Although the theater of the nineteenth-century has long been reviled as an unartistic wasteland of melodrama and spectacle, a critical reevaluation of the subject seems to be under way, due in large part to the recent rise in cultural and new historicist studies. These studies attempt to reexamine the much maligned dramas of the period within their web of social, cultural and historical contexts. Jerome McGann asserts in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism that "literary works are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products" (Cox 80). Terence Hoagwood specifies five dimensions of nineteenth-century dramas which pertain to cultural studies: "the plays are constituted in stage productions, in print media, in the historical engagements of their topicality, in the diachronic construction of their relationship with earlier and later drama, and in the synchronic construction of their relationship with other other cultural forms" (49). The supernatural dramas of Matthew Gregory Lewis--most notably The Castle Spectre (1797), Adelmorn, the Outlaw (1801), and The Wood-Dæmon (1806 and 1811)--exemplify how cultural contexts determine the content, reception and influence of literary works. Excoriated by the critics, wildly popular with the masses, the plays exploited revolutionary changes in the theater and formed a model for the melodrama, which "remained a dominant form of theatrical entertainment for a hundred years" (Booth 151). This discussion of Lewis's plays reflects James Woodfield's theory in English Theatre in Transition that "a true evaluation of the drama of the nineteenth-century must focus not on literary criteria, but on the theatrical aspects such as acting and staging" (2). Lewis himself explored this distinction, and his supernatural dramas embody the dichotomy between the literary and the theatrical.
Lewis's representation of the supernatural on stage is closely bound up with both the popularity of his plays, and the derision with which the critics held them, and stems ultimately from a complex web of social factors. On a most basic level, Lewis's handling of the supernatural raises important questions for cultural studies, since a culture's attitudes towards the supernatural, and the author's and the audience's varying degrees of faith and doubt, must influence the representation of a supernatural episode. Lewis wrote for a culture poised between an "Enlightened" scepticism of Fancy and a Romantic faith in the Imagination, and this shift in paradigms explains both the avidity with which the Gothic novel-reading public embraced his sensational productions, and the critics' concern that these plays would, in the words of a reviewer from the Theatrical Journal, "degrade the English stage, and vitiate the public taste" (369). More concrete influences on Lewis's representation of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena include changes in the demographics of his audience and the physical dimensions of the theaters. An awareness of these cultural contexts helps us comprehend the enormous popularity and influence of his plays.
By any standards, Lewis's spectacles were popular. In an age when many plays closed after a single night, and ten performances in a season was considered a successful run, his supernatural plays exceeded all expectations. The Castle Spectre opened late in the season at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, on December 14, 1797. It enjoyed a forty-seven night initial run, earning 18,000 pounds over a three month period. Revived, it was performed over twelve times in each of its second and third years, and it remained in the dramatic repertoire for much of the nineteenth century. Productions by touring companies packed the provincial theaters as well. William Wordsworth, for example, attended a performance in Bristol in March of 1798. The Castle Spectre was also extremely successful in print: the first printed edition appeared in 1798, and went through eleven editions by 1803. Several other of Lewis's plays were nearly as popular. The Wood Dæmon debuted at Drury Lane in 1806 and played thirty-four times. Slightly revised and retitled One O'Clock; or The Knight and the Wood Dæmon in 1811, it appeared at The English Opera House twenty-five times. His success was not limited to his Gothic dramas: Timour the Tartar, a spectacular historical melodrama, appeared at Covent Garden forty-four times in the 1811 season. All in all, as Jeffrey Cox notes, Lewis was "the most successful writer of serious drama at the turn of the century" (150).
Certainly the plays did not succeed on the strengths of their literary merits. Even in Lewis's day the critics tended to distinguish between the plays as literary texts and as public performances. For example, the review of The Castle Spectre in the Critical Review complains, "There is scarcely one original incident in the piece .... No genius is displayed in the more elevated dialogue; no wit shines in the comic parts: the story and the stage effects occasion the popularity of The Castle Spectre " (476). This same critic concludes, "We should disapprove the drama, did we judge of it only in the closet; but its effect in representation is admirable" (478). Coleridge, too, in his letter of January 1798 to Wordsworth which followed his reading of the play, called Lewis's style "a flat, flabby, unimaginative Bombast oddly sprinkled with colloquialisms," but he nevertheless admitted the play's theatrical merits, particularly its "management of situations for stage effects" (Peck 76). Wordsworth himself best summed up the reason for The Castle Spectre`s success in his sarcastic comment to Hazlitt that "it fitted the taste of the audience like a glove" (Hazlitt 17.118).
