Staging "The Mysterious Mother" 9780300274851

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S tag ing Th e  M y s t er iou s  M o t h er

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T he Le w is Wa lpole Series in Eigh t een t hCen t ury Cult ure and History The Lewis Walpole Series, published by Yale University Press with the aid of the Annie Burr Lewis Fund, is dedicated to the culture and history of the long eighteenth century (from the Glorious Revolution to the accession of Queen Victoria). It welcomes work in a variety of fields, including literature and history, the visual arts, political philosophy, music, legal history, and the history of science. In addition to original scholarly work, the series publishes new editions and translations of writing from the period, as well as reprints of major books that are currently unavailable. Though the majority of books in the series will probably concentrate on Great Britain and the Continent, the range of our geographical interests is as wide as Horace Walpole’s.

Title page from Horace Walpole’s copy of The Mysterious Mother. Strawberry Hill, 1768. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 49 2528B.

S t a gi ng Th e   M y s t e r iou s   M o t h e r

 Edited by

Cynthia E. Roman Jill Campbell Jonathan Kramnick

   

new haven and london

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund, and from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2023 by Cynthia E. Roman, Jill Campbell, and Jonathan Kramnick. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in ScalaPro Regular 10/14 by Newgen. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023935309 ISBN 978-0-300-26365-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

What is this secret sin; this untold tale, That art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse? Act I, Scene 2

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Con t en t s

Preface (Jonathan Kramnick)  xiii Introduction (Jill Campbell, Cynthia E. Roman)  1 Pa r t I | R e a di ng Th e M y s t e r iou s M o t h e r 1. Dale Townshend The Mystery of The Mysterious Mother: Textual Lives and Afterlives  9 2. Cheryl Nixon The Mysterious Orphan: Dramatizing the Betrayal of the Child  23 3. Nicole Garret Misreading The Mysterious Mother: Motherhood and Religious Feeling  37 4. Al Coppola “Some demon rides in th’ air”: Lightning and the Problem of the Supernatural in Walpole’s Second Gothic  48 5. Matthew M. Reeve Horace Walpole’s Crypto-Catholicism, the Gothic, and The Mysterious Mother 62

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6. Nicole Mansfield Wright Defiance of Authority and the Visionary Power of Negation in The Mysterious Mother 77 Pa r t I I | St a gi ng Th e M y s t e r iou s M o t h e r 7. Marcie Frank Wilful Walpole: Performing Publication and The Mysterious Mother 91 8. Jean I. Marsden Family Dramas: The Mysterious Mother and the EighteenthCentury Incest Play  103 9. Judith Hawley “The beautiful negligence of a gentleman”: Horace Walpole and Amateur Theatricals  113 10. David Worrall “I beg you would keep it under lock and key”: The Mystery of the 1821 Mysterious Mother Performances  124 Pa r t I I I | Th e Ya l e P e r f or m a nc e 11. David Worrall Abridged Version of The Mysterious Mother 137 12. David Worrall Abridging Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother 168 13. Misty G. Anderson Staging The Mysterious Mother 174 Pa r t I V | “ Th i s c op y i s t o be k e p t i n t h e B e a u cl e r c - cl o s e t t o e x p l a i n L a d y D i B e a u cl e r c ’ s D r a w i n g s . H . W . ” Facsimile of Horace Walpole’s Copy of the 1768 Strawberry Hill Edition  183

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14. Cynthia E. Roman The Beauclerk Closet Drawings: Seven Illustrations of The Mysterious Mother 329 List of Contributors  341 Acknowledgments 343 Index 347

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Preface

Over the course of the academic year 2017–2018, The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University held a series of events to celebrate the tercentennial of the birth of its namesake, Horace Walpole. It was an unfolding festival. We began with a garden party, held a symposium on his novel The Castle of Otranto, and put on exhibits and lectures. As a capstone of the year’s festivities, we sponsored a staged reading of Walpole’s closet drama The Mysterious Mother followed by a symposium with scholars from across the globe. The present volume is a record of that extraordinary event, held on May 2 and 3, 2018, at the Yale Center for British Art. The Mysterious Mother production featured eight actors in full costume reading from a text abridged for the occasion. Projected in the backdrop were images of a gothic castle and monastery, brooding mountains, and a ruined graveyard. The costumes were modeled on Lady Diana Beauclerk’s seven drawings for the play, illustrations Walpole so admired that he commissioned an elaborate hexagonal closet to store them. Among the most prized items collected by Wilmarth Lewis, the Beauclerk drawings gave the library he founded a distinctive presence in the production and now in these pages. Wilmarth and Annie Burr Lewis endowed the Lewis Walpole Library to build from their collection of eighteenth-century books, letters, manuscripts, prints, artworks, and artifacts, many descended from Walpole and all a variegated and sumptuous record of the period. They wanted to create a center for research and learning in the eighteenth century, and they especially wanted to seed interest in Horace Walpole and his times. The Lewis Walpole Library has realized the founders’ vision by bringing scholars to consult and write about its materials, by using its country location as a laboratory for academic discus-

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sion and innovation, and by designing programs to engage the public in the culture of the eighteenth century. The staging of The Mysterious Mother did all three at once, in glorious form. The book before you retains the multimedia nature of the occasion while presenting a vital cross section of scholarship on the eighteenth century and the history of performance. It brings Walpole’s play to life with materials drawn from the Lewis Walpole Library’s own collections, and it fully embraces the shocking strangeness of the play, as exciting for our time as it was for its own. Jonathan Kramnick Director, The Lewis Walpole Library

Introduction Jill Campbell and Cynthia E. Roman

In May 2018, marking the 250th anniversary of the play’s first publication at Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Press, the Lewis Walpole Library and the Yale Center for British Art presented a staged reading of The Mysterious Mother, abridged by David Worrall and directed by Misty G. Anderson, together with a mini-conference organized by Cynthia E. Roman and Jill Campbell. The performance of the play and the mini-conference were the fulfillment of a shared dream and the outcome of several years of conversation, scheming, and planning by a wide circle of collaborators, each of whom grew more deeply interested in the play as the plans developed. Many of these conversations took place at the Lewis Walpole Library among Cynthia E. Roman (the Library’s Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings), Visiting Fellows, and Yale faculty, so the Library itself played an essential role as incubator in the project’s development. The synergies and insights generated by close collaborative effort were a particularly fitting part of the process of developing this project, in keeping with W. S. Lewis and Annie Burr Lewis’s vision for the Library as both a research center and a venue for creative sociability and also with Walpole’s own practice of creative production within a coterie of trusted friends.1 The Mysterious Mother is especially shaped by that practice, which links artistic pursuits to the comforts of intimate conviviality but also may harbor experiments that are innovative or even subversive. Relishing the intimacy of discussions among our own growing and far-flung “Committee” of participants, we nonetheless aimed to share the results of our efforts with a wider audience in a public presentation of the play. To do so, even in the form of a staged reading rather than a full-blown theatrical performance, had something of the excitement and trepidation of

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accepting a dare. In preparing a public performance of The Mysterious Mother, we sought to explore, in action, a fundamental question raised by the play from the beginning of its 250-year history: the question of its “stageability.” Completed just a few years after Walpole’s celebrated gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), his five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother was initially circulated only among the author’s friends, with Walpole retaining tight control of access to print copies of the play for private reading as well as for use as a script for dramatic performance. Describing his play as a “delicious entertainment for the closet” and claiming that he “did not think it would do for the stage,” Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. As Marcie Frank argues in her contribution to this volume, even Walpole’s publication of the play involves a fraught form of performativity: in printing a small run of the play at his own press, he both made it available for reading and excluded most readers from access to it. He and his friends deemed the play certainly too “disgusting” and “dreadful” for the London stage. Yet essays in this volume by Judith Hawley, Dale Townshend, and David Worrall trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole’s protests suggest. The obvious though often unspoken reason for characterizations of The Mysterious Mother as “disgusting” and “dreadful” and for doubts about its suitability for the stage lies in the act of mother-son incest that forms the backstory of events—“this secret sin; this untold tale, / That art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse”—sixteen years prior to the present action of the play.2 As Jean I. Marsden shows in her contribution to this volume, the subject of incest was not uncommon on the eighteenth-century stage. What makes its treatment different, and singularly taboo, in Walpole’s play? Unlike the tragic victims of many incest plots, as Marsden observes, the Countess of Narbonne, the “mysterious mother” of the play’s title, is a witting and willing participant in the act of incest with her son, who remains unaware that his mother substituted herself for her maid Beatrice, with whom he had arranged a tryst on the very night of his father’s death. The Countess’s guilt is therefore known to herself from the moment of its inception but to no one else—either within the play’s world or in its ­audience—until the second-to-last scene of the play, when, driven to distraction by a concatenation of horrifying events, the Countess tells the story of that long-ago night and of its consequences. As Walpole explained in his Postscript to the play, in delaying his revelation of the Countess’s guilt until the

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play’s final scenes, he sought to build the audience’s “prejudice” in her favor as he “bestowed every ornament of sense, unbigotted piety, and interesting contrition on the character that was at last to raise universal indignation” (Postscript, R5). The play’s characterization of its central female character as eminently worthy of respect—as in many ways a paragon of virtue, religious devotion, ­benevolence, and “saintlike reason,” as well as the just and rightful sovereign of her domain—heightens the shock of her extraordinary transgression (IV.4; III.3). Like many works of gothic literature, the play is set in a distant place and time, the region of Narbonne in Catholic France in the Middle Ages. It opens with a soliloquy by Florian, a fellow soldier and friend of Edmund, the Countess’s son, who has returned to Narbonne on the sixteenth anniversary of his father’s death and his own banishment. Florian observes the fearful and portentous gloom of the castle and its surroundings—an atmosphere that the play will maintain throughout, including during a tremendous thunderstorm, while never admitting supernatural events (I.1; II.2). A pair of friars, Benedict and Martin, soon take the stage, eagerly discussing their ambition to “worm out” the Countess’s secret in order to gain control over her wealth (I.3). Throughout the play, the friars’ naked will to power, cynical manipulation of superstitious fears, and misogyny fulfill the expectations of monkish villainy so common in the English gothic. Repeatedly accused of heresy by Benedict and Martin, in her frequent sparring with their threats and veiled intimations, the Countess appears a heroic representative of reason and sincere religious devotion, independent of the Church’s worldly corruption. The Countess’s virtues of charity and ministering care are represented on stage by a procession of orphan children and by the object of her special attention and affection, the young woman Adeliza. Adeliza, a pensioner in a nearby abbey, has caught the eye of Edmund during the month in which he awaited Florian’s arrival in Narbonne; he hopes to marry her. Overhearing Florian’s reference to Edmund’s love for Adeliza, the Countess misunderstands the love as Florian’s own and eagerly encourages Adeliza to wed. When Benedict presents the Countess unexpectedly with her long-banished son, she mistakes him for her dead husband, to whom he bears a striking resemblance. Recovering from a swoon, she grows increasingly distracted but then reasserts her reason and her rightful rule of Narbonne; even Edmund is deeply impressed with her “majesty” (III.3). Benedict, however, has grown suspicious about the nature of the Countess’s secret and determines, since he cannot “dupe” her, to “destroy her: / Involve her house in ruin so prodigious, / That neither she nor Edmund

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may survive it” (IV.1). He does so by willfully misinterpreting the Countess’s wishes for Adeliza and joining her hand with Edmund’s in a forced wedding ceremony, against which Adeliza fruitlessly struggles (V.1). As the pace of action accelerates and the web of relations tightens around her, the Countess’s distraction verges at times on frenzied raving. When she learns that it is Edmund and not Florian who has been wed to Adeliza, she exclaims in horror that both groom and bride are her children, doubling her own willful incestuous bond with their unwitting one: as Adeliza is the child of her tryst with Edmund, the Countess stands before him a “monster” of confused, multiple relations—“thy mother! mistress! / The mother of thy daughter, sister, wife!” With one last exertion of her reason, she recounts the events of the night of her husband’s death, sixteen years to the day before the action of the play. Having yearned eagerly for her long-absent husband’s return to her bed only to learn of his sudden death, she took the opportunity of Edmund’s assignation with Beatrice to satisfy her desires with the son who so resembled his father. Her fatal secret at last disclosed, the Countess seizes Edmund’s dagger from him, “revenging” her crimes against him upon herself, and dies (V.6). Edmund dissolves his union with Adeliza—his half-sister and daughter but “no wife”—and departs from “this theatre of monst’rous guilt,” welcoming the prospect of death on the field of battle (V.7). Embedded in the excess of conflicting family roles that drives this melodramatic plot are less conspicuous failures and fissures within the Countess’s conduct of her duties as a mother, as several essays in this volume show. Cheryl Nixon’s and Nicole Garret’s essays both shift our attention away from the mesmerizing subject of the Countess’s incest to reveal other troubling features of her character. Re-centering her account of family in The Mysterious Mother on the figure of the orphan, Nixon argues that the Countess’s crime of incest is compounded by that of orphaning, as she withholds Adeliza’s parentage from her as well as banishing Edmund and thus actively orphans them even as their mother survives. Garret examines the unstable relations between norms of religious feeling and of maternal behavior in the play, observing the separation the Countess enacts between economic and affective motherhood and her assumption of a paternal rather than maternal role—resolutions to her conflict that prove untenable in the presence of her son. As shocking as the Countess of Narbonne’s crimes of deliberate incest and the abdication of maternal care may be, these obvious familial upheavals pale alongside subversive challenges to broader belief systems that are woven throughout The Mysterious Mother. As many of the essays in this volume

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suggest, Walpole’s tragedy is replete with intellectual and religious controversies and un-settlings of systems of knowledge and belief that undergirded the mid-eighteenth-century establishment in Britain. Al Coppola argues that the dispute between Florian and Martin about the meaning of a violent thunderstorm in Act II, scene 2 engages with 1760s Enlightenment debates over electricity alongside pre-Enlightenment superstitions, popular fascination, and credulity about lightning as divine retribution. Likewise, Walpole’s objection to the oppressions of the Church so vividly dramatized in the monastic villainy of friars Benedict and Martin, who scheme against the reasoned resistance of the Countess, coexisted in tension with an attraction to Catholic aesthetics evoked by the medieval gothic setting of the Castle of Narbonne. Matthew M. Reeve explores the paradox of crypto-Catholicism within Walpole’s largely non-Catholic circle as an integral component of the group’s medievalism and a spiritual, aesthetic, and political disjunction from English Enlightenment projects. Finally, Nicole Mansfield Wright considers The Mysterious Mother as a vehicle for envisioning alternatives to an oppressive political regime. Wright locates Walpole’s political critique in the very verbal formulations of his play, which are loaded with affixal and non-affixal negations that indirectly endorse defiance of corrupt institutional authority, priming readers to envision alternatives to the established order. If we accept Walpole’s play as an instigation to disrupt social, political, and religious institutions, the shock factor of his play is potentially greater than that of incest. Such subversive provocations would be less dangerous during Walpole’s lifetime if shared only among a small coterie of his friends, removed from public politics. Despite or perhaps intrigued by the cautions about whether the play would do for the stage, in the days leading up to the play’s performance at the YCBA, scholars, library staff, and actors gathered at the Lewis Walpole Library as its own coterie of enthusiasts to imagine how its staging might indeed be accomplished and to prepare for that event. The group reenacted the readings of Walpole’s contemporaries with a shared sense of delicious entertainment, tempered with some discomfort around the provocative, even subversive plot. In our collective quest, the group imagined the unimaginable, grappling with potential pitfalls of humor, parody, and kitsch. As a necessary accommodation for modern audiences, David Worrall provided an artfully abridged text that clarified Walpole’s “pure melodramatic line” and shortened the performance. Essentially fulfilling shared wishes to see the play staged, the public performance unfolded before a rapt and enthusiastic audience.

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This volume aims to make available to a wider audience of readers a rich set of materials related to our 2018 live staging and discussion of the play: a full facsimile text of Walpole’s own copy of the 1768 Strawberry Hill edition that he “kept in the Beauclerc-closet to explain Lady Di Beauclerc’s Drawings,” the abridged version by David Worrall, reflections from the director Misty G. Anderson, Lady Diana Beauclerk’s illustrations with comments by Cynthia E. Roman, and essays based on the proceedings from the mini-conference that followed the performance. We gratefully acknowledge the indispensable editorial efforts of Paul Baines and Frederick S. Frank, whose Oxford University Press and Broadview Press editions have kept The Mysterious Mother accessible to students and other readers and whose scholarship has informed our work. The contents of this volume are offered for others who wish to stage the play and to inquire more fully into its mysterious content and its complicated publication and performance history. Notes 1.  Lewis set forth his vision for the library, Yale in Farmington as he called it, as “a center for eighteenth-century studies under pleasant circumstances” that would be “able to support serious studies in any aspect of his [Walpole’s] time.” Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, “Yale in Farmington,” in One Man’s Education (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967), 468–77. 2.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), I.3: 10. All quotations from the play are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text.

