Abstract
Surveying recent interest in the various intersections of Shakespeare and the gothic, this chapter considers three aspects of these points of convergence. It considers the role played by Shakespeare in the early gothic of writers such as Walpole and Radcliffe, and in the course of this discussion, also considers Shakespeare’s role in mid-eighteenth-century nationalist political debates, in which the idea of a ‘gothic’ heritage developed at around the same time as Bardology: Shakespeare was appropriated as a ‘gothic’ writer anachronistically by Whig historians. The chapter then gives attention to the topic and imagery in Shakespeare’s theatre which came to fascinate later writers of the gothic, including his representation of the supernatural and ‘unnatural’, dreams, ghosts and madness. The chapter briefly concludes by considering some of the ways in which Shakespeare would be appropriated by later writers of the gothic tradition in the nineteenth century and beyond.
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Whiteley, G. (2021). Shakespeare, Influence and Appropriation. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84562-9_2
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