A recurring theme in the criticism is alarm over this turn in popular favor. The critic in The Analytical Review blusters, "For our part, we cannot but regard the success of [The Castle Spectre ], and others of a similar class, as truly humiliating to the pride of our national taste; and as seeming to demonstrate, that the manly and sublime beauties of the drama must resign their place in the estimations of a british [sic] public to stage trick and scenery; to pantomime and farce .... ghosts, gliding in their winding sheets, are what interest and convulse a modern audience" (180). This shift in the taste of the audience was not lost on the actors of the period. T. P. Cooke mourns, "I hope it will not hereafter be believed that The Castle Spectre could attract crowded houses, when the most sublime productions of the immortal Shakespeare would be played to empty benches" (Evans 133). It is worth noting that by 1823 Cooke had adapted to the times: in Richard Brinsley Peake's immensely popular play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, Cooke played the monster. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge exhibit a degree of jealousy and desperation in their remarks on Lewis's play. After all, as Jonathan Wordsworth notes, they "had both written tragedies for the stage in the previous year [The Borderers and Orsorio], and both had been turned down by Covent Garden a day or two before the Spectre opened at the Theatre Royal" (ii). William Wordsworth attributed his failure to "the depraved State of the Stage at present" (Osborne 5), and in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads continued to bemoan the modern craze for "frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories." Despite his bravado, he wrote to James Tobin in 1798, "if I had no other method of employing myself Mr. Lewis's success would have thrown me into despair" (Peck 76).
How did Lewis succeed consistently in attracting an audience when his more literary contemporaries did not? Certainly a major reason for his success was his innovations in staging the supernatural. The title character in The Castle Spectre, which appears twice on stage during the play, produced an electrifying effect on the audience, yet prompted sharp rebukes from most critics. Why such extreme responses? After all, there were obvious precedents for depicting ghosts on stage in Shakespeare's plays, and ghosts had been a staple of Gothic novels since Walpole's Castle of Otranto in 1764. Nor was Lewis's spectre the first shown in a Gothic drama: James Boaden's Fontainville Forest did so in 1794. Why was Lewis's ghost so controversial in 1797? First, some critics charged that ghosts were acceptable in Shakespeare's plays because the people in that benighted time believed in them, but in the modern, enlightened eighteenth century, such phenomena were ludicrous. In fact, there was widespread popular interest in the supernatural in the eighteenth century century (witness the case of the Cock Lane ghost in 1762), although educated society scoffed at such credulity. For some critics, even Shakespeare's ghosts were not completely acceptable. In 1794 these critics applauded John Philip Kemble's production of Macbeth in which the ghost of Banquo did not actually appear on stage (Reno 97-98). While ghosts were acceptable in Gothic novels because they could be dismissed as the subjective delusions of a character, that option was not open to the playwright who either had to give the ghost a physical presence or omit it entirely. Boaden did precede Lewis in putting a spectre on stage, but he minimized the physicality of his phantom by partialy hiding it behind a gauze screen (Reno 99).