PART I Re ading Th e M y s t er iou s M o t h er

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1 • The Mystery of The Mysterious Mother: Textual Lives and Afterlives Dale Townshend

In his Short Notes of the Life of Horatio Walpole, a draft autobiographical account of his life, letters, and most formative experiences to date that he drew up in 1779, Horace Walpole wrote as follows: “March 15 [1768]. I finished a Tragedy called the Mysterious Mother, which I had begun Dec. 25. 1766: but I had laid it aside for several months while I went to Paris, & while I was writing my historic doubts on Richard 3rd. The two last acts were not now as much finished as I intended.”1 Momentous and worthy of recording though its completion certainly was, The Mysterious Mother, as Marcie Frank has pointed out, was not Walpole’s first foray into drama, nor would it prove to be his last.2 As early as June 1743, Walpole had published in the journal Old England “The Dear Witches,” a parodic and vastly redacted reworking of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that figured his father, Sir Robert Walpole, as the Duncan-like victim to a cabal of political assassins.3 Later, in 1773, he wrote “Nature will Prevail,” a short comedy that was performed at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in June 1775 and which would be posthumously published, together with the essays “Thoughts on Comedy” and “Thoughts on Tragedy,” in the second volume of The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford in 1798. Completed by the middle of March 1768, The Mysterious Mother was immediately dispatched in manuscript form to some of Walpole’s closest friends, and within a month, the play had gratifyingly received the approval of his “oracle of taste” John Chute, “who is not easily pleased,” and Thomas Gray, “who is still more difficult.”4 Upon learning in 1769 that friends of George Montagu had eagerly consumed the copy of the play that Walpole had sent him, Walpole, citing a line from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, wrote that “I beg you would keep it under lock and key; it is not at all food for the public—at least not till I

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am food for worms, good Percy.”5 Thus began a complex process of disclosure and obfuscation, publication and suppression, the assertion and concealment of authorial identity that would characterize the textual life and afterlife of The Mysterious Mother from the moment of its completion in 1768 onward.

Printing, Piracy, and Publication Between June 14 and August 6, 1768, Walpole printed fifty copies of the drama at his private printing press at Strawberry Hill, then the largest establishment of its kind in the country.6 This, in itself, was a significant and particularly revealing choice: unlike The Castle of Otranto (1765), Walpole’s acclaimed “Gothic Story” that, so as to maintain the antiquarian conceit of the “discovered” document, had been published anonymously by Thomas Lowndes in London, The Mysterious Mother was literary property that required Walpole’s own tight authorial regulation and control. Consequently, these printed versions of the play were distributed to only a select few of his most trusted friends, among them Thomas Barrett, Richard Bull, and Diana Beauclerk. The manuscript annotations that Walpole added in ca. 1780 to a copy of the original Strawberry Hill edition of 1768 that he sent to Bull indicate the extent to which he actively policed and controlled the text’s circulation: “Mr Walpole has sent Mr Bull the only copy he has left of the play, but begs to have it returned as soon as he has read it, & that he will not let it go out of his hands.”7 In June 1779, when Walpole eventually allowed Horace Mann to see a copy of the drama that had long been a topic of discussion in his letters, he insisted that it be returned to him via post all the way from Florence.8 Walpole’s reluctance to part with printed texts of The Mysterious Mother encouraged people to generate their own manuscript copies, and at least seven of these are held at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, today. It was only in an attempt at forestalling the publication of a spurious and unauthorized edition of the play, news of which he had received from the actor John Henderson, that Walpole reluctantly gave his consent to the London bookseller James Dodsley to publish The Mysterious Mother in 1781.9 As the author, in a suitably gothic idiom, wrote to William Cole, “My tragedy has wandered into the hands of some banditti booksellers, and I am forced to publish it myself to prevent piracy. All I can do is to condemn it myself, and that I shall.”10 Unlike the first, limited Strawberry Hill printing, this second edition bore no mention of Walpole on its title page but included, instead, a one-and-

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a-half-page preface that stressed the undisclosed author’s partly sincere, partly faux-modest reluctance to bring the drama to public scrutiny: The Author of the following Tragedy is so far from thinking it worthy of being offered to the Public, that he has done every thing in his power to prevent the publication—in vain. It is solely to avoid its being rendered still worse by a surreptitious edition, that he is reduced to give it from his own copy. He is sensible that the subject is disgusting, and by no means compensated by the execution. . . . All the favour the Author solicits or expects, is, to be believed how unwillingly he has submitted to its appearance: he cannot be more blamed than he blames himself for having undertaken so disagreeable a story, and for having hazarded the publicity by letting it go out of his own hands.11 Happily enough for Walpole, the mere mention of the forthcoming “authorized” edition was enough to forestall the intended piracy. Consequently, the 1781 text, though printed, never actually proceeded to publication, and Walpole was now content to give copies of this edition to some of his friends in lieu of the first edition of 1768.12 Now more widely distributed, its reception was, for the most part, positive: having read the 1781 edition and urging its immediate production on stage, the English theater historian David Erskine Baker in 1782 wrote that, “knowing its merit, we cannot but express our surprize that its author should wish to withhold it from the public.”13 By 1785, however, Walpole was clearly aware of the fact that, through his careful act of withholding, the play had become somewhat of a collector’s piece or “rarity.”14 Indeed, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that he actively courted the sense of mystery and intrigue that this entailed. Though momentarily defused by Dodsley’s printing, the threat of textual piracy was soon to return. In November 1781, extracts from The Mysterious Mother purportedly leaked from a manuscript copy were published in the St James’s Chronicle. The newspaper’s reprinting of Act I, scenes 1 and 5 was preceded by lines that indicate that Walpole’s drama had come to be regarded as a valuable literary property made all the more so by the air of secrecy and exclusivity that surrounded it: “An anonymous Correspondent has highly favoured the St James’s Chronicle by the following desirable Specimen of an unpublished Performance, which in the Dramatick World, we are truely sensible, is held as a First-Rate Curiosity.”15 The same newspaper followed up this act of piracy one week later, this time publishing Act III, scenes 1 and 3, and

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Act IV, scene 4 in the “Poet’s Corner” column and prefacing the extracts with a similar affirmation of the play’s somewhat illicit, highly sought-after value: “To the Printer of the S. J. Chronicle. / Sir, / Your Readiness to oblige, induces me to transcribe, for your Poet’s Corner, another speech or two from an invaluable Manuscript, whilst it remains in my Possession.”16 Further extracts from the play were printed in the Public Advertiser in November 1781 and again in 1783, the latter prompting Walpole to write to the publisher Henry Sampson Woodfall in request of its immediate suppression, and even offering him financial compensation “for any imaginary benefit he might receive from the impression.”17 “At this time the public must be curious to see more interesting articles than scenes of an old tragedy on a disgusting subject,” he wrote, a play “which the author thinks so little worthy of being published, that after the first small impression, he has endeavoured to suppress it as much as lies in his power.”18 In his reluctance to see it publicly disseminated, Walpole, the famed author of Otranto, had clearly made a mystery of The Mysterious Mother, and this served only to prompt and occasion further intrigue. Some seven years later, the matter of the play’s publication was still not settled, and in 1790, Walpole was to learn through the Irish antiquary Joseph Cooper Walker of another pirated edition of his text, this one published in Dublin.19 Without Walpole’s knowledge, his friend James Caulfeild, 4th Viscount Charlemont, successfully suppressed this publication on the aged author’s behalf, and while Walpole remained enormously grateful toward his literary protector, he had become, by this time, quite exhausted by the entire debacle. “I have lived too long not to have divested myself both of vanity and affected modesty,” he wrote to Charlemont in February 1791, continuing that: I have not existed to past seventy-three without having discovered the futility and triflingness of my own talents—and at the same time it would be impertinent to pretend to think that there is no merit in the execution of a tragedy, on which I have been so much flattered; though I am sincere in condemning the egregious absurdity of selecting a subject so improper for the stage, and even offensive to private readers—but I have said too much on a personal theme; and therefore, after repeating a million of thanks to your Lordship for the honour of your personal interposition, I will beg your Lordship, if you please, to signify to the bookseller that you withdraw your prohibition. . . .20 Albeit with Walpole’s begrudgingly granted consent, The Mysterious Mother was duly published in Dublin by John Archer, William Jones, and Richard

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White in 1791, Walpole’s name mentioned only in a cited extract from a description of the play that had first been published in Biographia Dramatica in 1782.21 A poem by one “Florizel” that was published in The World on Wednesday October 12, 1791, indicates something of the public approbation with which the eventual publication of Walpole’s “mysterious” piece was met: See WALPOLE’S Pen, with magic skill retrace The letter’d page with energy and grace; Again see Learning triumph o’er the Stage, See Sense with pathos fill the Drama’s page. Again the heart exults at Virtue’s cause, And tender Pity meets its lov’d applause; On Rapture’s pinions borne aloft we soar, T’ enjoy the transports that we felt before. What then we felt, we now again shall prove; The slightest changes in their numbers move; SHAKESPEARE would NATURE’S fancy’d studies chuse, And WALPOLE writes the language of the Muse.22 Walpole, at least for this anonymous poet, had restored the spirit of Genius that had last been seen on the English stage in the plays of Shakespeare. A reprint of the Dublin edition was published in London in 1791, this time featuring Walpole’s name on the title page, and another edition followed in 1796. After so many years of resistance, Walpole consented to the publication of The Mysterious Mother in the first volume of his posthumous Works that Mary Berry oversaw in 1798, including in Volume Four a hitherto unpublished prologue that had been written in 1768.

Reading and Responding to The Mysterious Mother If publication of the play was accompanied by so many anxious gestures of authorial concealment, control, and manipulation, the theatrical production and performance of The Mysterious Mother was nothing less than inconceivable. Horace Mann summed up the views of many when he wrote that “The subject may be too horrid for the stage, but the judicious management of it by preparing the reader for the catastrophe, the sublime ideas and expressions so admirably adapted to the personages, make it a delicious entertainment for the closet.”23 Indeed, The Mysterious Mother remained in Walpole’s lifetime a

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closet drama the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808; 1832) and the later verse dramas of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley; as such, it was intended only to be read by the solitary reader or, upon occasion, out loud in a small group, and variously with or without the author’s knowledge or consent. Many of Walpole’s friends who first read the play were struck by the plot’s similarities to other incest narratives, for unlike Otranto, the idea for which apparently came to Walpole in a dream, The Mysterious Mother was taken from at least one recognizable source: a tale of double incest as told by Marguerite of Navarre in the Heptaméron (1558), the particular narrative, number 30, excerpted in a book that Walpole himself owned (see the essays by Jean I. Marsden and Judith Hawley in this volume).24 When John Chute in 1768 brought to Walpole’s attention the startling similarities between his tragedy and the tale of the French Queen, Walpole appears to have been genuinely surprised: at least consciously, he believed that he had based his drama on an historical event that was narrated to John Tillotson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the late seventeenth century.25 In fact, without wishing to undermine his claims to originality, other readers of the script continuously sent to Walpole evidence of their having encountered in their reading and antiquarian research similar themes and narrative treatments: William Cole, in antiquarian material that he had found at Cambridge in 1769; Michael Lort in works by Luther and Joseph Hall in 1775; Topham Beauclerk in a work of travel literature in 1775; and William Mason in an unidentified dramatic source—possibly the anonymous Fatal Discovery, or Love in Ruins (1698)—in 1778.26 The effect of these revelations, of course, was to construct The Mysterious Mother as something of an archetypal myth, as a tragic drama of universal human relevance and significance that Walpole, rather like Sophocles in Oedipus Rex, had bravely dared to draw out of the dark, unconscious recesses of Western civilization. Reverend William Mason, the Whig politician, poet, and garden designer with whom Walpole had struck up a correspondence in the 1750s, was a particularly close reader of The Mysterious Mother. Having pored over it “three or four times,” Mason of his own accord sent to Walpole a heavily annotated copy of the first, Strawberry Hill edition of the play in May 1769, suggesting a series of alterations and amendments, all intended, he claimed, to overcome the “capital defect in the denouement.”27 His suggested changes, he stressed, were not intended to correct Walpole “as a poet” so much as to recuperate his personal regard for him “as a man,” a disclosure that reveals the moral imperative informing them. The “axiom” according to which Mason worked was that in-

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cest was “a crime so horrid” that it could only be committed “ignorantly” and “by mistake”; the guilt of the Mysterious Mother, in other words, could only be assuaged if her incestuous embrace of her son had been committed unwittingly or unconsciously, in a moment of tragic inevitability and according to a tragic error of insight, like that of Oedipus. Converting the act of maternal incest from a conscious and deliberate intention into an unconscious mistake, Mason aimed to restore the Countess to her full tragic potential by furnishing her with a legitimate claim upon the audience’s reserves of Pity and Terror; without these, he warned, the play was incapable of scaling tragedy’s Aristotelian heights but would be forever condemned to evoking in the audience the non-cathartic responses of indignation and disgust. In Mason’s extraordinarily economic rewriting of sections of Walpole’s play, it is thus jealousy and not grief and sexual passion that drives the Countess’s actions: suspicious of her husband’s growing intimacy with Beatrice, she takes the sexual place of the maid in order to gain her adulterous husband’s affections—a paternal agent who, in this version of the play, dies shortly after instead of before this fatal moment. Mason’s version makes of a desiring, deliberately incestuous mother an unwitting, unconscious victim to marital infidelity, her “dire passions” rewritten as “blind passions” but then subsequently reframed as crimes of “folly” rather than sexual desire.28 In his “Postscript to the Alterations,” Mason claimed that these suggested changes were intended to make of a closet drama something that was performable on the stage (fig. 1.1): “To make the foregoing scenes proper to appear upon the stage was the reason why these alterations were written, or rather to soften the horror of the subject so far as to prevent it from shocking an audience.”29 But they were also executed with a set of specific aesthetic imperatives in mind: the return of a play that deliberately eschewed Aristotelian principles of composition to one that was suitable for what Mason called a “Grecian audience,” reconnecting it to the springs of Pity and Terror from which it had sprung, and reconciling it with the classical tradition of unconsciously committed incest that he identified in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. Shortly after receiving Mason’s suggestions, Walpole penned his friend a warm letter of thanks, modestly claiming that “I cannot think the play deserved the pains you have bestowed on it” and prioritizing his friendship with Mason over any trivial literary dispute.30 “I have no better reasons for not making all possible use of your alterations,” he explained, than the conviction that the play could never be produced on stage, but he promised to insert the corrections into his own copy of the text; “should The Mysterious Mother ever

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Fig. 1.1 William Mason, “Postscript to the Alterations.” Manuscript notes in a copy of The Mysterious Mother owned by Horace Walpole. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale ­University. 49 2528A.

be performed when I am dead,” he continued, “it will owe to you its presentation.”31 Nine years later, he was still making to Mason the same promises; when the threat of piracy surfaced in 1781, Walpole reiterated the point again.32 When the printing of 1781 appeared without any trace of Mason’s changes, however, Walpole, while reiterating his admiration, wrote to his correspondent to explain the reason for their exclusion.33 Though in public Walpole might have cultivated in relation to his august correspondent a respectful and placatory tone, he privately recorded on his copy of the corrected text sentiments of a more frank and defiant nature (fig. 1.2): N.B. I did not adopt these alteration[s] because they would totally have destroyed my object, which was to exhibit a character whose sincere penitence was not degraded by superstitious bigotry. The introduction of jealousy was utterly foreign to the subject—and though in my original it is very improbable that a wife on the very night of a beloved husband’s death would think of going to bed to [sic] her own son, it would be at least as improbable that she should suspect her husband would after an absence of many months think of an intrigue with his maid on the very

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night of his return. Jealousy would reduce the Countess to a very hacked character, instead of being one quite new on the stage. H. Walpole.34 As Walpole saw it, to turn incest into a tragic, unconscious mistake was to compromise the integrity of a drama that, as the prologue had pointed out, deliberately turned its back on neoclassical aesthetics in order to court a “Gothic” spirit of horror and terror.35

Fig. 1.2 Horace Walpole’s manuscript note on William Mason, Letter to Horace Walpole, May 8, 1769. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. LWL Mss Vol. 163.

