AT THE ORIGINS OF BRITISH GOTHIC: SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES TITUS ANDRONICUS AND MACBETH

Abstract

The study of the most ‘bloody’ Shakespeare’s dramas — his first tragedy Titus Andronicus (1588–1593, staged 1594) and the last of his four great tragedies, Macbeth (1606) — makes clear the presence and gradual sophistication of the gothic vector in his work, and reveals topoi that have become universals of Gothic literature. Among them are horror as an inescapable component of human existence; evil and villains who violate the moral norm and the balance in society and nature; victim heroines; mysterious, supernatural element; demonized past; and most importantly — the theme of God and devil. Titus Andronicus is considered here in a new perspective as a ‘tragedy without a hero’ and as a gothic grotesque with elements of the comic, which are supposed to dilute the atmosphere of horror but only intensify it. Shakespeare retained the ‘horror aesthetics’ in Macbeth, a play about ‘the drug of power’, but he transferred the source of evil, that shakes society and nature, into the consciousness of man. The metaphysical view of life is strong in Shakespeare’s tragedies, but there is no single religious ideology as in the poetry of Dante. Poet, sensitive to various trends which fed the air of the early Modern period, Shakespeare conveyed the unsteady atmosphere of life in the late 16th — early 17th century. The sources of horror in his tragedies one can find in historical and literary tradition (Ovid, Seneca, chronicles), but first of all — in the social and cultural discourse of the epoch. Following the tradition of Shakespeare who was the key figure of English literary mainstream, Gothic authors of the late 18th — early 19th centuries (H. Walpole, A. Radcliffe, W. Beckford a.o.) legitimized their own, considered marginal, genre.