H. W. Hewet's woodcut for the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet (Act V, Scene i), from the 1847 Harper & Bros. edition of Shakespeare's Plays.
| Yup, Willie the Shake. He was a huge influence on late C18 Gothic writers, especially those such as Ann Radcliffe who sought mainstream acceptance and literary validation for their work. The Gothic, after all, was a fledgling genre often treated by critics with condescension or outright disdain, and invocations of Shakespeare (see Walpole's preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto for a classic example) helped to lay claim to literary respectability as well as to create an atmosphere of refinement and literary sensibility that many thought the Gothic lacked (as indeed it sometimes did). The frequent use of supernaturalist elements and revenge motifs helped further establish the influence of Renaissance drama on the Gothic tradition. | H. W. Hewet's woodcut for the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet (Act V, Scene i), from the 1847 Harper & Bros. edition of Shakespeare's Plays. |
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Hamlet (Table of Contents) [MIT]
Featuring Shakespeare's most famous ghost, and a prince who, if not exactly goth, does exhibit a decided preference for black clothing, and does spend a fair amount of time talking about death, and talking to skulls....
-- brief summary and commentary [Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, NYU School of Medicine]
-- For another etext of the play, or for a synopsis and other materials, check out The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark website. [Enotes.com, another one of those ripoff plagiarism sites] |
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Julius Caesar (Table of Contents) [MIT]
Shakespeare's classical history classic (that's not as redundant as it seems) about ambition, betrayal, and—in Act 4, Scene 3—the ghost (very briefly) as harbinger of bad news.
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Macbeth [MIT] Shakespeare's most famous witches. Well, his only witches, but you get the idea...
-- Birnam Wood on the Net
-- brief summary and commentary [Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, NYU School of Medicine] |
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A Midsummer Night's Dream [MIT]
A supernaturalist comedy, with fairies, spells, mistaken identities, etc....
-- Commentary on and etext of the play (and a MOO)
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Othello [MIT] Non-supernatural, but an excellent example of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy, a genre which, in its depiction of powerful (and "base") emotion, had a significant effect on characterizations of the Gothic villain. (Perhaps the most famous — in its time — example of the genre is Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.)
-- brief summary and commentary [Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, NYU School of Medicine
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Richard III (Table of Contents)
Yes, a history play, but ghosts aplenty (ten by my count)....
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Romeo and Juliet (Table of Contents) [MIT] No ghosts, of course, but a powerful love story which exerted considerable influence on writers of late-C18 and early-C19 Gothic fiction, itself developing in part from the mid- to late-C18 tradition of the sentimental novel.
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The Tempest (Table of Contents) [MIT] A romance, a comedy, something sui generis — call it what you will (oops, that's another Shakesplay), this one features a monster (Caliban), a sprite (Arial), and a magician (Prospero). Add a deserted island, a power grab, and a love story, and you have, among other things, a compelling meditation on the nature of Monstrosity and Humanity — and thus a presaging, of a sort, of Frankenstein and dozens of SF tales.
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