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While Mason’s reading of The Mysterious Mother was thoughtful and morally scrupulous, other readers engaged with the text in a spirit closer to that in which Walpole had intended it. Frances Burney, for instance, responded acutely to the play’s gothic qualities, recording in The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney (1786) her shocked reactions to a group reading of the text at Windsor Castle merely four months after her arrival at court: “Dreadful was the whole! truly dreadful! a story of so much horror, from atrocious & voluntary guilt, never did I hear!,” the horrified Burney recalled. “I felt a sort of indignant aversion rise fast & warm in my mind against the wilful Author of a story so horrible: all the entertainment & pleasure I had received from Mr Walpole seemed extinguished by his lecture, which almost made me regard him as the Patron of the vices he had been pleased to record.”36 In tones more of delight than disgust, the Scottish antiquary John Pinkerton recalled in his Walpoliana (1799) a chilling, nighttime reading of Walpole’s tragedy at Strawberry Hill on September 20, 1784, an occasion on which Walpole had left him alone with the script at 11 p.m. while he called upon a neighbor. As Walpole and Pinkerton both knew, the date of this reading—September 20—was, in itself, highly auspicious, marking, as it did, the anniversary of that night so many years before on which the play’s Count of Narbonne was gored to death by a wild stag, the same night on which the Countess seduced but then banished her son Edmund, and also the night on which Edmund returns to Narbonne, exactly sixteen years later, at the beginning of the action. Equally startling was Walpole’s decision to call upon his neighbor Catherine or “Kitty” Clive on this, of all nights, for it was “the Clive,” the famed English comic actress, who was to speak the Epilogue to the play were it ever to be performed. That is, at least in private, Walpole certainly entertained the fantasy of bringing The Mysterious Mother to the stage. From around 1753, Clive had been living in Twickenham at Little Marble Hill, a property owned by Walpole himself; upon her retirement from the stage in 1769, she moved to Little Strawberry Hill (later known as “Cliveden”), another Twickenham property within close proximity of Strawberry Hill that Walpole had built in 1768 and which he generously gifted to her. The night on which Pinkerton read The Mysterious Mother at Strawberry Hill in 1784 thus marked the congruence and uncanny return of a number of factors that were intimately related to the dramatic action that it described. “This odd circumstance,” wrote Pinkerton, “conspired with the complete solitude of the Gothic apartments, to lend an additional impression to the superstitious parts of that tragedy. In point of language, and the true

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expression of passion and feeling, the new and just delineation of monastic fraud, tyranny, and cruelty; it deserves the greatest praise.”37

Afterlife Thus we might begin to track and account for the afterlife of The Mysterious Mother in Romantic-era Britain, from the time of its completion in March 1768, through the latter decades of the eighteenth century, and into the early nineteenth. The curious publication history of the play certainly intrigued other writers. In 1792, in the preface to her unperformed drama The Massacre, the radical writer Elizabeth Inchbald claimed that her decision to write the play while withholding it from production was directly informed by the precedent that Walpole had set in The Mysterious Mother. Other contemporary writers and critics were variously inspired and appalled by the play’s contents. In his corrected and expanded Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative of 1800, Nathan Drake claimed that, though its subject matter was “singularly horrid and almost disgusting,” Walpole’s tragedy “is conducted with such inimitable skill, that it may in this respect be considered as approximating nearer perfection than any other drama extant, the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles even not excepted.”38 The influence of The Mysterious Mother, however, went well beyond the late eighteenth-century stage: as a primarily textual phenomenon in its day, its inevitable destination, perhaps, was the prose genre of Romantic-era fiction. For it was a drama without which later gothic representations of brothersister incest in, say, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) would not have been possible. Ann Radcliffe twice used extracts from the play as epigraphs to The Italian (1797), reworking the relationship between the Countess and Father Benedict in that between the Marchesa di Vivaldi and the notorious villain Father Schedoni. Later Romantics were equally enamored of it. In the preface to Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1821), Lord Byron praised The Mysterious Mother as “a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play.” Walpole, he continued, “is the father of the first romance and of the last tragedy in our language, and surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he may.”39 Walter Scott was less enthusiastic when he anthologized The Mysterious Mother in Volume Two of Ballantyne’s Modern British Drama in 1811. As he wrote in the essay “Remarks on English Tragedy” that opened the first volume in the series,

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Towards the conclusion of the eighteenth century, an attempt was made, by the Honourable Horace Walpole, to illustrate the more powerful passions of terror, remorse, and despair. The Mysterious Mother is a sketch executed to the powerful and gloomy style of Massinger. But no exertion of poetical talent can reconcile us to its radical defect, or induce us to consider as the proper subject for popular amusement, a story more unnaturally horrid than even the Œdipus of Sophocles.40 In his later Lives of the Novelists (1825), too, Scott would parse the play as a “horribly impressive but disgusting drama.”41 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was unequivocally dismissive, and was recorded in Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Coleridge (1835) as having opined that “the Mysterious Mother is the most disgusting, detestable, vile composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it.”42 Irrespective of whether Walpole’s gothic tragedy was revered or reviled by later readers, one might sincerely ponder the extent to which some of the greatest sexually transgressive texts of canonical Romanticism—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Laon and Cythna (1817) and The Cenci (1819), Mary Shelley’s Matilda (written 1818–19; published 1959), John Polidori’s Ernestus Berchtold (1819), and even Byron’s Manfred (1817)—would have been possible without The Mysterious Mother and the cultivated air of mystery that surrounded it.

Notes 1.  Horace Walpole, Short Notes of the Life of Horatio Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, and of Catherine Shorter, His First Fife, 1746–1779, The Lewis Walpole Library, Mss Vol. 149, fol. 16. 2.  Marcie Frank, “Horace Walpole’s Theatricality,” in Horace Walpole: Beyond The Castle of Otranto, ed. Peter Sabor (New York: AMS Press, 2009), 309–27. 3.  Horace Walpole, “The Dear Witches: An Interlude,” Old England; or, The Constitutional Journal, no. 20, Saturday, June 18, 1743, 1–2. 4.  Horace Walpole to George Montagu, April 15, 1768, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 10: 259. Subsequent citations of Walpole’s correspondence will use the abbreviation HWC. 5.  Horace Walpole to George Montagu, October 16, 1769, HWC, 10: 298. 6.  For an account of the original publication of The Mysterious Mother, see A. T. Hazen, A Bibliography of Horace Walpole (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 79–85.

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7.  Walpole’s manuscript annotations are to be found in Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), The Lewis Walpole Library, 33 14, copy 6. 8.  Horace Mann to Horace Walpole, September 25 and October 16, 1779, HWC, 24: 517, 522. 9.  See Horace Walpole to John Henderson, April 16, 1781, HWC, 41: 427. 10.  Horace Walpole to William Cole, May 4, 1781, HWC, 2: 270. 11.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1781), v–vi. 12.  For this printed but unpublished edition, see Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1781). 13.  David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse, new edition, 2 vols. (London: Printed for Mess. Rivingtons; T. Payne and Son; L. Davis; T. Longhorn and G. Robinson; J. Dodsley; J. Nichols; J. Derret, 1782), 2: 247. 14.  See Horace Walpole to Lord Charlemont, November 23, 1785, HWC, 42: 155. 15.  St James’s Chronicle; or, The British Evening Post, no. 3228, November 8–10, 1781. 16.  St James’s Chronicle; or, The British Evening Post, no. 3231, November 15–17, 1781. 17. See Horace Walpole to Henry Sampson Woodfall, November 8, 1783, HWC, 42: 85. 18.  Horace Walpole to Henry Sampson Woodfall, November 8, 1783, HWC, 42: 85. 19.  See Horace Walpole to Joseph Cooper Walker, November 6, 1790, HWC, 42: 301. 20.  Horace Walpole to Lord Charlemont, February 17, 1791, HWC, 42: 309. 21.  For this edition, see Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Dublin: Printed for John Archer, William Jones, and Richard White, 1791). For an account of the background to this 1791 Dublin edition, see Richard H. Perkinson, “Walpole and a Dublin Pirate,” Philological Quarterly 15, no. 1 (October 1936): 391–400. 22.  Florizel, “To the Honourable Horace Walpole, On the Perusal of His Tragedy of The Mysterious Mother,” The World, Wednesday, October 12, 1791 (Issue no. 1492), 3. 23.  Horace Mann to Horace Walpole, September 25, 1779, HWC, 24: 517. 24.  See “Un des Contes de la Reine de Navarre, que j’ai changé d’une façon qui explique une Epitaphe que tout le monde sçait, & que personne n’entend,” in Armand de Madaillan de Lesparre, Recueil de différentes choses, 4 vols. (Lausanne, 1756), 1: 394–412. 25.  See Horace Walpole to Henry Seymour Conway, June 16, 1768, HWC, 39: 102–3. 26.  See, respectively, William Cole to Horace Walpole, August 3, 1769, HWC, 1: 186; Michael Lort to Horace Walpole, July 5, 1775, HWC, 16: 165; Topham Beauclerk to Horace Walpole, August 19, 1775, HWC, 41: 308–9; and William Mason to Horace Walpole, October 7, 1778, HWC, 28: 444. 27.  William Mason, Letter to Horace Walpole, May 8, 1769, The Lewis Walpole Library, LWL Mss Vol. 163. 28. For Mason’s manuscript alterations, see Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), The Lewis Walpole Library, 49 2528A.

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29.  Mason’s manuscript Postscript occurs on the blank verso before Walpole’s own printed Postscript in Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Printed at Strawberry Hill, 1769), The Lewis Walpole Library, 49 2528A. 30.  See Horace Walpole to William Mason, May 11, 1769, HWC, 28: 16–17. 31.  Horace Walpole to William Mason, May 11, 1769, HWC, 28: 17. 32.  See Horace Walpole to William Mason, October 11, 1778, HWC, 28: 445; Horace Walpole to William Mason, May 6, 1781, HWC, 29: 139–40. 33.  Horace Walpole to William Mason, July 3, 1781, HWC, 29: 148. 34.  See Walpole’s manuscript note in William Mason, Letter to Horace Walpole, May 8, 1769, The Lewis Walpole Library, LWL Mss Vol. 163. 35.  For a reading of the sexual politics at work in Walpole’s refusal to adopt Mason’s proposed changes, see E. J. Clery, “Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire,” Essays and Studies 54 (2001): 23–46. 36.  Quoted in Peter Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole, The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 141. 37.  John Pinkerton, Walpoliana, 2 vols. (London: Printed for R. Philips by T. Bensley, 1799), 1: 27. 38.  Nathan Drake, Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Sudbury: Printed by J. Burkitt, for T. Cadell Jnr. and W. Davies, 1800), 2: 187. 39.  Lord Byron, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. With Notes. And The Prophecy of Dante, a Poem (London: John Murray, 1821), xx. 40.  Walter Scott, “Remarks on English Tragedy,” in The Modern British Drama, Volume First: The Tragedies, v. 41.  Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, et al, 1825), 1: 126. 42.  Quoted in Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage, 148.

2 • The Mysterious Orphan: Dramatizing the Betrayal of the Child Cheryl Nixon

Although Walpole’s play’s name emphasizes the centrality of the mother, The Mysterious Mother can also be investigated for its interest in the plight of the child. In this paper, I argue that the play dramatizes the family’s ability to re-create the child and, more specifically, the parent’s ability to redefine the biological child as an orphan.1 The Countess of Narbonne’s positioning of her ward Adeliza as an orphan provides the clearest example of her interest in enacting familial redefinition, while her positioning of her son Edmund as an exile, barred by her from his home and parents, demonstrates her understanding of the power of symbolic orphaning. These acts of familial redefinition result in the orphan’s feelings of loss and confusion, and the play encourages the audience to see these emotions as a commentary on the child’s inherent powerlessness, placelessness, and selflessness.2 The absence of knowledge attendant to the orphan becomes horrifying when it is revealed that Adeliza and Edmund are both the Countess’s biological children and have incestuously wed. This twisted family relationship occurs only because the Countess erases their connection by positioning them as orphans. The siblings’ marriage leads to the climactic revelation that the Countess incestuously slept with Edmund, resulting in the birth of Adeliza, who is thus not only his wife and sister but also his daughter. The mother’s purposeful transformation of her child into an orphan is an act of familial deception, one that reveals the child’s tenuous claim to family, even to the seemingly undeniable biological bonds of mother and child. Simply put, in The Mysterious Mother, orphaning is a shocking act of betrayal; although we focus on incest as the play’s most sensational act of betrayal, orphaning is just as striking.3

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Orphaning is one of the motivating concerns of the play and retains its central position because it can overtly call attention to its importance. While the horror of incest remains hidden in order to create the mystery of the Countess’s anguish and to allow for its unexpected revelation, the pain of being orphaned can be overtly declared and the orphan’s missing family can be repeatedly noted and interpreted. The Mysterious Mother’s interest in the orphan can be traced on four levels. First, and most obviously, the orphan figure is duplicated throughout the play, revealing the orphan’s ability to function as both a compelling character and a plot structuring device. Second, the orphan figure is further repeated in the “chorus of orphans,” which ensures that the audience sees the orphan as a symbolic structure. Third, the orphan structures meaning, allowing the anxieties of family structure to be explicitly addressed: is the family fixed or mutable? In The Mysterious Mother, orphaning is a strategy of family reconfiguration that is on a spectrum with—and ultimately proves to further—incest’s familial redefinition. And, finally, orphaning emphasizes the activity of interpretation. The orphan figure highlights the unequal knowledge that often defines the act of interpretation, especially when an attempt is made to make sense out of a fragmented or lost family.

The Duplication of the Orphan In Walpole’s play, the figure of the orphan is repeated, structuring both character and plot by foregrounding the child’s dependent relationship on the mother and the mother’s betrayal of that dependency. Although the play amplifies the Countess’s mysterious distress, it just as obviously emphasizes the emotions of Adeliza and Edmund. Both are tortured by their relationship with the Countess, who highlights their filial uncertainty—a lack of knowledge about, acceptance by, and support from a parent. An existential homelessness connects the two characters, hinting at their yet-to-be-revealed sibling relationship. A ward overseen by the Countess, Adeliza is the play’s central orphan character and provides a clear articulation of the play’s central thematic obsession: the mystery of family relationships. Unsure of her parentage, she is cared for by the Countess, whom she labels her “patroness,” “benefactress,” and “friend.”4 She explains that when she has attempted to call the Countess her mother, she is rebuffed: Countess: Thou dearest orphan, to my bosom come,     And vent thy little sorrows. . . .

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Adeliza: . . . When have I wept, but when thou hast refus’d     To let thy Adeliza call thee mother?     I know I was not worthy of such honour,     Too splendid for a child of charity.     I now am most unworthy! (III.1: 54–55) At one remove from the seemingly clear, if estranged, biological parent/child relationship of the Countess and Edmund, Adeliza provides an overt dramatization of the mystery of parentage. This mystery widens to define the Countess’s puzzling rejection of Edmund, which is solved only when their incestuous relationship is disclosed. When their mother’s incestuous act is revealed, it becomes clear that Adeliza is Edmund’s sister. The very bond that obsesses both children—both tried to claim and were rejected by the same mother— proves to be a bond that should not exist. An exiled child, Edmund is a type of manufactured orphan. He has suffered “sixteen exil’d years,” knowing only a “cruel parent” defined by “hate,” “harshness,” “aversion,” and a “cold” heart (II.1: 28–31). Deciding that he must return home, even at the risk of his mother’s disapproval, he explains, “I am weary . . . / Of such a vagrant life” (II.1: 28). When we first meet him, he describes his banishment from his home by his mother. He believes that she has rejected him after having learned that he enjoyed the “melting beauties” of a lover, Beatrice, on the night his father died (II.1: 26). Edmund describes this scene to his friend Florian, who, notably, has also suffered the death of a father and provides yet another repetition of a lost parent. Emphasizing his mother’s anger after this evening, Edmund explains that she,            . . . grew estrang’d. Estrang’d! —aversion in its fellest mood Scowl’d from her eye, and drove me from her sight. She call’d me impious: nam’d my honest lewdness, A prophanation of my father’s ashes. I knelt and wept, and, like a puling boy, For now my blood was cool, believ’d, confess’d My father’s hov’ring spirit incens’d against me. This weak confession but inflam’d her wrath; And when I would have bath’d her hand with tears, She snatch’d it back with horror. (II.1: 27) At the end of the play, Edmund learns that his visit to Beatrice was actually an incestuous liaison with his mother, and his mother’s rejection results from

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her guilty initiation of the crime. Edmund thinks that his banishment results from his illicit liaison; only in the last lines of the play does he understand the extent to which illicit desire exists within and has been repeated by his family as incest.5 Orphaning highlights the unexpected parallels between Adeliza’s and Edmund’s positions; their connection as lost children becomes only more horrific when their connection to a shared mother is revealed. Until they come to understand their incestuous relationship, they hope to reunite with their parents and restore a stable family structure. In their longing to achieve parental acceptance, the orphaned Adeliza and Edmund are able to state overtly a core desire of all children—a longing for the parent, which in a play that connects it to incest has particularly negative consequences.6

The Symbolic Claim of the Orphan The importance of the orphan figure to The Mysterious Mother is amplified by the “Chorus of Orphans,” a seemingly minor set of characters that is listed in the dramatis personae and appears briefly in the play. Early in the play, we learn that the Countess serves as a benefactress to a group of children that she calls “my little orphans” (I.4: 17). Although it seems to function primarily to highlight the generous charity of the Countess, the chorus emphasizes the symbolic power of the orphan. The orphans overtly state the abstract ideals they embody and the aims the Countess hopes to realize by patronizing them. The symbolic resonance of the orphans inspires one of the most interesting and charming scenes in Diana Beauclerk’s illustrations of the play; her visual depiction of the chorus encourages a close reading of the values the orphan represents (fig. 2.1). We meet the orphans when they walk across the stage and sing a hymn, following stage directions that explain, “A procession of children of both sexes, neatly cloathed in a white and blue uniform, issue from the castle, followed by friar Martin, and advance towards the stage-door. They stop, and the children repeat the following hymn.”    I. Throne of mercy! lo! We bend. Thither dare our hopes ascend, Where seraphs, wrapt in light’ning rays, Dissolve in mercy’s tender blaze?

