SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

128
first Gothic playwright, publishing his play in 1768. 4
Certainly earlier dramatic works
contained precursors of Gothic elements, particularly in their violent plots, eerie settings,
and concern with transgressions, but twentieth-century critics have generally noted a
distinct Gothic dramatic canon. In 1947 Bertrand Evans published Gothic Drama from
Walpole to Shelley, the first major work to define the texts and key issues that constituted
Gothic drama. Evans relates that later playwrights such as Byron credited Walpole as the
“father of the first romance” (Cox 119). 5
Evans notes an explosion of Gothic drama up until the 1790s, an era filled with
paradigm-changing ideas. Since the medieval period England had undergone many such
shifts, including two major ones: the Catholic church as the center of everyday life had
been dismantled, climaxing in the break with Rome and centuries of Catholic-Protestant
struggles, and the divine right of kings to rule had been challenged. These institutions
adapted and recovered, and seemingly the only institution to remain intact was the family
—but in many Gothic works it is the idea of the family unit that is challenged and
interrogated. At the same time some “potentially radical questions about
the treatment of women are raised . . . [Gothic plays] continue and extend Gothic
conventions but do so within a changed literary and ideological movement” (Cox 5.). 6
4 Fifty copies of The Mysterious Mother were published privately and the play was never performed (Cox
12).
5 Forty years later Frederick S. Frank published The First Gothics:A Critical Guide to the English Gothic
Novel (1987), and in 2006 reissued Evan’s study, in which he identified the starting point of Gothic drama
as The Mysterious Mother (Cox 120).
6 The popularity of Gothic novels and drama waned until the late Victorian era when, perhaps aroused by
scientific advances which once again questioned man’s nature and the opposition of faith and reason, it
reemerged with such novels as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Dracula (1897).