Abstract
On a dark and stormy night in the ruins of a French abbey, a young virgin reading a fragmentary manuscript thinks she sees a ghost. So begins the climactic scene of Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 novel The Romance of the Forest, warmly praised by Samuel Coleridge for its evocation of ‘mysterious terrors.’1 An early success in a prolific decade of Gothic fiction and drama, The Romance exemplifies Radcliffe’s technique of constructing and then demystifying supernatural terrors by having them ‘ingeniously explained by familiar causes.’2 With its visually striking architectural components against a picturesque continental landscape, the novel proved highly adaptable for theatrical representation; three years later, Covent Garden staged James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest, purportedly ‘Founded on the Romance of the Forest.’ But the adaptation made a crucial modification to Radcliffe’s novel: where Radcliffe ascribes Adeline’s ghost sighting to her overheated imagination, Boaden confronts her with a true phantom.
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Notes
Samuel Coleridge, ‘Lewis’s Romance of the Monk,’ Critical Review 19 (February 1797: 194–8
Rictor Norton, Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000), 197.
Jacqueline Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37–8.
Christopher Balme, ‘Playbills and the Theatrical Public Sphere,’ in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, ed. Charlotte Canning and Thomas Postlewait (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010).
Terry Castle, ‘The Gothic Novel,’ in Boss Ladies, Watch Out! (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92.
Simon During, Modern Enchantments: the Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 29.
Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 120.
Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Robert Reno, ‘James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1984): 97.
Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14.
Clifford Siskin and William Warner, ‘This is Enlightenment: An Invitation in the Form of an Argument,’ in This is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1.
Diane Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 115.
James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of Kemble (Philadelphia: Robert H. Small, 1825), 313.
Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, ed. Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 134.
D.L. MacDonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 111.
James Boaden, Fontainville Forest, in The Plays of James Boaden, ed. Steven Cohan (New York: Garland Publishing, 1980), 39.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 5.1.14–15.
Dale Townshend, ‘Gothic and the Ghost of Hamlet,’ in Gothic Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis and Dale Townshend (New York: Routledge, 2008), 82.
For a history of Fuseli’s painting and its later engraving, see Alan R. Young, Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709–1805 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 69.
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 247.
Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 30.
Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 171–2.
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.
For Fontainville Forest’s complete performance calendar, see Ben Ross Schneider, Jr, ed., Index to the London Stage 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 85.
Charles Dibdin, Annette and Lubin: A Comic Opera, In One Act (London: G. Kearsley, 1778).
Henry Siddons, The Sicilian Romance: or, the Apparition of the Cliffs (London: J. Barker, 1794), 21.
Sybil Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 34.
John O’Brien. Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 1.
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© 2014 Nathalie Wolfram
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Wolfram, N. (2014). Gothic Adaptation and the Stage Ghost. In: Luckhurst, M., Morin, E. (eds) Theatre and Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345073_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345073_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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