After 1780, the Gothic became an established dramatic kind in its own right. The decade of the 1790s has received a preponderance of attention; in contrast, this chapter begins with formative productions including John Home’s Douglas (1756), Robert Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne (1781), adapted from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otronto (1764), and the plays of the 1780s. Gothic drama changed decade by decade more than has been recognised, and this essay demonstrates the playwrights’ increasing development of innovative, sophisticated uses of music, lighting, sets, sound and spectacular effects, both adapted and created. Drawing upon dramatic forms as diverse as she-tragedy and farce, early Gothic plays could be operas, melodramas or pantomimes. The 1780s set the mixed genre pattern that became distinctively Gothic and led to plays such as George Colman’s Blue-Beard (1798), with its sixty-four-night initial run. In conclusion, the chapter argues that Gothic drama is an important, even formative, part of the rise of modern popular culture with its ability to be sharply political, highly entertaining and an addictive fad.

One of Daniel Defoe's contemporaries, Eliza Haywood, opens The Invisible Spy (1755) by taunting the reader: “I have observed that when a new book begins to make a noise in the world ... every one is desirous of becoming acquainted with the author; and this impatience increases the more ... he endeavors to conceal himself.” Shortly before her death, Haywood “laid a solemn injunction” to keep her secrets on the person who knew her life best, because she believed “improper liberties [would be] taken with her character after death, by the intermixture of truth and falsehood.” Almost from the beginning of his writing career, Defoe could serve as proof of these statements. Although his contemporaries often wanted to “become acquainted with the author” in order to get him arrested, many of his modern-day biographers and critics have dedicated themselves to scrutinizing the works to find the man. Most people think that a writer can be found in the works and that “writing was his/her life.” The writer, however, was a material body, a mortal body. Defoe stood in the rain in the pillory and could not brush the water off his nose. Although he obviously had an excellent constitution and unusual stamina, he had colds, bruises, and surgery. People responded to his material body in ways that affected his behavior and self-perception; they remembered his hooked nose, his habit of crooking his little finger, and his foppishness. Writing was not Defoe's life. Unlike most writers, for whom “life” and its demands are obstacles to writing, except for the brief period of Defoe's poetic aspirations, he preferred life and resorted to writing when enraged, unoccupied, or in economic need.