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Fig. 2.1 Diana Beauclerk, Act 2d, Scene 2d: Edmund and Florian with Procession of ­Orphans and Benedict, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 1++ Box 300.

   II. Hear us! harmless orphans hear! For her who dries our falling tear. Hush her sorrows; calm her breast: Give her, what she gives us, rest.    III. Guard our spotless souls from sin! Grant us virtue’s palm to win! Cloath the penitent with grace; And guilt’s foul spots efface! efface! (II.2: 34) While the first stanza of the hymn aligns the orphans with the generalized ideals of “hope” and “mercy,” the second and third connect them to the plight of the Countess. Revealing the tumult that defines their benefactress, they ask for help in bringing her “calm” and “rest.” They hope to remain virtuous and

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untainted by sin while at the same time bringing grace to the penitent Countess. The hymn’s last line is the most revealing, as the orphans ask to “efface” “guilt’s foul spots,” indicating that the Countess has committed some sort of guilty sin that she hopes will be forgiven. The orphans sing to atone for the Countess’s sin and become symbolic markers of that crime. Beauclerk’s image of the chorus of orphans singing this hymn is arresting on several levels. The illustration is filled with active figures, offering a lively counter to the other images in the series that typically feature two figures that assume stylized melodramatic poses expressing anguish. The orphans are cherubic, smiling and laughing as they sing, providing an image of happiness that differs from the distress displayed in the other illustrations. Lined up in pairs, while also depicted as engaged in familiar forms of intimacy such as looking at or touching each other, the orphans offer an image that embodies natural order. In Beauclerk’s presentation, the orphan seems to symbolize an active, happy, and natural form of innocent, “spotless” virtue. Beauclerk aligns the orphans with a positive, hopeful understanding of the ideals they sing about—hope, mercy, virtue, penitence, grace—and positions them as a visual respite from the negative images of familial suffering that fill the other drawings in her series. Most interestingly, Beauclerk’s rendering of the chorus captures the impulse to observe and uncover the meaning of the orphan. Unlike the other images in the series, this illustration depicts two characters, Edmund and Florian, watching the unfolding scene. Standing to the left of the picture, the two men gaze intently on the orphan procession. The image calls attention to a self-reflective moment in the play: a performance is being watched and interpreted by an audience. As this scene appears early in the play, Edmund and Florian might assume that the charming procession of orphans presages happy family connections ahead. Of course, we know better—but, as captured by Beauclerk, the hope for positive orphan relationships can be put on full symbolic display.

Orphaning and the Compounding of Incest Orphaning is a strategy of family reconfiguration that, in The Mysterious Mother, furthers incest’s extreme redefinition of biological bonds. Walpole carefully creates a chain of questions in which orphaning provides clues that lead to the answer of incest. Most immediately, we are encouraged to ask, “What is the mysterious source of the Countess’s suffering?” Her anguish

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seems linked to two additional mysteries: “Why did she banish Edmund?” and “Who are Adeliza’s parents?” The play allows us to sense that these multiple examples of distress not only characterize the parent and child but also somehow link the parent and child; without knowing exactly why, we sense that troubled biological relationships account for this distress. In an accessible and lively study of the orphan published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Terry Castle explains the allure of the figure, writing: Precisely because the 18th-century orphan-hero is usually untried, unprotected, disadvantaged (not to mention misinformed or uninformed about his or her parentage), he or she can function as a sort of textual free radical: as plot-catalyst and story-generator—a mixer-upper of things, whose search for a legitimate identity or place in the world of the fiction at once jump-starts the narrative and tends to shunt it away from didacticism and any predictable or programmatic unfolding of events.7 In The Mysterious Mother, we know that the orphaned characters will serve as the plot catalysts Castle describes: the exiled Edmund decides to return home, even if his mother has outlawed it, while the orphaned Adeliza is eager to claim the Countess as a mother, even as she confesses to the Countess that she is “most unworthy” of her love due to encouraging a suitor (whom the Countess later discovers to be Edmund). Both seem to want to force the Countess to tell her story—a desire that leads to the unpredictable unfolding of events Castle describes. The Countess’s activity of redefining the biological child as an orphan compounds her crime of incest. Orphaning provides not just another example of her immoral manipulation of the family but also an example of her conscious decision to extend that control—to give manipulation structure and permanence by making orphaning an overt part of her family. Before we know that incest is the crime at the heart of the narrative, we know that the Countess has symbolically orphaned her son, has a mother/daughter relationship with an adopted orphan, and serves as a benefactor to a group of orphans. Her interest in the fragmented family is clear. And after her incestuous act is revealed, we understand that this interest is purposeful: she would rather fragment her family through orphaning than have its true structure revealed. After the revelation, we can see that orphaning is a form of familial redefinition that can be overtly practiced, in a way that incest cannot. Orphaning thus becomes a visible trace of the hidden crime of incest. The Countess believes that orphaning can mask her crime of incest, in effect providing a “solution” to incest.

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­ owever, we know this is twisted logic; this solution only compounds, furH thers, and ultimately reveals her original crime. Orphaning, like incest, allows Walpole to explore the limits of family bonds and discover the breaking point of the family. The crime of purposeful orphaning is, in some ways, more troubling than incest. First, both orphaning and incest are expressions of excess. In The Mysterious Mother, the excessive desire of incest leads to and is replaced by the excessive rejection of orphaning. Opposing impulses—desire and rejection—are yoked together in the Countess’s expression of them and, of the two, rejection can be categorized as the more negative impulse. Second, orphaning is not just a singular occurrence but is expressed as an everyday structure; in The Mysterious Mother, it is a form of family betrayal that is routinized and normalized and becomes a mechanism of regularized control. Adeliza and Edmund cannot escape their orphan status but must live it daily. The Countess understands that her crime of incest is interwoven with these additional crimes. After learning that her husband’s monument has been destroyed, she raves about how “be known my crimes” and how to “disclose the frightfull scene” (III.1: 51). The audience does not yet know that she refers to incest and does not yet understand that Edmund and Adeliza are siblings but knows that she has committed the crime of afflicting Edmund and controlling Adeliza. In her unclear rantings, she admits that she can only wound them further and presages future manipulation: My Edmund too! Has not the mother’s hand Afflicted him enough? Shall this curs’d tongue Brand him with shame indelible, and sting His honest bosom with his mother’s scorpions? Shall Adeliza hear the last of horrors, ’Ere her pure breast, that sighs for sins it knows not, Has learn’d the rudiments of human frailty? (III.1: 51–52). The Countess reveals her power over her children: she knows she can afflict, curse, brand, shame, and sting Edmund and that she can bestow horror, sin, and frailty on Adeliza. Her purposeful positioning of them as orphans ensures that she can inflict that control.

Orphaning and the Activity of Interpretation The orphan introduces the unknown into the family: Who are your parents? Who are your siblings? Where did you come from? Where are you go-

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ing? The orphan is a mystery that needs to be solved, a question that needs to be answered. The orphan thus heightens our interest in interpreting the family—both its structure and its meaning—and the individual’s place within it. Using the orphan to encourage and then thwart that interest, The Mysterious Mother is intent on depicting interpretation as a continually confounded activity. Even when answers are provided to questions about the Countess’s family, those answers lead only to more confusion and uncertainty. The chorus of orphan children emphasizes the compulsion to interpret that is embodied by the orphan; themselves a cypher that represents the Countess’s guilty crime and her desire for forgiveness, the orphans are also depicted as interpreters of the Narbonne family. They witness the supernatural destruction of a cross that serves as the monument to the Count of Narbonne, the Countess’s husband. After being introduced on stage while singing their hymn, the group makes a solemn procession to the cross, guided by the friar Martin who explains they “Proceed to chant our holy dirge, and offer / Due intercession for his soul’s repose” (II.2: 35). When Martin stops to talk to Edmund, the children refuse to continue to the cross without him, explaining, “They say the Count sits there, / With clotted locks, and eyes like burning stars” (II.2: 37). With this innovation of the dead father, the group of orphans introduces an element of the supernatural to the family narrative. A violent thunderstorm overtakes the scene and “the Orphan-children run in terrified,” beseeching Martin to “save us! save us!” (II.2: 40). They explain the source of their fear: First Orphan: Oh! A storm so dreadfull!     Some demon rides in th’ air. . . . Martin: ’Twas well—but none of you, had none the courage     To face the fiend? Second Orphan: I wink’d, and saw the light’ning     Burst on the monument. The shield of arms     Shiver’d to splinters. E’er I could repeat     An Ave-Mary, down with hideous crash     The cross came tumbling—then I fled— Martin: Retire;     This is unholy ground. Acquaint the Countess.     I will not tarry long. (II.2: 40–41) The orphans witness an event that cries out for interpretation but that offers no clear answers. The lightning splintering the father’s shield of arms and toppling his cross portends that the Narbonne family is cursed or damned. At

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the very least, the family is being threatened with destruction and is depicted as falling into further chaos. The family has done something that has enraged supernatural forces, but it remains unclear what.8 As he attempts to decipher the event, the friar Martin can only lament, “Sixteen fatal years / Has Narbonne’s province groan’d beneath the hand / Of desolation—for what crimes we know not!” (II.2: 41). Mirroring the audience’s attempts to interpret the Narbonne family, the orphaned Edmund and Adeliza try to unravel the mysteries—the “desolation” and “crimes”—that plague the family and define their place in it. Edmund overtly states that his mother’s rejection of him is a mystery, pondering, “some mystery, / Beyond a widow’s pious artifice, / Lies hid beneath aversion so relentless” (II.1: 28). Importantly, he positions himself as an interpreter determined to solve that mystery, exclaiming, “I must know this riddle” (II.1: 31). However, when Edmund first sees his mother after his banishment, her reaction offers no clarity. Unsure whom she is seeing, the Countess cries out, “Hah! is this sorcery? or is’t my husband?” and faints (III.3: 64). Edmund attempts to assert his familial position, declaring, “behold thy son!” and “Dear parent, mother” and questioning, “Art thou, or not, a mother?” (III.3: 64–65). The Countess continues to think she sees her husband and can only respond, “Narbonne, dost thou live?” (III.3: 66). Edmund positions himself at her feet and “kneels for pardon,” only to have his mother say, “touch me not” and “Horror on horror!” (III.3: 66–67). Like Edmund, Adeliza tries to discover her family relationships, but her orphan status confers only confusion over her parentage. When the Countess questions Adeliza before revealing her crime of incest, Adeliza promises her submission to the Countess, positioning herself as a child made by her: I am the thing you made me. Crush me, spurn me, I will not murmur. Should you bid me die, I know ’twere meant in kindness. (IV.3: 78) As their discussion continues, the Countess shows her tenderness and seems on the verge of revealing that she is Adeliza’s mother, stating, “Thou art my only thought—oh! wast thou form’d / The child of sin?—and dare I not embrace thee?” (IV.4: 84). Picking up on this reference to her parentage, Adeliza replies, “Alas! was I then born the child of sin! / Who were my parents? I will pray for them!” (IV.4: 84). As the discussion continues, the Countess expresses humility by throwing herself to the ground. But her tenderness turns to violence, cursing her ward as a “little imp of darkness” and threatening,

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“Pity would bid me stab thee, while the charm / Of ignorance locks thee in its happy slumbers” (IV.4: 85–86). Faced with such contradictory information and emotions, Adeliza can only conclude, “Alas! She raves—I will call help” (IV.4: 86). As both Edmund’s and Adeliza’s situations of ineffective family definition demonstrate, orphaning results in a disempowering lack of knowledge. The Countess’s continued ability, even when half-mad, to hide her family’s structure from her children reveals the unequal knowledge that defines the orphan: the parent knows the child’s family history, while the orphaned child does not. The Mysterious Mother also reveals the unequal power that accompanies that familial knowledge; Edmund and Adeliza can only submit to their mother’s mysterious pronouncements. This is perhaps best seen in Edmund’s acceptance of his mother’s declaration that she is his sovereign when she commands,          . . . Edmund, hear me! Thou art my son, and I will prove a mother. But I’m thy sovereign too. This state is mine. Learn to command, by learning to obey. (III.3: 68) Awestruck, Edmund responds, “Why, this is majesty” and vows, “I will learn t’obey” (III.3: 68). Rather than rebel against the parent’s power, the orphan yields to it, perhaps out of desire not to alienate but to gain access to the knowledge the parent holds.

Conclusion: The Confused Language of Orphaning The figure of the orphan is central to unlocking the logic of Walpole’s horror: the most shocking form of horror is family betrayal, and that horror is best expressed by the destruction of the parent/child bond, whether through incest or orphaning. As The Mysterious Mother builds toward the revelation of the incestuous acts that define the family, incest becomes increasingly conflated with orphaning. Any attempt at stating truths about family structure results in more mystification of it. The play dramatizes confusion about the Narbonne family by using language that becomes confused; words are repeated, questioned, and equated, becoming unmoored from the seemingly stable referents of family relationships. The horror of both incest and orphaning is their inexpressibility; both result in the horror of language that is unknowable.

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The Narbonnes’ parent/child relationships are brought into the open by a new spousal relationship. When Florian explains to the Countess that Adeliza and Edmund have wed, the Countess expresses extreme confusion that captures her loss of familial and self-control. Her rush of repeated words offers no insight into the relationship, expressing only her agony and not its source: Confusion! phrenzy! blast me, all ye furies! Edmund and Adeliza! when! where! how! Edmund wed Adeliza! quick, unsay The monst’rous tale—oh! prodigy of ruin! (V.5: 111) When Edmund and Adeliza enter, they ask the Countess to bless their marriage, resulting in a confused repetition of the word “children”: Edmund and Adeliza understand that they are both her children in that they have married, but the Countess knows that they are both her children born of her. Edmund: Dear parent, look on us, and bless your children! Countess: My children; horror! horror! yes, too sure     Ye are my children! . . .     —Who made this marriage? whose unhallow’d breath     Pronounc’d the incestuous sounds? Edmund: Incest! good heavens! (V.5: 112–13) The Countess tries to define and prove her crime of incest, spouting a list of family relationships that she knows are equated. Although she is attempting to reveal the truth, those words and the relationships they signify are still not understood by Edmund. Countess: . . . Lo! where this monster stands! thy mother! mistress!     The mother of thy daughter, sister, wife!     The pillar of accumulated horrors!     Hear! tremble!—and then marry, if thou darest! (V.5: 113) What sounds like madness is an attempt to name the multiple familial positions that have been collapsed together. Edmund cannot understand what he is hearing, and responds, “thy words are phrenzy” (V.5: 113). Edmund and Adeliza attempt to calm the Countess, and she begs heaven to “For a short interval lend me that reason” that will allow her to explain herself (V.5: 114). She is ultimately able to tell the full story of the incestuous relations that bind the three of them. While Adeliza faints, Edmund draws a dagger, which the Countess seizes and uses to stab herself fatally. Edmund vows to go

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to war, so that he can “rush on death,” and orders Adeliza to be cloistered in a convent (V.5: 118–19). When the Countess’s unspoken crimes are spoken, they can barely be framed in language and are only dimly understood. When her acts of parent/child betrayal are comprehended, the horror results in death. The orphan, occupying a malleable position that thwarts interpretation and cofounds language, proves to be the perfect instrument to advance, innocently and unknowingly, these horrors. Notes 1.  The imaginative power of the literary figure of the orphan has occasioned much commentary. Well-known studies of the fictional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orphan include: Eva Konig, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Vicissitudes of the Eighteenth-Century Subject (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Laura Peters, Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture, and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). Also see my The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body (London: Routledge, 2011). 2.  Nina Auerbach provides an influential foundational definition of the “orphan archetype,” defining the orphan as a homeless, powerless, alienated, “dispossessed, detached self” (396). See Nina Auerbach, “Incarnations of the Orphan,” ELH 42, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 395–96. 3.  Examining new forms of kinship, class, and power available in the eighteenth century, Ellen Pollak explores how flexible family structures, including orphaning, enable incestuous relationships. See Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Her article on Delarivier Manley traces how the introduction of the orphaned ward into the family allows incestuous relations between the father-figure and daughter-figure. See Pollak, “Guarding the Succession of the (E)state: Guardian-Ward Incest and the Dangers of Representation in Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39, no. 3 (1998): 220–37. For additional examinations of incest and the orphaned or adopted child, see: Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); T.G.A. Nelson, “Incest in the Early Novel and Related Genres,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16, no. 1 (1992): 127–62; and Ruth Perry, “Incest as the Meaning of the Gothic Novel,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory

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and Interpretation 39, no. 3 (1998): 261–78. See also Chapter 5 in my The Orphan in Eighteenth-­Century Law and Literature, 189–224. 4. Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Twickenham: StrawberryHill, 1768), III.2: 53–54. All quotations from the play are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text. 5.  For a fascinating study of two Restoration-era plays that similarly feature mother/ son incest revealed after the son’s marriage and resulting in the mother’s madness, see J. Douglas Canfield, “Mother as Other: The Eruption of Feminine Desire in Some Late Restoration Incest Plays,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39, no. 3 (1998): 209–19. 6.  Paul Baines examines the “libidinous economy of the play,” in which both Adeliza and Edmund reference their parents as they engage in courtship and marriage (293). See Paul Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 287–309. 7.  Terry Castle, “Don’t Pick Up: Why Kids Need to Separate from Their Parents,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, www.chronicle.com/article/dont-pick-up/, May 6, 2012. 8.  On Walpole’s critique in The Mysterious Mother and in his correspondence of superstitious attributions of natural events (including lightning and thunderstorms) to supernatural causes, see the essay by Al Coppola in this volume.

