The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto is a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first Gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – A Gothic Story. Set in a haunted castle, the novel merged medievalism and terror in a style that has endured ever since. The aesthetic of the book has shaped modern-day Gothic books, films, art, music, and the Goth subculture.
Walpole was inspired to write the story after a nightmare he had at his Gothic Revival home, Strawberry Hill House, in Twickenham, southwest London. Claiming he saw a ghost in the nightmare—which featured a "gigantic hand in armour"—Walpole incorporated imagery from this into the novel, and also drew on his knowledge of medieval history.
The novel initiated a literary genre that would become extremely popular in the later 18th and early 19th century, with authors such as Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and George du Maurier.
The Castle of Otranto was written in 1764 during Horace Walpole's tenure as MP for King's Lynn. Walpole was fascinated with medieval history, in 1749 building a fake gothic castle, Strawberry Hill House.
The initial edition was titled in full: The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. This first edition purported to be a translation based on a manuscript written at Naples in 1529 and recently rediscovered in the library of "an ancient Catholic family in the north of England". He employed an archaic style of writing to reinforce this conceit.
The Italian manuscript's story, it was claimed, derived from a story still older, dating back perhaps as far as the Crusades. This Italian manuscript, along with alleged author "Onuphrio Muralto", were Walpole's fictional creations, and "William Marshal" his pseudonym.
In the second and subsequent editions, Walpole acknowledged authorship of the work, writing: "The favourable manner in which this little piece has been received by the public, calls upon the author to explain the grounds on which he composed it" as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success...." There was some debate at the time about the function of literature; that is, whether works of fiction should be representative of life or more purely imaginative (i.e., natural vs. romantic). The first edition was well received by some reviewers who understood the novel as belonging to medieval fiction, "between 1095, the era of the First Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last", as the first preface states; and some referred to Walpole as an "ingenious translator". Following Walpole's admission of authorship, however, many critics were loath to lavish much praise on the work and dismissed it as absurd, fluffy, romantic fiction, or even unsavory or immoral.
In his 1924 edition of The Castle of Otranto, Montague Summers showed that the life story of Manfred of Sicily inspired some details of the plot. The real medieval castle of Otranto was among Manfred's possessions. He repeated the assertion in 1938 in The Gothic Quest.
The Castle of Otranto tells the story of Manfred, lord of the castle, and his family. The book begins on the wedding day of his sickly son Conrad and princess Isabella. Shortly before the wedding, however, Conrad is crushed to death by a gigantic helmet that falls on him from above. This inexplicable event is particularly ominous in light of an ancient prophecy, "that the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it." Manfred, terrified that Conrad's death signals the beginning of the end for his line, resolves to avert destruction by marrying Isabella himself while divorcing his current wife, Hippolita, who he feels has failed to bear him a proper heir in light of the sickly condition of Conrad before his untimely death.
However, as Manfred attempts to marry Isabella, she escapes to a church with the aid of a peasant named Theodore, who had correctly identified the giant helmet that had killed Conrad as having come from the giant statue standing before the church. Manfred accuses Theodore of having sorcerous responsibility for the helmet having been summoned. Manfred orders Theodore's death while talking to the friar Jerome, who ensured Isabella's safety at the church. When Theodore removes his shirt to be killed, Jerome recognizes a mark below his shoulder and identifies Theodore as his own son, and thus being of noble birth. Jerome, who has revealed himself to be of noble rank, begs for his son's life, but Manfred says Jerome must either give up the princess or his son's life. They are interrupted by a trumpet and the entrance of knights from another kingdom who want to deliver Isabella to her father, Frederic, along with the castle, as Frederic has a stronger claim to it (another reason Manfred wishes to wed Isabella). This leads the knights and Manfred to race to find Isabella.
Theodore, having been locked in a tower by Manfred, is freed by Manfred's daughter, Matilda. He races to the underground church and finds Isabella. He hides her in a cave and blocks it to protect her from Manfred and ends up fighting one of the mysterious knights. Theodore badly injures the knight, who turns out to be Isabella's father, Frederic. With that, they all go up to the castle to work things out. Frederic falls in love with Matilda, and he and Manfred make a deal to marry each other's daughters. However, Frederic backs out after being warned by an apparition of a skeleton.
Manfred, suspecting that Isabella is meeting Theodore in a tryst in the church, takes a knife into the church, where Matilda is meeting Theodore. Thinking his own daughter is Isabella, he stabs her. Theodore is then revealed to be the true prince of Otranto as Matilda dies, leaving Manfred to repent. A giant ghostly form appears, declares the prophecy fulfilled, and shatters the castle walls.
Manfred abdicates the principality and retires to religion along with Hippolita. Theodore becomes prince of the remains of the castle and is married to Isabella, for she is the only one who can truly understand his sorrow.
