The Theatrical Gothic in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Despite its seeming defeat at the hands of the new melodrama and, later, the emerging stage realism, the Gothic continued to stalk the stage long into the nineteenth century. Shape-shifting and refusing to die outright, the Gothic mode would inform melodrama, domestic drama, sensation drama and even the emerging realist dramas to the end of the century. Moreover, whilst according to hegemonic narratives of theatre history, the new modes of realism would claim a victorious precedence over the drama of the shudder, this chapter argues that as the fin de siecle loomed, attempts to repress the Gothic on stage were met with an increasingly Gothic representation of the theatre itself within the wider popular and literary imagination.