Lewis, in contrast, accentuated the impact of his ghost. The stage directions for the ghost's first appearance to her daughter, the heroine Angela, emphasize the effect of his very visible ghost, and calls for musical accompaniment and effects of light and sound:
The folding doors unclose, and the Oratory is seen illuminated. In its center stands a tall female figure, her white and flowing garments spotted with blood; her veil is thrown back, and discovers a pale and melancholy countenance; her eyes are lifted upwards, her arms extended towards heaven, and a large wound appears upon her bosom. Angela sinks upon her knees, with her eyes riveted upon the figure, which for some moments remains motionless. At length the Spectre advances slowly, to a soft and plaintive strain; she stops opposite to Reginald's picture [her husband], and gazes upon it in silence. She then turns, approaches Angela, seems to invoke a blessing upon her, points to the picture and retires to the Oratory. The music ceases. Angela rises with a wild look, and follows the Vision, extending her arms towards it .... The Spectre waves her hand, as bidding her farewell. Instantly the organ's swell is heard; a full chorus of female voices chaunt `Jubilate,' a blaze of light flashes through the Oratory, and the folding doors close with a loud noise. (206)
The spectre appears yet again in the final scene, interposing herself between her daughter and the villain Osmond, giving Angela a chance to stab him dead with the dagger which had taken her mother's life. Numerous reviewers complained that the ghost served no dramatic purpose worthy of her appearance, revealing no secret, meting out no providential punishment on the guilty. The Monthly Mirror objects "that there is no necessity for her appearance. The mischief that is done, or prevented, would have been done or prevented without her" (355). The critic for the Analytical Review argues that the success of the scene comes from "the spectacle and the music," and adds that "with the united efforts of the actress and the scene-painter, the property-man and the fiddler, [the ghost] has made her way to the public approbation" (185). Such was the sensational effect of the scene, however, that the weaknesses tended to be forgiven, even by some critics. The reviewer in The Monthly Mirror adds, "if we pass over the necessity of the Spectre in this play, we must allow the effect produced by her introduction, to be stronger than any thing of the sort that has been hitherto attempted" (356). Lewis was, after all, concerned with nothing so much as the effect his plays produced.
His fascination with sensational effects appears throughout his career. The most famous example is his answer to charges that his inclusion of two black servants in The Castle Spectre is anachronistic in the historic context of the play. Lewis blithely subordinates historicity to effect, saying: "I thought I could give a pleasing variety to the characters and the dresses, if I made my servants black; and could I have produced the same effect by making my heroine blue, blue I should have made her" (Evans 133). In Adelmorn, the Outlaw he multiplies the ghosts to three, and adds a staged dream vision with elaborate mechanical effects. The Wood-Dæmon furthers his search for novel and sensational effects. The production includes another dream vision, the appearance of Sangrida, the title character, in a chariot drawn by two dragons, and a bed which sinks and carries the occupants to a subterranean cavern. The grand finale entails the following stage directions: the villain, Hardyknute, "falls into the arms of four fiends, who come from behind the altar, to which they bear him, the snakes twist themselves round him; Sangrida stands over him, and they all sink--the statue and the rock disappear; the cavern vanishes, and Leolyn and Una find themselves in the great hall of the castle, which is illuminated" (65-66). The stage machinery is clearly the star of this production, and in fact the opening was postponed when the mechanic took ill (Peck 94). Lewis also devised crowd-pleasing effects for his non-supernatural drama. Timour the Tartar (1811), for example, featured a troupe of trained horses in the battle scenes. The reviewer in The Morning Chronicle signals the near surrender in critical opposition which had occurred by this point: "Amidst the clattering of hoofs, the clangor of swords and spears, and the shouts of an enraptured audience, it is scarcely possible, or perhaps hardly worth while, for criticism to attempt to speak" (Peck 104-5). By the end of his career as a playwright Lewis had carried the day, and with the support of the spectators routed the opposition, thus preparing the way for the dominance of melodrama on the nineteenth-century stage.
Lewis was innovative because he exploited the shifts in the theater already underway in the 1790s, and closed the gap between "high" and "mass" culture. His spectacles were ideally suited for the new theatrical milieu. The two "legitimate" or licensed theaters, at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, had been enlarged earlier in the decade. Covent Garden had been expanded from fewer than 2,200 seats to more than 3,000 in 1792, and Drury Lane grew in capacity from 2,300 to nearly 3,900 seats in 1794 (Cox 8). Richard Cumberland writes in 1807 of the effect: they are now "theatres for spectators rather than playhouses for hearers .... The splendor of the scenes, the ingenuity of the machinist and the rich display of dresses ... supercede the labours of the poet" (Cox 9). Although these two licensed theaters had a monopoly on spoken drama, a host of unlicensed or "illegitimate" theaters offered alternative entertainments, such as pantomimes or burlettas at several venues, opera at the King's Theatre, equestrian shows at Astley's Royal Grove and the Royal Circus, and naval spectaculars at Sadler's Wells (Cox 10-11). The increasingly popular fare of the "illegitimate" theaters crossed over, in Lewis's plays, to the immense new stages of the "legitimate" theaters. His melodramas blurred the boundaries between the two at a crucial moment of flux. Furthermore, as the Industrial Revolution altered the pattern of English society, London began to fill with new working classes who favored the escapist fare of the spectacular melodramas. The increasing drabness of urban and industrial life created a corresponding craving for relief (Wordsworth called this "a state of almost savage torpor"), a craving satisfied by the fantastic and the marvelous. Theater managers staged just such productions, designed to draw crowds to fill their cavernous new auditoriums (Kucich 65). A passage from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, although a much later work, suggests the taste of these audiences: "Three times a week is an average attendance at theatres and dances by the more prosperous costermongers .... [a representative from that class relates,] `Love and murder suits us best, sir .... of Hamlet we can make neither end nor side; and nine out of ten of us--ay far more than that--would like it to be confined to the ghost scenes, and the funeral, and the killing at the last'" (1.15).