3 • Misreading The Mysterious Mother: Motherhood and Religious Feeling Nicole Garret

Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768) is a funny play in several ways. Walpole circulated, suppressed, and eventually published his play; he commissioned drawings, which he then shut up in a closet for only a select few to see. He called its subject “disgusting.”1 He contrived for the play an elite coterie branding but never exploited that brand for commercial success.2 The comedy, like the tragedy, is a product of characters misreading—both signs in nature and the mysterious mother herself. It is, in part, a satire of superstition and religious bigotry. We laugh when the monks Martin and Benedict shudder at a funeral dirge, thinking it is a voice beyond the grave saying “FORBEAR!”3 But when others misread the Countess as a mother whose maternal instincts have become corrupted by superstitious priests, the consequences are tragic. It is easy to overlook the satire in Walpole’s tragedy, especially in re-reading, because there is so much to wonder at in the incest plot revealed in the play’s dénouement. And it is not without good reason that both criticism of the day and recent scholarship have focused so much on incest, the former reflecting almost entirely on whether such a subject is fit for the stage or public consumption and the latter interested in the cultural and literary milieu in which it was produced and the attitudes that kept it off the stage for two hundred and fifty years.4 Hazarding the possibility that ignoring the incest plot constitutes a misreading, this essay puts incest aside to focus on the way in which Walpole’s play links motherhood and religion, or superstition. The play dramatizes the Countess of Narbonne’s oscillations between reason and superstition, suggesting a spectrum of religious difference, rather than a binary. Maternal behavior operates on a similar spectrum, with what Toni Bowers calls “affective

37

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motherhood” on one end and paternalistic, authoritarian tendencies on the other.5 Although they consistently misread the Countess, the other characters accurately link religious feeling with maternal affection, albeit in divergent ways that reveal their individual pieties and biases. Walpole thus takes up the anxieties of maternal difference and religious feeling found in the fictions of Daniel Defoe, such as Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), and Richardson’s sequel to Pamela (1741). For the Countess, the ineluctable pull of affective motherhood moves in tandem with her backsliding into superstition: the closer her children get to the danger of her secret, the more susceptible she becomes to delusions of supernatural interference, the more she longs to embrace them. Her place on the spectrum is a matter of mental fortitude and of circumstance, rather than some permanent state of enlightenment. A focus on motherhood and religious feeling not only puts The Mysterious Mother in conversation with other maternal fictions of the period, it also isolates the themes that generate, as Walpole put it, “two essential springs of terror and pity” before the incest plot unfolds in the final act (Postscript, R1). Those aspects of the Countess’s character that make her mysterious and interesting also arouse a creeping sense of terror, leading the audience to wonder what could make this woman of reputed sense and piety reject her son, seemingly unnaturally, out of what appears to be religious zealotry. In other words, why does her maternal behavior depart so violently from Enlightenment maternal norms? Taking Walpole’s comments in his Postscript to the 1768 edition at face value, we know his agenda for our reading of the Countess was to make “the contrast of vice and virtue” legible in a single character. In order to do that, he needed to raise our interest and sympathy enough to sustain it in the final scene. He writes, For this reason, I suppressed the story till the last scene; and I bestowed every ornament of sense, unbigoted piety, and interesting contrition, on the character that was at last to raise universal indignation in hopes that  some degree of pity would linger in the breasts of the audience. (Postscript, R5) Walpole’s suppression of “the story”—the incest—succeeds in emphasizing a very different story about motherhood and its pieties, religion and its pitfalls. Pity and fear are thus not reserved for the final scene but rather threatened by the nature of what is revealed. Contrary to what the other characters believe, the fact that the Countess does not reject her child out of religious devotion, bigotry, or superstition is immediately clear to the audience, who dread the

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causes of her penance and pity its effect on her children. We pity her insistence on eternal damnation and look on with horror at her creeping superstitious impulses. As I discuss below, these themes of maternal affect and religious feeling, which seem to dissipate with the reveal in the fifth act, are memorialized in Lady Diana Beauclerk’s illustrations. Many of the characters recognize some link between religious feeling and maternal behavior, and they appraise the Countess’s behavior according to their own pieties about religion and motherhood. In the first scene, the newly arrived Florian excoriates the Countess and her feminine tendency to extremes: “Her son in exile / She wastes on monks and beggars his inheritance, / For his soul’s health! I never knew a woman, / But lov’d our bodies or our souls too well” (I.1: 2–3). Reading for the incest plot, it is easy to see this accusation as a pointed description of a woman who has tried to erase a moment of lust with a lifetime of penance. However, eighteenth-century advice literature, particularly on maternal grief, often contained cautions to mothers who were thought too apt to dote on the living persons of their children and instead asked them to pay more attention to their souls, in life or death.6 It was common for a parent, at least outwardly, to wish their child dead or banished rather than vicious.7 The dialog between Peter the Porter and Florian in Scene Two reinforces the rumor that the Countess’s maternal affection has transformed into religious devotion, yet in this transformation Peter reads not unnatural motherhood but an excess of feminine virtue. He speaks of the Countess’s charity to orphans and her “ever heav’n-directed eye” (I.2: 4). In response to Florian’s claim that she is a “ruthless mother,” Peter says, “but spare his mother; / such virtue never dwelt in female form” (I.2: 6–7). In Florian’s estimation, a real mother longs for physical proximity and affection. Florian’s pieties about motherhood as an affective state lead him to read the Countess as a weak woman whose affections have been replaced by religious bigotry; Peter reads her as a mother with an overabundance of religious piety. The scene between Florian and Peter begins to raise the text’s most pressing questions about the Countess: just how religious is she, and just how is she religious? The monk, Martin, also adheres to dichotomies. Martin reads “rank heresy” in the Countess’s refusal to take confession, to believe in prophetic visions, or to take solace in incantations (I.3: 13). The Countess’s wouldbe confessor, Benedict, realizes that Martin’s simple dichotomies do not accurately explain her behavior. He claims that she thinks too much, is too much a logician. He chides her for her display of “pagan virtues” and, ironically, laments to Martin that “This steady woman / Can ne’er be pious with so many

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virtues” (I.3: 15). As one scholar suggests, the Countess’s debates with Benedict and refusal to take confession define her as a sort of reformed Protestant, especially as her rational speeches stand in sharp contrast to Benedict’s immoral catholic villainy.8 But this is perhaps too simplistic. Like the other binaries to which Walpole’s characters are attached (mother/monster, saint/heretic, pagan/Christian), Catholic/Protestant does not accurately describe the religious condition of the Countess, who is ever reasoning through her own perdition and against the temptation to take absolution from priests. She is both the “steady woman” and a “sober mourner, with frantic gesture and disordered step” (I.2: 8–9). This philosopher Countess has lapses for which she chastises herself. Introducing the effect of Narbonne’s castle on visitors, the first lines of Florian’s soliloquy reflect on the power of places and events to trigger a religious experience: How these antique towers And vacant courts chill the suspended soul, Till expectation wears the cast of fear; And fear, half ready to become devotion, Mumbles a kind of mental orison, . . . What kind of a being is circumstance! (I.1: 1) “Expectation” and “fear” act upon the soul in quick succession here, a result of “circumstance” or environment, and Walpole’s characters reason themselves out of the effects of the passions with varying degrees of success. Later in the play, the Countess describes a similar succession when she finds her husband’s likeness mysteriously destroyed: Omens and prodigies are but begotten By guilt on pride. We know the doom we merit; And self-importance makes us think all nature Busied to warn us when that doom approaches. (III.1: 50) In this construction, “Guilt” interprets, “pride” exaggerates, and “self-­ importance” concludes; passions take over the functions of reason. Subtending these speeches, therefore, is an awareness of the ease with which reason retreats and rational religion slips into superstition. This preoccupation with the subjective, imaginative response is, indeed, an original feature of Gothic literature; it is important here, however, that it is so closely linked to questions of religious belief, or “superstition.”9 Not long before Walpole wrote The Mys-

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terious Mother, David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) had posited that primitive humans progressed from polytheism to monotheism as they turned to contemplating the natural order rather than the relationship between aberrations and the events of life. In other words, it is a primitive impulse to interpret phenomena as divine judgments or predictive events; however, since neither polytheism or monotheism are inherently rational, humans may slip back into the superstitious bigotries (or irrational beliefs) that we see very much on display in Walpole’s tragedy.10 Horace Walpole’s anecdotes about the 1750 London earthquakes ridicule this impulse to read natural events as prodigies. In a letter to Horace Mann, he refers to the “absurdities that were committed after the earthquake” and says of the clergy “they all take care, after accounting for the earthquake systematically, to assure you that it was still nothing less than a judgment.”11 Neither the battle-hardened soldier, Florian, nor the Countess, who is “not degraded by superstitious bigotry,” is entirely immune to such absurdities.12 The Countess is always in danger of slipping back into the superstitious madness that led her to sneak into her son’s bed. She resists the offerings of her priests only insofar as she can resist physical and psychological proximity to Edmund. Later in the play, when wracked by grief, she thinks she sees her husband when she beholds her son, hears ghosts, believes herself dead, and asks for spells to relieve her misery. At other times, she scoffs heroically at Benedict and bests him with logic and biting wit. In short, she wavers—­ traveling the whole spectrum between rational skepticism and frenzied enthusiasm. Benedict, too, recognizes glimmers of his own effect on her conscience when his innuendos appear in her feverish dreams. Thus, Walpole succeeds in presenting a character whose penitence is not degraded by superstitious bigotry in part by dramatizing her staunch resistance. She says, “weak minds / Want their soul’s fortune told by oracles and holy juglers” (I.5: 24). The Countess’s attitude to priest-craft echoes Walpole’s insistence that “weak minds alone believe or feel that conscience is to be lulled asleep by superstitious bigotry” (Postscript, R5). The Countess has reasoned herself into her religious position, but her freedom from superstition hinges on maintaining a certain mental fortitude. By the end of the first act, it is established that the Countess’s religious opinions are far from what they are reputed to be. Her parental behavior is similarly difficult to define. The Countess’s relationship to her son is not, as the other characters believe, dictated by her religious zealotry or relationship to the priest who, in in fact “quail[s]” before her (III.3: 45). Traditional mother-

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hood being unavailable to her, she acts out her parental role rather as steward of her son’s ancestral wealth. Benedict reads this behavior as loveless: “She loves him not; yet mistress of his fortunes, / His ample exhibition speaks her bounty. / She destines him whate’er his father’s love / Gave blindly to her will” (I.3: 15). Edmund, still believing he was banished for an affair with Beatrice, calls his mother “rigid” but corrects Florian’s belief that she is squandering his money: “. . . to me her hand / Is bounteous, as her heart is cold,” he says (II.1: 28). The money she sets aside for charity is taken “from her own wants” (I.3: 15). Toni Bowers’s terms “affective motherhood” and “economic motherhood” are useful for understanding the Countess’s parental behavior. In her reading of Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana (1724), Bowers argues that Defoe’s protagonist seems initially satisfied with an exclusively economic relationship to her children, but that she comes to see the impossibility of choosing between the affective and the economic. Roxana learns that it is “always both,” never either/ or.13 Like the Countess, Roxana reasons that economic motherhood—caring for the material needs of the child—is a substitute for affection and nurturing. Neither Roxana nor Walpole’s Countess are able to attend to their children, or “love” them in conventional ways, and both find the religious systems of their birth to be insufficient for supporting their experiences or bearing them up under trial. Whereas Roxana works out biblical interpretations that support her peculiar brand of motherhood, Walpole’s Countess assumes the role of the father—the ruler of lands, money, and children, as Benedict calls her, “mistress of [Edmund’s] fortunes” (I.3: 15).14 Importantly, like Roxana’s, the Countess’s decision to emphasize her economic role emerges from protective emotion: both mothers strive to shield their children from the knowledge of their (sexual) crimes and the consequences of that knowledge.15 Economic stewardship might feel unloving, and is certainly deeply unsatisfying to Edmund, but the Countess has earned his respect through behaviors more immediately associated with fathers. Like a female Lord Chesterfield, the Countess writes her son letters teaching him how to be a man and a soldier. These letters contradict her reputation as a “praying Magdalen”: Edmund says, Her letters! Florian; such unstudied strains Of virtuous eloquence! She bids me, yes, This praying Magdalen enjoins my courage To emulate my great forefather’s deeds.

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Tells me, that shame and guilt alone are mortal; That death but bars the possibility Of frailty, and embalms untainted honor! (II.2: 30–31) In reaffirming his banishment, she enjoins him to obey her commands and speaks of her “masculine” soul (III.3: 68). Furthermore, the Countess has little respect for mothers, seeing them as dispensable: “Trust me,” she counsels Florian, “a father’s guardian arm / Were well worth all the treasures it withheld. / A mother might be spar’d” (II.4: 47). For the Countess, motherhood is complicated and corruptible. It has brought her misery, but fatherhood seems possible, straightforward, indispensable.16 And yet, as we see, the mother cannot be spared. Both Edmund and Adeliza crave maternal affection. As long as the incest is unknown, the Countess’s wavering between parental roles stimulates all of the pity and a great deal of the terror.17 For her part, although she cannot lavish Edmund with affection, the Countess is overcome with protective emotion at the sight of him. The closer her children get to her secret—and the more danger they are in—the more precarious her mental fortitude. The Countess resists certain kinds of “natural” impulses, both to superstition and to affect, only for as long as she can remain above fear and manipulation, and she is well aware of her vulnerabilities: “Nature! these feelings were thy gift. Thou knowest / How ill I can resist thy forceful impulse” (IV.4: 84). As it was for some of those who experienced the 1750 London earthquakes, the shock of terrible events separates her from her reason. She begins to feel that nature intervenes directly in the events of her life. It is clear by the end of the play that the Countess’s manly and pagan virtues are largely predicated upon circumstance. And, as Florian muses at the beginning of Act I, “what kind of being is circumstance!” (I.1: 1). Themes of oscillation between reason and superstition, light and dark, and of the circumstantial nature of terror make Lady Diana Beauclerk’s soot-­ water drawings fitting illustrations for The Mysterious Mother. Walpole adored Beauclerk’s drawings because, he said, they are expressive but “they do not shock like the original.”18 The drawings have the ability to express the interplay among reason, nature, penitence, and superstition in a way that sanitizes the incest plot. The illustration for Act IV, scene 4 (fig. 3.1), for instance, emphasizes the Countess’s torment and Adeliza’s abandonment.19 When Adeliza asks for information about her parents, the Countess throws herself to the ground and laments the “gift” of nature and the “forceful impulse” to own her daughter and confesses (VI.4: 84).

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Fig. 3.1 Diana Beauclerk, Act 4th, Scene 3d: The Countess of Narbonne and Adeliza, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH ­Contents B373 no. 5++ Box 300.