In the preface of the second edition, Walpole claims the novel is "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern." He defines the "ancient" romance by its fantastic nature ("its imagination and improbability") while defining the "modern" romance as more deeply rooted in literary realism ("a strict adherence to common life," in his words). By combining fantastic situations (helmets falling from the sky, walking portraits, etc.) with supposedly real people acting in a "natural" manner, Walpole created a new and distinct style of literary fiction, which has frequently been cited as a template for all subsequent gothic novels. The Monthly Review stated that for "[t]hose who can digest the absurdities of Gothic fiction" Otranto offered "considerable entertainment".
The Castle of Otranto is the first supernatural English novel and is a singularly influential work of Gothic fiction. It blends elements of realist fiction with the supernatural and fantastical, establishing many of the plot devices and character types that would become typical of the Gothic novel: secret passages, clanging trapdoors, pictures beginning to move, and doors closing by themselves. The poet Thomas Gray told Walpole that the novel made "some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’nights."
The first and most obvious connection to William Shakespeare is presented by Horace Walpole himself, in the preface to the second edition of Otranto, in which he "praises Shakespeare as a truly original genius and the exemplar of imaginative liberty, as a part of a defense of Otranto's design". Elsewhere, Walpole's several allusions to works by Shakespeare further emphasize the connection he wishes to draw between his own work and Shakespeare's. For example, in Hamlet, "Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost becomes for Walpole a template for terror".
Walpole presents a "more fragmented recasting" of the Ghost in Hamlet, which had served as a representation of the "now unsanctioned, but still popular Catholic view of ghosts as speakers of truth" for Shakespeare. The Catholic elements at play within both Hamlet and Otranto are invoked to represent a further sense of wonder and mystery to the Protestant audiences of both works. The Catholic element was a necessary facet of the "template of terror" that Walpole meant to invoke.
The allusion to Hamlet's experience with the Ghost is meant not only as a "template of terror," but also to make readers feel as if they are watching the play itself, and Walpole does this on three occasions. First, he posits Manfred's encounter with the animated portrait of Ricardo as a connection to the Ghost's initial appearance to Hamlet. Second, when Friar Jerome informs Theodore of the dangers to be found in Otranto and calls for him to take revenge, this is a direct allusion to the Ghost's demand to Hamlet to remember him. Third, Frederic's encounter with the skeletal apparition parallels the final appearance of the Ghost in Hamlet.
The violent question of bloodlines and succession serves as a key element in many of Shakespeare's plays, from Hamlet to Richard II and Macbeth, and it is clearly one of the major concerns of Otranto. The link to Hamlet is strengthened even more because of the incest that is also at play in Otranto. "In Otranto, the castle and its labyrinths become grounds for incest that signal the dissolution of familial bonds", which is also a major point of issue in Hamlet since Hamlet's mother (Gertrude) and his uncle (Claudius) were, in a way, related before their marriage. Both Hamlet and Otranto are literary springboards for discussion of the questions of marriage, as the question of Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage and later marriage to Anne Boleyn were still heated topics of controversy. Henry VIII had married his brother's wife Catherine of Aragon and later dissolved that marriage due to Catherine's inability to produce a male heir who lived to adulthood. Similarly, Otranto revolves around "a larger sexual contest to secure lineage".
The final connection between Otranto and Shakespeare lies in the role that the servants play. Like Shakespeare, Walpole aims to create a "mixture of comedy and tragedy," and one of the ways he does so is by using the minor, servant characters (such as Bianca) as comic relief. This is a trope that Walpole takes from Shakespeare as, for example, Shakespeare's mechanicals from A Midsummer Night's Dream also serve as the key comic element in the play.
Horace Walpole's aesthetic productions, especially his home at Strawberry Hill House, have been interpreted through the lens of queer theory and described as camp. The Castle of Otranto is seen as establishing a literary foundation in which sexual desire and transgression is a defining thematic undercurrent of the new genre of the Gothic. Max Fincher has written that Manfred is preoccupied with the threat of his identity being discovered in a way that parallels the fear of homoerotic desire being discovered. He argues that misogyny in the novel is an attempt to project manliness, overcompensating for the author's or character's fears of queerness or weakness. Because of these fears, he argues, the book presents non-heteronormative behavior as "unnatural and demonic."
Otranto is generally credited with creating the entire Gothic novel genre. It was a smash hit in its day, until the author revealed that it was purely satirical fiction rather than an actual adaptation of medieval text. At that point, the critics and populace who had praised it turned on the book, claiming it was superficial, and other pejoratives generally assigned to romantic novels, which were seen as inferior in Britain at that time. But its impact was dramatic. The novelist Clara Reeve wrote The Old English Baron (1777) as a response, claiming she was taking Walpole's plot and adapting it to the demands of the time by balancing fantastic elements with 18th-century realism. She explained:
After a number of other novels were added to the budding Gothic genre, the teenage author Matthew Lewis published The Monk (1796), a novel that directly imitated the formula of Otranto, but took it to such an extreme that some have interpreted the novel as parody.
Jan Švankmajer directed the surrealist short film Castle of Otranto (1977) based on the novel. It takes the form of a pseudo-documentary frame story in live action with an abridged adaptation of the story itself presented in cut-out animation in the style of Gothic art.