Gothic Drama

Today we won't have time to cover the gothic form of drama that was popular in the late C18, but it's an interesting genre so wer are posting it here so you all have the information.

With the American and French Revolutions, the 1780 anti-papist Gordon Riots and the 1778 Regency Crisis of King George III, the English were at an extreme level of insecurity as the C18 was nearing its close. In such a tumultous climate the forms of the gothic, in drama and in literature, flourished and came to be considered an early example of "mass culture" or pop culture, because people of all social classes had access to it, since producing and distributing copies of plays and novels was now inexpensive.

King George III was a particularly influential character whose struggle with insanity in the 1780s (he possible suffered from prorphyria) caused panic across the nation when the Regency Crisis of 1788 occured, when there confusion about whether or not the king should be declared legally deceased, though many politicians did not want his heir to rule, but an insance king left on the throne could have been disatrous. This crisis inspired several elements commonly seen in the gothic dramas at this time. One scholar describes the heart of these plays as "an authority figure gone mad, or at least seriously obsessive and neurotically moody" (Backsheider 162). But before his first episode of madness, the king was influencing theatre with his commission of a large "castellated palace" at Kew. The structure does not remain and contemporaries criticised the entire venture as overly eccentric and unreasonable, but the design was recreated on numerous stages with functioning bridges and towers.

Another influence was Shakespeare, whose plays had retained popularity among these audiences. Gothic playwrights favored dark tones and bloody scenes, like in Macbeth. More of what was typical in gothic plays included stock characters (the aforementioned mad aristocrat and his beautiful love interest), haunted and/or decrepit castles, storms, violence and war, robbery and death. Gothic plays also worked with the contrasting ideas of the male eye and the female breast: the eye is often a powerful, penetrating tool and women's breasts were accentuated in costumes as signifiers of femininity and vulnerability.