In Beauclerk’s depiction, the Countess has thrown herself away from Adeliza and from the forest, but the branches of a tree appear to reach out for her. She, in turn, reaches toward them and for her daughter. The push/pull effect in this image is emblematic of the Countess’s predicament, or what we know about it, throughout the play: an inexplicable aversion to “natural,” or affective

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motherhood, which is nonetheless inescapable. For other scenes, Beauclerk presents characters straying out of the artifice of the castle and toward natural elements that similarly seem to reach out to pull them toward a darker, untamed, but irresistible part of their nature.20 In Beauclerk’s drawings, natural elements reflect and give cover to human passion while simultaneously reaching out to draw them further into the darkness. This darkness is a retreat and a cover, but it also has an ominous, creeping, inescapable quality. The drawings provide a way to read themes of nature and maternal longing obliquely and without the disturbing, polarizing mechanism that drives them in the play. They read The Mysterious Mother for what it says about nature and superstition without attention to any particular form of sin or crime.21 That is also what I have attempted to do here, although there is clearly much more to say. If such an eschewal of incest and female sexual desire constitutes a misreading, it also allows us to focus on the play’s preoccupation with maternal nature and superstition. This perspective engages The Mysterious Mother in conversation with other eighteenth-century fictions about family and the links between maternal nature, spiritual health, and material circumstance. Notes 1.  Horace Walpole, Preface, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (London: 1781), v. 2.  For a fuller discussion of the publication history and coterie audience of The Mysterious Mother, please see the essays by Dale Townshend and Marcie Frank in this volume. 3.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), IV.2: 74. All quotations from the play and its Postscript (which is paginated separately) are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text. 4.  On Walpole’s satiric treatment of incest, see Jill Campbell, “‘I Am No Giant’: Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love Among Men,” The Eighteenth Century 39, no. 3 (1998): 238–60. E. J. Clery argues convincingly that it is the “premeditated nature of the incest” and fears about female desire that shocked audiences; see E. J. Clery, “Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire,” Essays and Studies 54 (2001): 23–46. On the relationship between female sexuality and incestuous desire, see also Paul Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28, no. 1 (1999): 287–309. Frances Burney’s reaction to the Countess’s “monstrous, voluntary guilt” supports Clery’s assertion. Early responses to Walpole’s play, including Burney’s, can be found in Peter Sabor, ed., Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage (London: Rout-

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ledge, 2013). For a discussion of Walpole’s play in the context of other incest dramas, see Jean I. Marsden’s essay in this volume. 5.  Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116. 6.  Simon Patrick’s The Heart’s Ease (1665), for instance, ridicules mothers for their concern for the mortal flesh, rather than the spiritual state, of children. Reading early modern women’s writing on child death, Patricia Phillippy explores the ways in which an ongoing anxiety over the body of the lost child complicated their efforts to console themselves. See Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death, and Literature in Post-Reformation England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141. 7.  It is precisely this idea of maternal care with which the Countess confronts Benedict when she asks “should I not wish him with the blessed?” (I.5: 4). Later in the play, Edmund tells Florian that his mother shows “mark’d anxiety for [his] soul’s welfare” (II.2: 130). 8.  See Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: John Murray, 1996), 220. 9.  See George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 7. 10.  David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion. Ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11.  Horace Walpole, “Letter to Horace Mann, May 19, 1750,” in The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford: Including Numerous Letters Now First Published from the Original Manuscripts (R. Bentley, 1840), 334–37. On Walpole’s debunking of superstition in his letters and his treatment in The Mysterious Mother of superstitious interpretations of natural events, see Al Coppola’s essay in this volume. 12.  Horace Walpole’s note on a letter from William Mason (May 8, 1769) quoted in The Lewis Walpole Library, “Written by Horace Walpole; Horace Walpole at 300,” accessed December 10, 2019. On Walpole’s ideas about Catholicism, see Matthew Reeve’s essay in this volume. 13. Bowers, Politics of Motherhood, 116. 14. Roxana interprets biblical motherhood as economic support. For instance, when promising to provide financial support to Amy’s child by the landlord, Roxana compares herself to Rachael and Amy to Bilhah: “Rachael put her Handmaid to-Bed with Jacob, she took the Children as her own; don’t be uneasie, I’ll take the Child as my own.” By this she means she will take on “the Charge, the Expence, the Travel, &c.” Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, ed. John Mullan (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 49. 15.  The Countess says she would prefer her “crimes” were public, but “has not a mother’s hand / Afflicted him [Edmund] enough? Shall this curs’d tongue / Brand him with shame indelible . . . ?” (III.1: 51). Similarly, Roxana fears that she might become

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a corrupting influence on her children if they learn that their mother was a famous courtesan. 16.  Paul Baines suggests that the crumbling battlements of the castle indicate that the Countess has not been entirely successful in her role as patriarch. See Paul Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28, no. 1 (1999): 292–93. 17.  For a more extensive analysis of the Countess’s failure to mother Edmund and Adeliza according to their needs, see Cheryl Nixon’s essay in this volume. 18.  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, October 31, 1779, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 24: 524. 19.  Horace Walpole’s inscription on the verso of Beauclerk’s drawing says that it illustrates Scene Three of Act Four, but it is in Scene Four that the Countess throws herself to the ground. Martin and Benedict are on stage throughout the third scene; in the fourth scene, the two women are alone. 20.  For a fuller discussion of Beauclerk’s drawings, see Cynthia Roman’s essay in this volume. 21.  Some who viewed Beauclerk’s drawings were, of course, unwilling to evaluate them without thinking of the incest plot of The Mysterious Mother. See for instance Letitia-Matilda Hawkins, “Anecdotes of Walpole” in Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage, ed. Sabor, 304.

4 • “Some demon rides in th’ air”: Lightning and the Problem of the Supernatural in Walpole’s Second Gothic Al Coppola

Surely one of the most important reasons to recover, restage, and discuss Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother is to explore how this notorious closet drama helped shape the emergent form of the gothic. More talked about than read, more read than seen—in the eighteenth century as well as today—The Mysterious Mother is itself something of a mystery. How do we assess the contribution of Walpole’s scandalous half-published, half-suppressed theatrical, with its lurid themes of incest and “depraved imagination” and its weird amalgam of pre-enlightened superstition and prelatical hypocrisy? What do we get when we resituate this play alongside Walpole’s endlessly read The Castle of Otranto as twin headwaters of the gothic’s murky flow? To answer that question, we need to look more closely into the intellectual context for this play’s monstrous birth in 1768, just four years after Walpole published his world-beating, genre-defining novel. Specifically, I’d ask that we attend to a major scientific and cultural controversy that breaks out in the mid1760s over the nature of and proper defenses against lightning strikes. As a natural phenomenon that is unequivocally sublime, lightning calls down with it a whole range of associations that were energetically debated in the learned journals and popular periodicals of the day and that all but define the gothic imaginary. Lightning conjures up the fear of forces beyond human agency or comprehension, along with lingering superstitions about its possible supernatural origins as a vector of divine retribution or of spirits’ revenge from beyond the grave.1 Consider what happens to the supernatural in Walpole’s gothic vision when we move from The Castle of Otranto to The Mysterious Mother. In Walpole’s later play, he retains the gloomy, moldering ruined castle motif, and there remains

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an abiding sense that the very places and spaces of these stories are accursed. But in The Mysterious Mother we find no examples of the hallucinatory literalism that we had in Otranto—I’m thinking of that preposterous giant helmet, so manifestly and insistently real that it crushes a young heir to death and serves as a temporary holding cell for a suspected malefactor. Indeed, that helmet is a deliberate and weirdly material signal that the castle is truly haunted. To put it bluntly, Walpole’s inaugural gothic tale is straight-up supernatural. Past crimes of usurpation and cruelty do not merely persist in guilty memory; those wrongs are real, and the very palace is haunted by supernatural agents that will avenge them, in fulfillment of a what had seemed like a cryptically figurative prophecy. Turns out, the warning that “the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it” was absurdly literal.2 I’m not sure it’s all that much of a stretch to say that we could sketch the novel’s denouement in a single cheeky stage direction: Cue the supernatural, exit Manfred, running from a giant. My point here is that The Mysterious Mother has a very different conception of the supernatural. In fact, the play posits a deliberately anti-supernatural version of the gothic. No ghostly giants stalk these ancient halls. No skeletons rattle their bones. Talking portraits are right out. The castle and heirs of Narbonne are accursed, for sure, but there is no evidence that supernatural agents are to blame, and indeed I’d go so far as to say that Walpole contrived his drama precisely to abjure such a possibility. This follows, of course, from Walpole’s deliciously perverse decision to make the central crime of his play something far darker—“disgusting” is the word he uses in his preface to the printed 1791 edition—than the usurpation and supernatural revenge plot of The Castle of Otranto.3 The horrible truth at the center of The Mysterious Mother is one of unexpected psychological horror, not a supernatural haunting, and it would seem that Walpole’s second essay in the gothic was a deliberate swerve away from the credulity and superstition he toyed with in his first novel. As Sarah Tindall Kareem has perceptively shown, Walpole devised The Castle of Otranto to explore how fiction is “in the business of simultaneously enchanting and disenchanting its readers.”4 Kareem points to Walpole’s shifting grounds for defending the work in his successive prefaces to the novel— initially, the supposed editor “Marshall” counsels Enlightened readers to enjoy the aesthetic qualities of the tale while remaining untainted by the superstition that gripped the original readers of this ostensibly true history. In the second preface, written just six months later, Walpole admits the fictionality of

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the story but argues that “the powers of fancy” should be “at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention” while abiding by “the rules of probability.”5 In Otranto, Walpole places his faith in a critical reader who would surely not be taken in by the absurdities of the gothic imagination—giant helmets and swords and whatnot—but rather use them as a means for generating a new kind of readerly pleasure derived from following a patently absurd plot as if it were true. Kareem shows us how “Otranto’s techniques assume that fiction does both, reflecting the ‘split-subject attitude,’ at once engrossed and reflective, of a reader who both literally believes and merely “‘imagine[s]‌ the possibility’ of literary representations.”6 But, as Kareem points out, this urbane, Enlightened subjectivity was not as inevitable as Walpole apparently assumed: the later gothic novelist Clara Reeve complained that in The Castle of Otranto, the ludicrous excesses of Walpole’s plot “destroy the work of imagination” and that she was “vexed to find the enchantment dissolved, which I wished might continue to the end of the book.”7 In his second gothic foray, Walpole seems to have been determined to close down the problematics of superstition and credulity in order to re-found the gothic more narrowly on an investigation of the “essential springs of terror and pity” in a tragic plot “more truly horrid than Oedipus” that turns upon what Walpole called in his author’s postscript an act of “depraved imagination.”8 In this regard, Walpole’s second outing more closely follows the logic of what Joseph Drury identifies in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, an “explained supernatural,” to borrow the term from Walter Scott, that employs the “technique of hinting darkly at the presence of supernatural phenomena only to reveal at the last their ordinary physical causes.”9 Drury explains how Radcliffe in fact drew inspiration from occasional moments of demystification in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to develop the master trope that would govern her own novels; I am suggesting that Walpole pursues a similar strategy in his little-studied play—with one important difference. What Radcliffe eventually explains away as categorically non-supernatural for her rational readers, Walpole prefers to leave in tension, as a phenomenon whose explanation remains a point of contention in the plot. Superstition is not a romantic delusion to be dissolved but a genuine matter of concern that must be grappled with. Walpole signals this intention by transmuting the supernatural machinery of The Castle of Otranto into a thunderstorm that breaks in upon The Mysterious Mother. This should strike us as something less than a surprise, perhaps even inevitable, given the state of Enlightened public science at the time.10 By the 1760s, electricity was on practically everyone’s lips—often quite literally. Since the 1740s, science lecturers like John Desaguliers, Benjamin Martin,

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Fig. 4.1 J. Flipart, Plate III in William Watson, Experiences et Observations: Pour Servir à l’Explication de la Nature et des Proprietés de l’Electricité (Paris: S. Jory, 1748). Medical Historical Library, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.

and James Ferguson had been exhibiting dazzling electrical experiments as part of their popular public lecture courses in fashionable Westminster coffeehouses and spa-town meeting rooms. Indeed, the centerpiece attractions of these shows, as Paola Bertucci and others have shown, was the surprising and delightful elicitation of shocks and sparks, especially when the static charges, through the ingenious arrangement of insulators, could be propagated across a chain of audience members, only to be discharged via a finger-tip touch or the meeting of lips in an electric kiss (fig. 4.1).11 Walpole of course knew all about the new fad for electricity—was there a fashion he did not keep up on?—and his correspondence is shot through with snatches of gossip and playful firsthand accounts referencing the polite science of his day. As one might expect, it is highly seasoned with a sardonic wit, and we find that he tends to paint the newly fashionable science as little more than a droll bit of quackery that at best demonstrates his countrymen’s predilection for impostures and spectacles. In a 1750 letter from Horace Mann in Florence, there is jesting about the profligacy and uselessness of a friend’s electricity hobby: Mann gossips that he is coming back to England with “electrical instruments, which cost forty thousand pounds, but he must retrench . . . because the late hurricane did so much damage to his sugar-canes.”12 Not long after the composition of The Mysterious Mother, we find Walpole teasing the

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Duchess of Grafton for having “insulted me with your passion for Mr. Ferguson,” the eminent scientific lecturer, farcically claiming all the same that he is “not jealous—no, though [you] should go and star-gaze with him, like my Lady Froth in The Double Dealer.”13 Throughout his correspondence, we find Walpole having a laugh at preening scientific dilettantes and the impostures of scientific impresarios. We can see this as early as his 1748 promise—or is it a threat?—to produce a “treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity in all arts and sciences,” which, he promises, will be a frontal attack on the vain folly of scientific projecting, taking aim at “whole groves of hummingbirds, tame tigers taught to fetch and carry, pocket spyglasses to see all that is doing in China, and a thousand other toys, which we now look upon as impracticable, and which pert posterity would laugh in one’s face for staring at.”14 We can see it as late as his deliciously satiric account in a 1780 letter to Lady Ossory of his visit to see the electrical “healer” and mystic Dr. James Graham, whom he calls “the most impudent puppet-show of imposition I ever saw.”15 It seems that by this time, enough of his countrymen had come around to his jaundiced view; the Lewis Walpole Library has a magnificent satiric print of Graham squaring off against a rival practitioner, the notorious Prussian conjuror Gustavus Katterfelto, in a lewd tableau that aptly registers the alarm, amusement, and ambivalence surrounding the mysteries of electricity (fig. 4.2). Indeed, in the 1750s and ’60s, Walpole’s letters suggest he was particularly interested in electricity insofar as this newly fashionable and much-debated scientific subject seemed to invite and strengthen credulity and superstition in his ostensibly Enlightened public culture. On referencing the earthquake that hit London in 1750, Walpole wrote that “One Stukeley, a parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by electricity—but that is the fashionable cause, and everything is resolved into electrical appearances as formerly everything was accounted for by Descartes’ vortices, and Sir Isaac’s gravitation.”16 Darkly fascinated by the persistence of pre-Enlightened thought even as he expresses exhaustion at the prospect of trying to counteract it, Walpole wrote in 1756 that “’tis ruin, at least perpetual odium and persecution, to attack any reigning superstition . . . for my part I had rather any dowager of my acquaintance should lump an earthquake under the chapter of miracles, than be forced to explain to her the natural process of it: I am sure she will not talk half so much nonsense upon it in a religious style, as she would in a philosophic one.”17

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Fig. 4.2 Unknown, The Quacks. Published March 17, 1783, by W. ­Humphreys. Etching and engraving. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 783.03.17.02+.

It is for these reasons that we ought to attend very carefully to the thunderstorm that punctuates Act II, a scene that unfortunately—albeit for excellent reasons of pacing and plausibility—could not be performed in full by the actors in our staged reading in the Yale British Art Center lecture hall in May 2018, although visual and sound effects in that production powerfully conveyed the storm’s effects. The thunderstorm that so terrifies the denizens of Narbonne is in fact a critical scene: it triggers a pitched debate about the very possibility of supernatural agency, and it offers Walpole an opportunity to explicitly disavow it. Act II begins with the Young Count Edmund, just returned from his exile, and his friend Florian meeting the procession of orphan children making a pilgrimage to the old Count’s grave on the anniversary of his sudden death. They go to implore a blessing for their benefactor, the Countess of Narbonne, who has devoted her life to penance, self-abnegation, and charity since the tragic events of the night when her beloved husband was suddenly and unexpectedly killed. However, when Florian overhears the scheming priest Martin

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encourage the children’s superstitious belief that the Count haunts the church porch, the blunt-talking soldier confronts him: Flor.: I marvel, father, gravity like yours     Should yield assent to tales of such complexion;     Permitting them in baby fantasy     To strike their dangerous root. Mar.: I marvel not     That levity like yours, unhallow’d boy,     Should spend its idle shaft on serious things.     Your comrade’s bearing warrants no such licence. (II.2: 37) Though a religious scoffer himself, Florian concedes that Edmund, that Enlightened man of sense, might “Knee[l] to Omnipotence,” but that does not mean “each gossip’s dream, / Each village-fable domineers in turn / His brain’s distemper’d nerves” (II.2: 38). It is at this point that the storm comes on. Walpole’s stage directions read, “Violent storm of thunder and lightening [sic],” and this triggers a debate about its proper interpretation. Martin declaims, “Will this convince thee! Where’s the gossip’s dream? / The village fable now? Hear heav’n’s own voice / Condemn impiety!” To this, Florian immediately shouts back, “Hear heav’n’s own voice / Condemn imposture!” (II.2: 38–39). Edmund would have them end their dispute because the storm is beginning to intensify, but this only leads Martin to add fuel to the fire by spitefully prophesying a divine rebuke: “Yes, you do well to check / Your comrade’s profanation: lest swift justice / O’ertake his guilt, and stamp his doom in thunder.” In response, Florian is given a remarkable speech: Flor.: Father, art thou so read in languages     Thou canst interpret th’ inarticulate     And quarreling elements? What says the storm?     Pronounces it for thee or me? Do none     Dispute within the compass of its bolt     But we? Is the same loud-voic’d oracle     Definitive for fifty various brawls?     Or but a shock of clouds to all but us? (II.2: 39) “What says the storm?” asks Florian here, quite pointedly, and we are asked to attend closely to this question. Indeed, when a stroke of lightning “Burst[s] on the monument”—“The shield of arms / Shiver’d to splinters . . . down

