Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare

ANNE WILLIAMS

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Walpole's Gothic, both literary and architectural, is a thing of shreds and patches. The Castle of Otranto was inspired by the fragment of a nightmare concerning a 'gigantic hand in armour', and chapter 1 begins with the fall of an enormous helmet into the castle's courtyard. Walpole pieced together his story from patches of history, folk tale, kidnapped romance, medieval superstition and Shakespearean allusions. Strawberry Hill, the villa that Walpole constructed over nearly forty years, is a pastiche of Gothic designs, imitated (in wood or papier mâché) as adornments for fireplaces, ceilings and library shelves – to say nothing of battlements and turrets made of lathe and plaster. Walpole's prolific writings appear in an equally heterogeneous range of genres. His body of work, in short, seems as disjointed as the armour of Alphonso the Good.

Yet the works of the 1760s reveal an unexpected kinship. Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, and in February 1768 Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third. Six months later, he printed at Strawberry Hill fifty copies of The Mysterious Mother, a tragedy in blank verse. These works mark the climax of Walpole's creative activity. With the exception of the Beauclerc Tower (1776), built to house illustrations of the play, Walpole's original work was essentially finished by the end of the 1760s. Despite their seeming diversity, however, these works share one important characteristic: they are all 'Shakespearean'. Walpole appropriated, rewrote and impersonated his precursor. I propose that under the aegis of Shakespeare, Walpole finally lived up to the Horatian motto he had chosen for his library ceiling – 'fari quae sentiat: he says what he feels'.

Walpole plays Shakespeare

[Horace Walpole's] features were covered by masks within masks ... He played innumerable parts and over-acted them all.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother are overtly fictional, though Walpole repeatedly teases us about their relation to r