As Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I–II (1812) and Eastern Tales (1813–16) steadily gained ascendancy in the field of narrative verse, Walter Scott – hitherto the master of the form – realised the wind was changing. Years later, in the preface to the 1830 edition of Rokeby (1813), he acknowledged that his ‘manner, or style, which, by its novelty, attracted the public in an unusual degree had now […] exhausted the patience of the reader’ and, after Byron’s success, ‘[t]here would have been little wisdom in measuring my force with so formidable an antagonist’.1 With his metrical innovations, ‘licentious combination’ of rhymes, structure and style, historically documented settings and complex characterisations, Scott had made verse tales central to the period’s ‘Metromanie’, John Gibson Lockhart’s neologism for the Romantic-era craze for poetry.2 Taking on Scott’s mantle, Byron modified and revitalised the form; but for all his investment, his attitude towards it was decidedly mixed. It was after reading Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh in 1817 that he formulated his well-known condemnation of the current ‘wrong revolutionary poetical system’, disastrously bent on a collective swerve away from Augustan models (BLJ, V. 265). Besides himself, most of the names guilty of promoting this system were authors of ‘metrical tales’: Scott, Southey, Wordsworth and Campbell (he reprieved Rogers and Crabbe). Three years later, he asked his publisher to spare him from Hemans and George Croly, also narrative poets and published by Murray (BLJ, VII. 201). Even as Byron cultivated and promoted narrative poetry, he denounced it as the expression of a misguided poetic climate, and a derivative, repetitive and faddish form artificially propelled by an insatiable demand for novelty.

This chapter considers the intersection of Gothic and Orientalism in the long eighteenth century from the joint perspective of its origins and ideological relevance. Having traced the influence on Gothic of literary materials imported from the East, it examines the terrifying effects of commercial and imperial concerns in works such as William Beckford’s Vathek, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s ‘The Anaconda’, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. The relevance of this commercial and imperial imaginary for figurations of subjectivity, the body and sexuality is then explored with reference to George Colman’s Blue-Beard, Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’, Walter Scott’s ‘The Surgeon’s Daughter’ and the anonymous novel The Lustful Turk. Through its double focus, the chapter argues that, if the East is a foundational feature in early Gothic, the troubling power of Orientalist Gothic depends on distance and alienness, though also, and more perturbingly, on the proximity and contact promoted by an expanding commercial and territorial imperialism.

On November 4, 1811, the Whig poet and banker Samuel Rogers invited Byron to dine at his house together with fellow poets Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore. To his host’s consternation, Byron declined all offers of food and drink, seemingly pleased with “potatoes bruised down on his plate and drenched with vinegar.” A few days later, on meeting Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse, Rogers enquired: “How long will Lord Byron persevere in his present diet?” The answer was: “Just as long as you continue to notice it” (HVSV 41). This anecdote, from a few months before Byron became the most talked-about poet in Britain, significantly catches him in the process of learning to “act famous.” Not yet a literary star, he comes across as a moody poseur, knowingly playing with his audience and their intersecting gazes, at the center of which is his own body, that pivotal and hugely problematic part of the Byronic myth.

A relatively uncomplicated definition of ‘Gothic drama’ would describe it as the counterpart of Gothic romance, one in which the plots, themes and other appurtenances of the latter are transferred to the stage or, at least, into a dramatic text. Romantic-period commentators themselves recognised that drama appropriated the features made popular by contemporary Gothic fiction, translating them into a visual, multimedia and three-dimensional artefact. In his scathing attack on Charles Robert Maturin's Bertram (1816), Samuel Taylor Coleridge associated stage Gothic with hackneyed elements, including ‘ruined castles’, ‘dungeons’, ‘trap-doors’, ‘skeletons’, and ‘flesh-and-blood ghosts’ (Coleridge 1983: II:211). As the last item in this list suggests, stage versions of Gothic gave visual and material immediacy to the imaginings of fictional texts. Accordingly, in his foundational study of 1947, Bertrand Evans defined Gothic drama as being distinguished by ‘specialized settings, machinery, character types, themes, plots, and techniques selected and combined to serve a primary purpose of exploiting mystery, gloom, and terror’ (Evans 1947: 5).

Several plays performed and/or published between the 1760s and the 1820s conform to these features, and serve to delineate a potential canon of Gothic drama. The conventional starting point is Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother (1768, 1781, 1791), though with John Home's Douglas (1756) and Hall Hartson's The Countess of Salisbury (1765) as forerunners. In the 1770s and 1780s Gothic features evidently emerged in Robert Jephson's adaptation of Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) as The Count of Narbonne (Covent Garden, 17 November 1781), but also in historical plays such as Hannah More's Percy (Covent Garden, 10 December 1777); Hannah Cowley's Albina (Haymarket, 31 July 1779); and Andrew Macdonald's Vimonda (Haymarket, 5 September 1787); plays inspired by classical antiquity such as Arthur Murphy's The Grecian Daughter (Drury Lane, 26 February 1772); operatic comedies like John O'Keeffe's The Castle of Andalusia (Covent Garden, 2 November 1782) and James Cobb's The Haunted Tower (Drury Lane, 24 November 1789); or pantomimes such as Miles Peter Andrews's The Enchanted Castle (Covent Garden, 26 December 1786).

‘She is too good, or, at least, too silent for one to be comfortable with her’. Thus, in the opening of Charlotte Smith's comedy What Is She? (1798), the maid Winifred describes the elusive character of her otherwise irreproachable mistress Mrs Derville. The same feeling of discomfort is emphasized by the lady's suitor, Lord Orton, who, disguised as the impecunious and troubled Mr Belford, exclaims: ‘Incomprehensible woman! Her situation, her mind, every thing about her, is mysterious. Yet my heart mocks at the doubts of my reason, and I have scarcely courage to wish them satisfied – yet I must know more of her, or endeavour to forget that I have known her at all’. Thus Smith posits the mysterious woman as the centre of her play's action and the pivot in the love-story which, in line with comedic convention, is its thematic, affective and ideological mainstay. In addition, the fact that both Winifred and Orton/Belford are affected by Mrs Derville's unusual behaviour stresses the profound impact of her own enigma on the community of people around her. Accordingly, an irresistible curiosity urges the dramatis personae to pry into her identity and seek to reconstruct the narrative of her life.

Placing Mrs Derville under the joint headings of mystery and secrecy, Smith increases her long list of suffering, persecuted female wanderers. Also in the generic context of the drama Smith's use of curiosity does not represent a drastic departure from an eighteenth-century tradition numbering such influential precedents as Susanna Centlivre's The Busy Body (1709), one of the most successful of eighteenth-century plays, the plot of which is increasingly complicated by the curiosity of the aptly named Marplot, or George Lillo's 1737 tragedy The Fatal Curiosity, later adapted by George Colman as Fatal Curiosity (1782). In addition, by consigning her female protagonist to the scrutiny of countless observers, she includes her in a series of ideologically weighted concerns typical of the political and cultural climate of 1790s Britain with its alternate tension of political subversion and regulatory containment.