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with hideous crash / The cross came tumbling,” the terrified children rush back in to report that “some demon rides in th’ air” (II.2: 40–41). Their childish fears assume a supernatural agent, and the scheming priest encourages their superstition—“Undoubtedly” he responds, asking “Could ye distinguish ought?” (II.2: 40). As a reader, it is hard not to side with Florian, who has to be physically restrained by Edmund from responding when Martin cynically declaims that “tongues licentious / Have scoff’d our holy rites, and hidden sins / Have forc’d th’ offended elements to borrow / Tremendous organs!” (II.2: 41). No final rebuttal is made by these men of sense to clinch the argument—­ Martin gets the last word here—and these pre-enlightened superstitions linger like incense in the still, dank air of this gothic tale. Nevertheless, this exchange places us on our guard and encourages us to privately dismiss them. In effect, Walpole has contrived this scene to mount compelling argument against superstitious belief and the credulous, or knavish, narcissism that feeds it—but he doesn’t quite banish it from his tale. Their dispute is narratologically compelling, but, I’d add, quite timely as well. For the 1760s were a decade that saw an intense interest in the nature of electricity and its relationship to thunder and lightning. Benjamin Franklin first published Experiments and Observations on Electricity in 1751, which theorized that the electrical fluid that natural philosophers had been experimenting with via electrostatic generators and Leyden jars was the very same phenomenon responsible for the awesome destructive power of electrical storms.18 While many naturalists accepted Franklin’s hypothesis, the 1760s saw more than a few prominent dissenters resist Franklin’s claims in scientific circles, following the lead of the Abbé Nollet, who spoke out against the identification of lightning as electricity in the 1750s.19 However, the 1760s drew the curtain on the second act of the scientific controversy, what would turn out to be a decades-long dispute about the efficacy of lightning rods. Lightning rods were perhaps the defining scientific matter of concern of the later eighteenth century, if we think in the terms that Bruno Latour has laid out, whereby scientific debates are never only ever about the “facts” but rather about the entire panoply of ideologies, social behaviors, institutions, and objects that are “concerned” in the adjudication of a particular matter of fact.20 Since 1752, Franklin had been advocating—and finding some success in installing—pointed lightning rods to draw down electrical charges from threatening clouds in order to lower the likelihood and decrease the deadliness of lightning strikes. Many English naturalists remained skeptical of their efficacy, while others threw their support behind round-tipped lightning

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rods,21 even as these scientific skeptics were joined by a host of divines and philosophers who objected to the practice on theological grounds.22 The first lightning rods were only installed in England in 1762, and just two years later the English naturalist Benjamin Wilson touched off a contentious and highly public dispute over their efficacy by publishing an essay that alleged that the use of lightning rods would prove more dangerous by making lightning strikes more likely.23 Soon enough, electrical showmen got in on the act, exhibiting “Thunder Houses” that purported to show the explosive effects of unprotected lightning strikes (fig. 4.3). While the philosophical dispute raged in the learned press and in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions, the newspapers of the day devoted a remarkable degree of attention to reports of lightning and electrical storms. In August 1764, the St. James Chronicle reported on a “severe storm of thunder and lightning” recently experienced in Boston, when “the Heavens appeared in one continual Blaze” as each rooftop lightning rod called down the celestial fire in a dazzling array of patterns. Just one mighty strike did damage, but “there were no Points erected within a half mile of the house.”24 As you can readily infer, this and many other reports to appear in the popular press during these years explicitly advocated for the erection of lightning rods.25 However, the next spring the Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser published an account from a maritime correspondent who reported that “during a violent storm of thunder, lightning, and wind, a luminous body surrounded the spindle at their mast head, which appeared to be a perfect body of fire.” “May it not be conjectured,” asked the editor, “that iron spindles at the mast head of ships, often attract the lightning that would otherwise escape?”26 As the popular debate over the nature of lightning and the use of lightning rods raged on, it seemed that no matter where one stood in the controversy, the power of lightning was a universal topic of fascination and terror. A few months later, that same newspaper published a harrowing account penned by the master of the Royal Navy frigate Tartar, Thomas Esquine, about an electrical storm off the coast of Florida that devastated his vessel: “I have experienced the force of electricity, which all the theory of it could hardly have made me to believe ever to be so great.” After having been first struck by lightning on the quarterdeck, Erskine was brought below for medical attention; however, he wrote that he “had not been down a minute when we heard a noise equal to all the guns of the ship exploding at once. This shock of lightning, or electricity, destroyed in an instant, the main-mast, main-top-mast, and main-topgallant-mast, tearing them in a million pieces; large splinters flying all around

Fig. 4.3 Exploding house or “thunder house,” used to show the importance of equipping buildings with lightning rods. 1800/1899. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Yale Objects Collection (RU 104).

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the ship for many yards distant, the sails bolt in as many pieces or threads; streams of electric fire rushing, at the same time, down to the bottom of the ship: In short, never was anything more tremendous!”27 This all helps us make sense of the way that Walpole concludes his storm scene. The children come running back on stage, interrupting the men’s debate, by carrying news of an off-stage conflagration and indulging in irrational fears that “some demon rides in th’ air.” Walpole didn’t have to embellish this scene. We know that one of the reasons why lightning rods were such crucial matters of concern is that they drew down, as it were, lingering pre-­ Enlightenment superstitions about the cause of sublime natural events like electrical storms and earthquakes. While questions about the efficacy and proper design of lightning rods were being debated by the learned on both sides of the Atlantic, people were still being electrocuted to death in shockingly high numbers due to the persistence of ancient beliefs that lightning was an act of God and a sign of His displeasure. Many contemporaries hewed to the traditional moral counsel that the only possible protection from lightning was to be found “by true faith, [putting] full trust in God” and a “by hearty repentance to remove the causes of God’s heavie judgements.”28 Clergy might use instances of lightning to increase their authority and control over their flock, as Martin does in the play, but it also meant that they had to do something when storms threatened. This generally meant “the frantic ringing of blessed church bells,” but this of course exposed the faithful to terrible deaths by electrocution if they were up in a steeple, yanking on wet bell pulls when the lightning struck.29 This was not some gothic, premodern superstition. One report issued in Munich found that over a thirty-three-year period, 386 lightning strikes to bell towers resulted in 103 fatalities. That report was published in 1784.30 No wonder that the Lloyd’s Evening Post in May 1768 felt the need to publish a long extract from the History of the Royal Academy of Paris on how to “preserve oneself from thunder.” Long story short: don’t hide under trees, and for God’s sake don’t ring any bells. “High edifices, decorated with [metal] . . . ought to be avoided,” the experts counseled, so “when the storm is over a church . . . the Ringers who hold ropes in their hands, whereby the electric shock may be easily communicated to them, are in very great danger.” The Parisian virtuosi concluded, “it is best to leave the bells at rest, and not come too near the steeple.”31 Insofar as the debates over lightning provided Walpole with an object lesson about the persistence of pre-enlightened superstition and credulity, Walpole incorporated these themes into his play as part of a larger strategy of

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internalizing and psychologizing the gothic. In so doing, he was able to reject the supernatural claptrap that became such a focus of the criticism of The Castle of Otranto through a complex maneuver that displaced such credulous attitudes outside of gothic fiction and re-located them at the very heart of the Enlightenment scientific project, even as he exploited those lingering currents of superstition as a backdrop against which he could articulate a much more disturbing, if anti-supernatural, vision of the gothic rooted in “depraved imagination.” Notes 1.  Electricity has been well studied in the context of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but those investigations have focused on late eighteenth-century debates about animal electricity as a “spark of life.” See Richard C. Sha, “Volta’s Battery, Animal Electricity, and Frankenstein,” European Romantic Review 23, no. 1 (2012): 21–41; and Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall, Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). For an exploration of a later gothic text that imbricates Romantic vitalist science and orientalist sorcery, see Elisa Beshero-Bondar, “Southey’s Gothic Science: Galvanism, Automata, and Heretical Sorcery in Thalaba the Destroyer,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 42, no. 1–2 (2009): 1–32. 2.  Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Michael Gamer (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 17. 3.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (London: 1791), iii. 4.  Sarah Tindal Kareem, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 147. 5. Kareem, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 146, quoting Walpole, Otranto, 9. 6. Kareem, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 147, quoting Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: 1762), 98. 7.  Quoted in Walpole, Castle of Otranto, 125. 8.  Horace Walpole, “Postscript,” in The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), R3. All quotations from the play and its postscript (which is paginated separately) are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text. 9.  Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 144. For a related discussion of the “techniques of suggestion” employed to give an apprehension of supernatural in the gothic, see E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 110. 10.  See particularly Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge U ­ niversity

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Press, 1992); Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21 (1983): 1–43; and Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 11.  Paola Bertucci, “Sparks in the Dark: The Attraction of Electricity in the Eighteenth Century,” Endeavour 31, no. 3 (2007): 88–93. See also the contributions to Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 12.  Horace Mann to Walpole, August 31, 1752, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 20: 331. Subsequent correspondence citations will be in abbreviated format as HWC. 13.  Walpole to the Duchess of Grafton, August 15, 1765, in HWC, 32: 16. In William Congreve’s Double Dealer (1706), the ludicrous Lady Froth is described in the cast list as a “pretender to poetry, wit, and learning” who shows off her superficial knowledge of chemistry and astronomy. 14.  Walpole to Henry Conway, August 29, 1748, in HWC, 37: 292–93. 15.  Walpole to Lady Ossory, August 23, 1780, in HWC, 33: 217. This recalls Walpole’s account of his visit to see the Cock Lane Ghost, discussed in Clery, Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 25. 16.  Walpole to Horace Mann, May 19, 1750, in HWC, 20: 154. He is referring to the Reverend William Stuckeley, who argued that earthquakes are the result of an excess of electrical charge stored in the Earth in such publications as “On the Causes of Earthquakes,” Philosophical Transactions 46 (1749–50): 641–46. 17.  Walpole to Horace Mann, May 16, 1756, in HWC, 20: 555. 18.  Benjamin Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London, 1751). 19.  Abbé Nollet, “Extracts of Two Letters . . . Relating to the Extracting of Electricity from the Clouds,” Philosophical Transactions 47 (1751–52): 553–58. 20.  Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48. Latour argues that to think in “realist” terms of “matters of concern” instead in the impoverished terms of “matters of fact,” we require “a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence” (246). 21.  Trent A. Mitchell, “The Politics of Experiment in the Eighteenth Century: The Pursuit of Audience and the Manipulation of Consensus in the Debate over Lightning Rods,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 3 (1998): 313. 22.  See Mitchell, “Politics of Experiment”; Bern Dibner, Early Electrical Machines (Norwalk, CT: Burndy Library, 1957), 41; and I. B. Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 145–54. While Pope Benedict XIV and Pope Pius IV advocated their use, some divines believed it futile and impious to at-

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tempt to abridge the power of lightning and redirect God’s wrath. See Thomas Prince, Earthquakes the Works of God and Tokens of His Just Displeasure (Boston, 1755). 23. Benjamin Wilson, “Considerations to Prevent Lightening from Doing Mischief,” Philosophical Transactions 54 (1764): 246–53. 24.  St. James Chronicle (London), August 16, 1764. 25.  See “Means of Security from Lightening, a Letter from Mr. Winthorp, a Gentleman of Cambridge, in New England,” Public Advertiser (London), September 10, 1768, which begins by asserting that “the Identity of Electricity and Lightening has been so fully established by Dr. Franklin, as to admit no reasonable doubt” and then goes on to narrate a terrific electrical storm that laid waste to Hollis Hall but spared nearby Harvard Hall, which had been fitted with pointed lightning rods. 26.  Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), April 11, 1765. 27.  Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), December 5, 1765. 28.  Simon Harward, A Discourse of the Several Kinds and Causes of Lightnings (London, 1607), 11–12. 29.  Mitchell, “Politics of Experiment,” 312. 30.  J. N. Fischer, Beweis dass das Glockenlaeuten bey Gewittern nehr schaedlick als nuetzlich sey (Munich, 1784), cited in Mitchell, “Politics of Experiment,” 312, n30. 31.  Extract printed in Lloyd’s Evening Post (London), May 23, 1768.

5 • Horace Walpole’s Crypto-Catholicism, the Gothic, and The Mysterious Mother Matthew M. Reeve

Although it is seldom understood as such, the gothic idiom so famously imagined and promoted by Horace Walpole (1717–97) and his circle confronted, and was informed by, its historical roots in medieval Catholicism.1 In England, the official end of Catholicism, marked by the sixteenth-century Dissolution of the Monasteries, established a fundamental break in religious structures and, by many accounts (including Walpole’s), its heritage in Gothic architecture. Of course few within Walpole’s circle were actually Catholic, which was tantamount to living what might now be called an “alternate lifestyle” in Georgian England, although some would be Catholic converts later in life. Their pronounced investment in the aesthetic and sensory trappings of Catholicism can best be understood as a form of crypto-Catholicism.2 Walpole, for example, once described himself as a “Protestant Goth,” and a strain of anti-Catholicism naturally runs through his writing as it does through the period itself, yet he felt no contradiction writing to Rev. William Cole, “I like Popery as well as you, and have shown I do. I like it as I like chivalry and romance. They all furnish one with ideas and visions which Presbyterianism does not. A Gothic church or convent fills one with romantic dreams.”3 Walpole’s gothic literary productions—The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother—are manifestations of Walpole’s crypto-Catholicism as important as his own Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill. Both stories are set in Gothic architectural settings and foreground and explore the religious structures of Catholicism as their subjects. Lady Diana Beauclerk’s extraordinary drawings of The Mysterious Mother, its action set in exaggerated and overtly stage-like Gothic settings—the castle and monastery—offer a positive pictorialization of the story and its Gothic/Catholic settings (fig. 5.1). But some were less

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Fig. 5.1 Diana Beauclerk, Act 2d, Scene 3d: The Countess of Narbonne and Peter, the Porter, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 3++ Box 300.

i­nspiring: eliding the heightened sensory and emotional tenor of the play with medieval Catholicism, Walpole’s friend Madame du Deffand would respond to The Mysterious Mother by invoking the monastic figures Abelard and Heloise and declaring in French, “I do not like Heloise at all, whether ancient or modern: her endearments, her passions, are not my style.”4 Walpole responded as only Walpole could, with a clever, flippant, and exacting retort noting that the play “does not resemble this century’s prim and conventional tone . . . beautiful feelings and emotions are nowhere to be found. There is nothing but unveiled passions, cries, repentance and horror . . . a kind of Gothic which would not be found in your theatre.”5 Walpole’s gothic reflected a complex response to Catholicism—variously critical, parodic, romantic, and erotic—but like many Goths and antiquaries before and after him, it was motivated fundamentally, if not straightforwardly, by the impulse to mourn a lost spiritual, political, and aesthetic past. In what follows, I will begin by introducing the contours of crypto-Catholicism within Walpole’s

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gothic o ­ euvre and then ask how this context might inform a reading of The Mysterious Mother. Walpole’s “theory” of the Gothic was explored across his art historiography, letters, and literature. Walpole’s oeuvre offered the first integrated social-­ political history of the Gothic, with a fundamental pivot at the sixteenth-­ century Dissolution, which witnessed the replacement of Roman Catholicism with Protestantism (or “presbyterianism”). Walpole’s vision of the Gothic was profoundly innovative and influential, but it was based ultimately on the writings of antiquaries such as William Dugdale (1605–86), Henry Spelman (1562–1641), and William Camden (1551–1623) who were themselves Catholic or Catholic sympathists and who sought to record the remnants of Gothic-­ Catholic past in the aftermath of the Dissolution that destroyed much of the nation’s heritage in medieval religious art.6 It is surely to these men that we look—in an English context at least—for the very origins of what is now called Medieval Studies. Walpole absorbed these ideas, and they became central to his construction of the Gothic. He famously used various monuments illustrated in Dugdale’s text as inspiration for the Gothic installations at Strawberry Hill, thereby “imprinting” (Walpole’s word) this nostalgic vision of the Catholic past on the inside of his famous house. Fundamental to the very poetics of medievalism in Britain was not simply mourning a lost aesthetic, political, and spiritual past but the attempt to connect the present with that past over the historical hurdle of the Dissolution.7 Medievalist productions sought either to erase the Dissolution or to heal the trauma of rupture through reimagining and reliving the Catholic-Gothic past in the present. Although Walpole seems to have employed both of these strategies in different contexts, his Whig sympathies meant that his perspective on the Dissolution was double-edged, if not outright contradictory on occasion. In 1753 he could claim to Richard Bentley that “my love of abbeys shall not make me hate the Reformation till that makes me grow a Jacobite like the rest of my antiquarian predecessors.”8 But in his Anecdotes on Painting, Walpole had this to say about Henry VIII and the Dissolution: “there is no forgiving him [Henry VIII] that destruction of ancient monuments and gothic piles and painted glass by the suppression of the monasteries; a reformation, as he called it, which we antiquaries most devoutly lament . . . .”9 This tension between the freedom from religious oppression he felt was possible because of the Dissolution and the draw of Catholicism and the aesthetics of Catholic religious art and the Gothic past to which it is connected, creates a rich paradox that was unresolved in Walpole’s oeuvre.

