“This demon in the garb of a monk”: Shakespeare, the Gothic and the discourse of anti-Catholicism

Abstract

This essay explores the religious, political and cultural significance that comes to be attached to the figure of Shakespeare in the early Gothic novel, and the ways in which Shakespeare's status as the national poet assumes a distinctly Protestant, anti-Catholic inflection in the genre. Focusing on two key Gothic novels from the 1790s, Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), the essay examines how Shakespeare is appropriated and deployed in the two texts, and the ways in which he is used both to uphold and critique the assumption that English national identity is ineluctably Protestant in character.