Bloody Records: Manuscripts and Politics in The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) famously begins when a giant medieval helmet plummets from the sky and fatally crushes Conrad, the only son and heir of Manfred the Prince of Otranto, on his wedding day. This event is a harbinger of things to come as more supernatural objects from the past descend in various ways on the castle to reveal the true history of Manfred’s ill-gotten rule over Otranto. As Manfred plots to divorce his wife and marry Conrad’s fiancée, Isabella, he stalks Isabella through a castle increasingly characterized by its medieval malevolence: a giant, armored hand appears on a banister; an army arrives bearing a colossal, ancient sword; a figure walks out of an old, musty portrait; a skeletal monk speaks. The novel reaches its climax when, in a case of mistaken identity, Manfred accidentally stabs his own daughter in a fit of rage. In the tumultuous denouement, the spirit of Alfonso the Good, the original Prince of Otranto and ghostly owner of the giant spectral objects that have mysteriously appeared throughout the story, materializes. He breaks the castle into ruins, reveals a seedy history of murder and forgery, and names a local peasant, Theodore, the rightful heir to Otranto before ascending into the sky in a giant fireball alongside St. Nicholas. Otranto’s wild supernatural machinations would become stock features of the Gothic novel, as would its medieval setting. In fact, critics have frequently treated the novel’s historicity as its most important formal feature. By setting Otranto in the murky medieval past, Walpole would seem to remove characters and readers alike from the empiricist ideologies of the Enlightenment and the demands of realist fiction, facilitating the Gothic’s unbelievable plot devices and sentimental effects. Understanding the
The Comic Tragedy of Mere Men and Women: The Ambiguously Distracting Use of Laughter in The Castle of Otranto and Its Prefaces
This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (1764) through a close reading of Walpole’s famous prefaces to the novel. The comic scenes evoke an incongruous dramatic response and contradict the claims made in the prefaces, according to which comic elements highlight dramatic ones. While being often thought of as indicative of a general aesthetic failure, the comic elements in this foundational text of the Gothic are indeed subtle, complex and artful. More precisely, Walpole’s curious use of laughter makes a complex appeal to an extra-dramatic level which undercuts the reader’s identification with the dramatic situations represented in the novel. Keywords: Horace Walpole; The Castle of Otranto; comedy; drama; Gothic novel; prefaces
The complete works of St. Thomas More
Publication of this volume brings to conclusion the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, a thirty-year publishing project of landmark importance in the study of humanism in Western history. The volume contains More's earliest works, probably written between 1492 and 1522, including English poems, a translation and devotional adaptation of Giovanni Francesco Pico's life of his famous uncle Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and a devotional prose work. These texts together trace More's earliest career as a humanist through his transition to maturity as a defender of the faith. The English poems (c. 1492-1494) are lively and experimental works, written at a time when English poetry was in its doldrums. This collection includes verses for a series of painted hangings in More's father's house, a lament for Queen Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII, traditional and sober Fortune verses, and a lively medieval comic poem, "A Merry Gest of a Sergeant and a Friar." The Life of Pico (c. 1510) is very likely More's earliest prose work and is his only extended translation of another writer's Latin into English. The translation is remarkable for its time, when sophisticated Latin was difficult to translate into more primitive English. The Last Things (c. 1522) is an incomplete prose work that re-creates the tradition of writing on death, judgment, hell, and heaven as objects of meditation. With the publication of St. Thomas More: Selected Poems, edited by Elizabeth F. Rogers (1961), the Yale University Press rated two new editions of the works of St. Thomas More. One is a complete scholarly edition in fourteen volumes; the other a modernized version of selected works in seven volumes. St.Thomas More: Selected Letters is the first volume in the Selected Works; The History of King Richard III is Volume 2 in the Complete Works. These editions, to be published over a period of ten years, are designed to serve as standard reference works for many decades to come. Sponsored by the Yale University Department of English and the Yale University Library, these editions mark a new era in the study of Renaissance literature, history, and religion.