whose role is purely to point out the significance of and event as a link to the fulfillment of the prophecy. However, he emerges as a main character later.
Friar Jerome – the friar at the monastery near the Castle of Otranto.
Frederic – the long-lost father of Isabella who appears late into the novel.
Bianca – the servant of Matilda who serves as a comic relief of the otherwise highly melodramatic novel.
Diego and Jaquez – these two, like Bianca, are other servants within the Castle of Otranto.
Literary elements
In the preface of the second edition, Walpole claims the novel is "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern." He defines the "ancient" romance by its fantastic nature ("its imagination and improbability") while defining the "modern" romance as more deeply rooted in literary realism ("a strict adherence to common life," in his words). By combining fantastic situations with supposedly real people acting in a "natural" manner, Walpole created a new and distinct style of literary fiction, which has frequently been cited as a template for all subsequent gothic novels. The Monthly Review stated that for "[t]hose who can digest the absurdities of Gothic fiction" Otranto offered "considerable entertainment".
The Castle of Otranto is widely regarded as the first Gothic novel, and, with its knights, villains, wronged maidens, haunted corridors, and things that go bump in the night, is the spiritual godfather of Frankenstein and Dracula, the creaking floorboards of Edgar Allan Poe and the shifting stairs and walking portraits of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.
Gothic elements
The Castle of Otranto is the first supernatural English novel and is a singularly influential work of Gothic fiction. It blends elements of realist fiction with the supernatural and fantastical, establishing many of the plot devices and character types that would become typical of the Gothic novel: secret passages, clanging trapdoors, pictures beginning to move, and doors closing by themselves. The poet Thomas Gray told Walpole that the novel made "some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’nights."
Queer elements
Symbolism in Castle of Otranto is perceived by some as homoerotic and the novel seen as an externalization of the author's grappling with sexuality. Max Fincher has written that Manfred is preoccupied with the threat of his identity being discovered in a way that parallels the fear of homoerotic desire being discovered. He argues that misogyny in the novel is an attempt to project manliness, overcompensating for the author's or character's fears of queerness or weakness. Because of these fears, the book presents non-heteronormative behavior as "unnatural and demonic," according to Fincher.
The Castle of Otranto and Shakespeare
The first and most obvious connection to William Shakespeare is presented by Horace Walpole himself, in the preface to the second edition of Otranto, in which he "praises Shakespeare as a truly original genius and the exemplar of imaginative liberty, as a part of a defense of Otranto's design". Elsewhere than in the preface, Walpole's several allusions to works by Shakespeare further emphasize the connection he wishes to draw between his own work and Shakespeare's. For example, in Hamlet, "Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost becomes for Walpole a template for terror".
(Three paragraphs removed due to spoilers.)
The final connection between Otranto and Shakespeare lies in the role that the servants play. Like Shakespeare, Walpole aims to create a "mixture of comedy and tragedy," and one of the ways he does so is by using the minor, servant characters (such as Bianca) as comic relief. This is a trope that Walpole takes from Shakespeare as, for example, Shakespeare's mechanicals from A Midsummer Night's Dream also serve as the key comic element in the play.
Literary impact
Otranto is generally credited with creating the entire Gothic novel genre. It was a smash hit in its day, until the author revealed that it was purely satirical fiction rather than an actual adaptation of medieval text. At that point, the critics and populace who had praised it turned on the book, claiming it was superficial, and other pejoratives generally assigned to romantic novels, which were seen as inferior in Britain at that time. But its impact was dramatic. The novelist Clara Reeve wrote The Old English Baron (1777) as a response, claiming she was taking Walpole's plot and adapting it to the demands of the time by balancing fantastic elements with 18th-century realism. She explained:
This Story is the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel. The question now arose whether supernatural events that were not as evidently absurd as Walpole's would not lead the simpler minds to believe them possible.
After a number of other novels were added to the budding Gothic genre, the teenage author Matthew Lewis published The Monk (1796), a novel that directly imitated the formula of Otranto, but took it to such an extreme that some have interpreted the novel as parody.