Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-767nl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T22:25:17.894Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Stage Adventures of Some Gothic Novels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2021

Willard Thorp
Willard Thorp*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The characteristic drama of the first years of the nineteenth century was, as everyone knows, absurdly romantic and sentimental. Incited by the extravagant Kotzebue and charmed into emulation by the new mélodrame from France, the first specimen of which reached England in 1802, the English playwrights supplied the stage with a variety of plots involving robber barons, victims of the Inquisition, captive maidens and sentimental villains. Frequently they seasoned these delicacies with supernatural horrors and garnished them with vaulted halls, sepulchral chambers, and dungeons.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 1928 , pp. 476 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1928

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 James Boaden, himself an adaptor of Gothic tales, commented significantly in later years on Jepbson's tragedy. One needs to remember the drama of the romantic years between. “The supernatural was rather hinted than shown: the author seemed conscious that the stage, at all events, was cold to the wonders of the Gothic muse: that the scenic castle could no longer be haunted by the midnight spectre, nor be overclouded by a mysterious and avenging fatality.” Life of Kemble (1825), I, 277.

2 Sir Bertrand is not included in the Works of Anne Letitia Barbauld, edited by Miss Lucy Aiken in 1825, but Warpole thought it was hers and so, evidently, did Andrews. This bit of evidence may be added to arguments adduced by Birkhead, Tale of Terror, pp. 28-29.

3 One specimen of this “amusing matter” I cannot refrain from quoting. Scene ten is the “far distant town” of Boston.

American Ballad
Boston is a Yankee town, so is Philadelphia,
You shall have a sugar-dram, and I'll have one myselfy.
Yankee doodle, doodle doo, yani.ee doodle dandy.
High doodle, doodle doo, yankee doodle dandy.
Our Jemima's lost her mare, and knows not where to find her;
She'll come trotting by, I'll swear, and bring her tail behind her.
Yankee doodle, etc
Jenny Locket lost her pocket, Lukey Sweetlipa found it.
Devil a thing was in the pocket, but the border round it.
Yankee doodle, etc
First I Bought a porridge pot, then I bought a ladle.
Then my wife was brought to bed, and now I work the cradle.
Boston is a silly town, and if I'd my desire,
First I'd knock the Rulers down, and then I'd kick the Crier.

4 Genest believes Mrs. Cowley alludes spitefully to the success of this scene in the preface to the Town before You: “In a popular piece a great actor, holding a sword in his left hand, and making awkward passes with it, charms the audience, ana brings down such applause as the bewitching dialogue of Farquhar pants for in vain.”

5 Boaden, Life of Kemble (1825), II, 119.

6 The alterations from the novel are of necessity many. Mrs. Radcliffe plagues her heroine with the attentions of a wicked Duke. Siddons eliminates him and makes Ferrand assume the double rôle of the Marquis Mazzini who has repudiated and imprisoned his wife, and of the Duke whose suit he encourages. As usual in her novels, the characters are constantly on the move, and the number of crumbling monasteries which they inhabit in the course of the romance is astounding. The drama is confined to the precincts of the castle and the monastery.

7 Mrs. Radcliffe by events in her twelfth chapter provides opportunity for this scene of mingled terror and buffoonery, but Siddons is alone responsible for it.

8 In the novel the servants of the Marquis have been aroused by the apparition in the south pavilion of the castle. Their master finally goes thither with them to prove that they are vainly superstitious. The novelist makes no attempt to mitigate the suspense she has created, and the reader is left quite in the dark until the denouement reveals the story of the incarceration of the Marquise. Mrs. Radcliffe always lays her ghosts before the last chapter is done, but she never laughs at her horrors as these dramatists do in their scenes of terror.

9 Frederick Reynolds assisted Andrews with this play as well as Better Late Than Never. Genest says Andrews was to have all the fame and Reynolds half the profits.

10 I have come on another version of The Monk of a far different sort—Le Moine, Drame fantastique, par L. M. Fontan, produced at the Odéon in 1831. In thirty-four yean theatrical fashions have greatly changed. Fontan particularly stresses the devil-compact which Boaden had so carefully avoided. His Monk is to be pitied for the struggle with evil which he is made to endure. The figures of Faust and the Byron of the popular imagination loom near.