Lewis recognized the taste of his audience, and he gave them what they wanted. In his epilogue to Thomas Holcroft's comedy Knave or Not? (1798), Lewis offers this recipe for a popular play:
That his Play may succeed, may the Bard safely boast,Who opens the piece with a Song by a Ghost;
But in popular plaudits unbounded he revels,
If he follows the Song with a Dance by two Devils ...
Give us Lightning and Thunder, Flames, Daggers and Rage;
With events that ne'er happened, except on the Stage. (Nicoll 99)
Lewis's tone is provocative. The ludicrous excess of the imagery, and the exuberant anapests of the metre, suggest that he does not take his own advice seriously; yet with this same formula he indeed won "popular plaudits unbounded." This ironic distance, combined with a pragmatic acknowledgement of public expectations, also appears prominently in his supernatural dramas. Although there is little evidence Lewis believed in ghosts himself, and in fact the early acts of The Castle Spectre present a ludicrous picture of jokes about ghosts, foolish characters who believe in ghosts, and other characters who are mistaken for ghosts, at the end of the play the ghost of Evelina is real, and the anticipated spectre actually haunts the stage. He gives his credulous, Gothic novel-reading public a moment of awe, or at least a shiver of fright.
Lewis's importance as a playwright cannot be gauged fairly by literary standards alone. A more accurate picture emerges when he is considered within the context of the forces which were revolutionizing society, literature and the stage at the end of the eighteenth century. Bertram Evans notes, "He wrote at the time that theatrical and literary plays parted company, and ... pointed the direction in which each kind was to go" (160). Lewis exploited the new theatrical medium and new public tastes, and was a harbinger of the spectacular melodrama which would dominate the nineteenth-century stage.
Works Cited
Booth, Michael. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Oxford UP, 1991.
Cox, Jeffrey N. Introduction. Seven Gothic Dramas 1769-1825. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. Athens: Ohio UP, 1-77.
Evans, Bertrand. Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley. Berkeley: U California P, 1947.
Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vol. New York: AMS Press, 1967.
Hoagwood, Terence. "Prolegomenon for a Theory of Romantic Drama." The Wordsworth Circle 23.2 (1992): 49-63.
Kucich, Greg. "`A Haunted Ruin': Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment." The Wordsworth Circle 23.2 (1992): 64-75.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory. Adelmorn, the Outlaw. J. Bell. 1801.
------. The Castle Spectre. Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992.
------. One O'Clock! or, the Knight and the Wood Dæmon. The New English Drama. Vol. 19. London, 1824.
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 4 vols. Facsimile ed. New York: Dover, 1968.
Nicoll, Allardyce. A History of English Drama. Cambridge UP, 1927.
Peck, Louis F. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Harvard UP, 1961.
Reno, Robert P. "James Boaden's Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis' The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage." Eighteenth-Century Life 9.1 (1984): 95-106.
Review of The Castle Spectre. Analytical Review 28 (August 1798): 179-91.
------. Critical Review. S.2, 22 (April 1798): 476-78.
------. The Monthly Mirror 4 (Feb. 1798): 106-13.
Woodfield, James. English Theatre in Transition 1881-1914. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984.
Wordsworth, Jonathan. Introduction. The Castle Spectre. New York: Woodstock, 1990.