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For Walpole, Thomas Gray, and others, the Gothic properly began in the reign of Henry III (1216–72), due both to Henry’s establishment of a royal center at Westminster and his signing of Magna Carta (1215). The Gothic reached its “perfection” from the time of Henry IV (1367–1413) through to the tomb of Archbishop Warham at Canterbury of 1507 (what Walpole called “the last example of unbastardized Gothic”).10 Its perfection was achieved by the creation of “singular” essays in Gothic design: King’s College Chapel, Cambridge (1446–1515), in particular was praised as “A bird of paradise,” which was “above all rules,” a “bold and unique essay that resembles nothing else” fig. 5.2).11 During the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47) the style began to decline, and it eventually terminated in the reign of James I (1603–1625).12 Walpole implicitly argues for a development of Gothic form terminating in the great Perpendicular buildings built under royal patronage, notably King’s College Chapel at Cambridge and Henry VII’s chapel, Westminster. The Gothic declines toward the end of the reign of Henry VIII (1491–1547) with the Dissolution, which also witnessed the importation of Italian artists into England and their use of “Grecian” or antique-derived forms in architecture. Weakened by the loss of Catholicism, the two architectural systems became corrupted and produced a “mongrel species” of architecture, a biological metaphor that describes the defilement of the Gothic by foreign influence from the antique world. Walpole frames the advent of classicism (what would now be called the English Renaissance) in sixteenth-century English architecture as a “reform” of Gothic. Henrician classicism is elided with broader social “reforms,” notably the Dissolution and the resulting destruction of much of England’s Gothic art. “Reform” in Walpole’s Anecdotes is figured as an oppressive force of traditional morality, which he compares to the physical frigidity of Siberia and the political tyranny of Nero.13 Signaling the end of “true Gothic,” which for Walpole is only possible in an environment of religious and social freedom, these reforms gave way to the mixed or “mongrel Gothic” that continued until the final death of the style with the Puritan revolution or English Civil War. Referencing Petronius, these replaced an “Arbiter elegantiarum” with a “Censor morum.”14 Walpole broadly understood the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the rise of the Whig Party to signal a return to political and artistic freedom that allowed for the revival of Gothic architecture and other arts such as landscape gardening. For Walpole, creative freedom (and thus the free play of subjectivities) was possible only when “a good government . . . indulges its subjects in the exercise of their own thoughts . . . refinements follow and much pleasure and satisfaction will be produced.”15

Fig. 5.2 After Antonio Canaletto, The Inside of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, after 1746. Etching and engraving. In William Bawtree’s extra-illustrated copy of Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill Press, 1784). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Folio 33 30 Copy 4.

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Although there is much internal contradiction in Walpole’s historiography, what does clearly emerge is that the Gothic is wed inextricably to the practices and aesthetics of Catholicism. Anticipating his Victorian successors in what would then be called “the Gothic Revival” including Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and John Ruskin, for Walpole the Gothic-Catholic past was a period of creative, aesthetic, and libidinal freedom that was revived in the modern present. He could claim to Mary Berry, for example, “Your partiality to the pageantry of Popery I do approve, and I doubt whether the world will not be a loser (in its visionary enjoyments) by the extinction of that religion, as it was by the decay of chivalry and the proscription of the heathen deities.”16 Transforming this political narrative into Enlightenment art history, Walpole considered the Gothic to be a period of freedom, elegance, artistic refinement, and ornamental extravagance that existed between two periods of repressive, ascetic classicism: the “Saxon,” or Romanesque, and the “Grecian,” or neoClassical.17 This is emphasized in what is perhaps the most telling polarization of the Gothic and classicism in Anecdotes when he compares “the rational beauties of regular architecture [that is, classicism], and the unrestrained licentiousness” of the Gothic. Walpole employed the same wisdom when he compared the Gothic and classicism to modes of written expression: “A Gothic cathedral strikes one like the enthusiasm of poetry; St Paul’s like the good sense of prose.” “Enthusiasm” or subjectivity is consistently positioned above the socially constructed and inherently objective “good sense” in Walpole’s aesthetics.18 It is significant to understand that Walpole’s Gothic aesthetics—both his enthusiasm for the Gothic period and his unique appraisal of it—­fundamentally opposed the dominant aesthetic stance of disinterested speculation connected to neoclassicism advocated by Joseph Addison, Joshua Reynolds, and others.19 Aiming to remove subjective investment in the image or object in favor of universal aesthetic values, this aesthetic tradition informed what would be called the British “stiff upper lip.” Across his many writings on Gothic art and architecture and their Catholic significations, Walpole’s historiography was deeply emotive and profoundly interested. Typical of this is Walpole’s description of the lavish funeral of George II at Westminster abbey in 1760: But the charm was the entrance to the abbey, where we were received by the Dean in rich copes, the choir and almsmen all bearing torches; the whole Abbey so illuminated, that one saw it to greater advantage than by the day; the tombs, long aisles, and fretted roof all appearing

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distinctly, and with the happiest chiaroscuro. There wanted nothing but incense, and little chapels here and there with priests saying mass for the repose of the defunct—yet one could not complain of it not being Catholic enough.20 In writing to the antiquary William Cole on another occasion, Walpole offered a visceral response to King’s College Chapel, Cambridge: “the beauty of King’s College chapel, now it is restored, penetrated me with a visionary longing to be a monk in it,” a fantasy that transforms King’s into a monastic rather than collegiate foundation.21 These are but two of a long list of nostalgic, sensory, and even erotic passages in Walpole’s writings in which he imaginatively re-Catholicizes medieval buildings. Walpole’s associative architectural fantasies subjectively reanimate these buildings and substantially restore what was stripped from them—physically and culturally—at the Dissolution. Walpole’s Gothic literature engages in a similar act of subjective historical restitution, an imagining of the Middle Ages for Walpole’s own emotive and erotic ends. Crypto-Catholic practices, the appeal of Gothic art, and highly affective responses likewise run through the medievalists in Walpole’s circle. For example, when Walpole invited George Montagu to Strawberry Hill in 1754 to see his recent building work, “he was in raptures, and screamed, and whooped, and hollaed [sic], and danced, and crossed himself a thousand times over,” thereby blending his own aesthetic delight with a mock-religious sanctity.22 At the Vyne in Hampshire (owned by Walpole’s friend John Chute), Walpole and his friends performed what was seemingly a faux mass in the chapel, with ancient mass books and incense, where they had “a most Catholic enjoyment of the chapel there.”23 We understand some of the levity of the affair when we learn that the mass led to a night of friends playing cards. At Strawberry Hill, Walpole also housed medieval illuminated books and liturgical ornamenta including a reliquary and a rosary; Dicky Bateman likewise had an expansive collection of Catholic art in his “popish chapel” at Old Windsor, which drew the ire of Mrs. Delaney who viewed Bateman’s love and display of Catholic art as a form of mockery.24 But this does not diminish the sense of Catholic liturgy being employed as a vehicle to explore the monosexual and homoerotic culture of Walpole’s circle. I follow Ellis Hanson in understanding that “[u]nder the cowl of monasticism was a cult of homoerotic community.”25 Elsewhere I have suggested that such effeminate, emotive, and affective engagements with medieval art (itself an aesthetic other within contemporary Georgian society) anticipate a later queer discourse on “camp.”26

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While it would be a mistake to propose that the crypto-Catholicism of Walpole and his circle amounted to a “queer theology” or to anachronistically claim that they were what Mark Jordan would describe in twentieth-century Catholicism as “liturgy queens,” crypto-Catholicism nonetheless offered a guise in which homosociality could be codified, aestheticized, and embodied.27 As a subversive “other” mode of spiritual and political allegiance within Protestant England, Catholicism and non-normative sexuality were “marked by a history of tropological substitution and inter-implication” for contemporary audiences.28 Indeed, as Patrick O’Malley has suggested, the cloister can be understood as a physical, performative, and psychic space that anticipates the development of the closet in modern constructions of homosexuality.29 It would of course be reductive, and simply incorrect, to insist upon a specific connection between sexual orientation and religious or aesthetic orientation here. What appears to animate such passages is something more elusive: a generative tension between homoeroticism and Catholicism as illicit subjectivities, as alternate ways of being. Catholicism, and monasticism in particular, offered a historical structure for Walpole’s own broadly if not exclusively monosexual culture. But it is worth noting that crypto-Catholicism of a related sort was also used as a guise to perform overtly heterosexual license, as in the case of Sir Francis Dashwood and the “Medmenham Monks,” just up the Thames from Strawberry Hill, who engaged in their orgiastic exploits with “nuns” (prostitutes) within neo-Gothic settings: the so-called “Hellfire Caves” that were entered via a faux medieval church façade.30 We can of course trace such an association between Catholicism and alternate or “unreformed” sexuality across many contemporary productions, including satirical prints (fig. 5.3). But the most tangible manifestation of the crypto-Catholicism of Walpole’s circle is in the buildings they built and the objects they patiently collected, displayed, and exchanged. In their commissions these men actively and playfully explored the Catholic and quasi-religious nature of the Gothic. In describing Dicky Bateman’s transformation of his rococo Thames villa into the Gothic style by two of the Strawberry Hill designers, Walpole claimed that Bateman’s villa had “changed its religion . . . I converted it from Chinese to Gothic,”; he further attested that his “monkish chambers” were “always dressed in mourning.”31 These men would develop a rich series of tropes to describe themselves as “Brother monks” or “abbots” and their houses as “nunneries” and “monasteries.” At Strawberry Hill, Walpole commissioned an “Oratory,” which was a functionless exterior prayer niche enclosed within iron rails with basins for holy water and a fifteenth-century bronze angel. Walpole’s famous letter of

Fig. 5.3 Unknown, A Scene in a Nunnery Garden. Published April 5, 1787, by Robert Sayer. Mezzotint. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 787.04.05.01+.

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1753 to Horace Mann describes his plans for his new “monastery” at Strawberry Hill thus: I am greatly impatient for my altar, and so far from mistrusting its goodness, I only fear it will be too good to expose to the weather, as I intend it to be in a recess in the garden. I was going to tell you that my house is so monastic, that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows and with long columns which we call the Paraclete in memory of Eloisa’s cloister.32 Walpole concludes with a reference to the “Paraclete” or entrance hall at Strawberry, the name of which was borrowed from the eroticized monastic setting of Alexander Pope’s medievalist poem Eloisa to Abelard (1717). Walpole would playfully allegorize Strawberry Hill as a papal center—“a Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome” (again citing Pope)—and he was clear that aspects of its interiors were intentional approximations of the splendor and “gaudiness” of medieval Catholic art, with “all the glory of Popery.”33 Catholicism and the Gothic not only shared a common temporal and thematic location in Walpole’s historiography, but both were also loftily associated with a form of sensory, ethical, and libidinal freedom, a state of being he felt was diminished by the “extinction” of Catholicism, chivalry, and the Gothic style itself with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. As such, a revival of the Gothic meant a return not only to the forms of later medieval architecture but also to its spiritual and performative modes, or at least to a specific—and particularly “camp”—conception of them. What does this context bring to our understanding of The Mysterious Mother? Most straightforwardly, the continental Catholic past becomes a space that normalizes or at least makes possible the story’s subversive plot: a gothicized Oedipus Rex. The story’s Gothic settings, the Castle of Narbonne (“There sorrow ever dwells”) and the abbey with its “impending towers,” offer a space in which Walpole as author could explore and ultimately deconstruct traditional paternal authority and the established epistemological relationship between the self and religion. Safely removed from its Georgian present and located in an anachronistic medieval past, these settings facilitate the story’s central narrative of incest as a Freudian “family romance.”34 The play’s overt focus on Catholicism, its rites, and its apparently villainous clerics has stood at the center of the play’s reception, from Paul Baines’s recent view of Walpole’s “manifestly anti-sacerdotal” focus, back to the 1797 critique that stated: “Mr Walpole was a bitter foe to priests, without distinction, and

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seems to have had no great reverence for sacred mysteries, or the doctrinal parts of the Christian system.”35 While there is some truth to these views, following them literally may obscure the duplicity and inherent ambivalence of Walpole’s characters in the play. Indeed, in his famous postscript Walpole distances himself from such polarizations: The villainy of Benedict was planned to divide the indignation of the audience, and, to intercept some of it from the Countess. Nor will the blackness of his character appear extravagant, if we call to mind the crimes committed by catholic churchmen, when the reformation not only provoked their rage, but threated them with total ruin.36 While Walpole clearly exploits the ready clichés of villainous Catholic clergy, he also goes some way to historicize and even justify Benedict’s actions. In this passage as in the play, the monks are the victims of a changing tide. In this sense, the play turns on the thwarting and eventual demise of Catholicism’s very structures. Narbonne is like T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, suffering a period of decline after the transgression of sixteen years previous. The Countess confounds Benedict: as the widowed leader of the House, she is “not cast in human mould” and would “unbuild / Our Roman church” and yet her “devotion’s real” (II.3: 10). Occupying the role of her late husband, the Countess neglects the traditional role as a benefactor to the Abbey, now partially ruined, and she also denies the traditional spiritual role of her priest and confessor. Benedict’s regular approaches to the Countess to offer spiritual guidance or confession receive rebuke and mockery, since she understands that the Church could never correct or contain her sin. Here, the often-cited parallel between the Catholic confessional as the precursor to the modern psychiatrist’s sofa seems apt, since religion grandly declines and is even replaced with the rise of psychoanalysis. For all intents and purposes firing her psychiatrist, the Countess disrupts the established epistemological relationship between the family and their faith, thus upsetting the structures of knowledge and power in medieval Catholicism. As a result, it is the castle, not the monastery, that becomes the physical container of, and site for, the exploration of trauma unmediated by Catholic confession, while the monastery languishes in disrepair. This helps us to understand why Walpole decisively locates the plot in the liminal period just prior to the Reformation (or in his words, “laying the scene in what age and country I pleased,” (Postscript, R1).37 As a historical and historiographical context, the Reformation not only historicizes the actions of

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the Catholic clergy in their attempts to regain control of a sinking ship, but it thematizes them as well. Unaware of the nature of the Countess’s transgression, they are also unaware that the Countess has already departed from Catholicism’s structures of sin and repentance. The Countess’s very subjectivity has shifted from an exterior piety consonant with Catholic confession to an interior, redemptive piety consistent with Protestantism (in the Epilogue, Kitty Clive jokes that she was “a Methodist”).38 As Baines suggests, the Countess is already “an Enlightenment figure,” a modern trapped in a Gothic setting. In this she anticipates a convention of gothic literature and cinema in which Gothic architecture struggles to control and contain female subjectivity. Because she is unable to negotiate this divide she internalizes her guilt, which is released in bouts of madness and hysteria. Was the Countess already in the process of conversion herself? The Gothic and Catholicism were historical figures through which Walpole staged and explored radical human difference, ethical and social ruptures, pain, and trauma that were otherwise unthinkable within the literary spaces of the Georgian present. This surely justifies George Haggerty’s view of Gothic architecture as a proto-psychoanalytic space or laboratory for the examination of human alterity.39 I began by noting a paradox in Walpole’s historiography in which the Gothic/Catholic past could be framed as a glamorous period of freedom and possibility that was supplanted by a period of repression (the Dissolution or Reformation), while his own Whig sympathies meant that the passing of the Middle Ages was necessarily a fortuitous event leading to an enlightened present. The Mysterious Mother would seem to perform this very paradox: although its narrative and expressivity are enabled by Walpole’s privileged Gothic-Catholic setting, it is that very context that the Countess—both villain and heroine—tries to remove herself from to be emancipated from sin. In the most Gothic of turns, “the sins of the mother” fundamentally implode both structures with death at her own hand.

Notes 1.  I have discussed this at length in my recent book Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). 2.  For recent works, see Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism:

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­ eligion, Cultural Exchange, and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff: University of R Wales Press, 2009). 3.  Horace Walpole to Cole, July 12, 1778, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 2: 100. Subsequent correspondence citations will be in abbreviated format as HWC. 4.  “Je n’aime point les Héloïses, ni l’ancienne ni la moderne; leurs tendesses, leurs passions ne sont point de mon genre.” Deffand to Horace Walpole, March 2, 1768, in HWC, 4: 32. Translated by the author. 5.  Horace Walpole to Deffand, March 11, 1768, in HWC, 4: 39–40. Translated by the author. 6.  Margaret Aston, “English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution Sense of the Past,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 231–55; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 7.  On the poetics of mourning in art historical writing, I am much indebted to Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 8.  Walpole to Bentley, September 1753, in HWC, 35: 146–47. 9.  Horace Walpole, Anecdotes on Painting in England, 4 vols. (Twickenham: Thomas Farmer, 1762–71), 1: 52. 10.  Walpole to Cole, August 11, 1769, in HWC, 1: 190–91.   11.  Walpole to Mary Berry, June 30, 1789, in HWC, 11: 22. 12. Walpole, Anecdotes, part I, chapter 5. For a recent discussion, see Nigel Llewellyn, “The Anecdotes of Painting and Continental European Art History,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 137–49, although this text naturally explores painting rather than architecture. 13. Walpole, Anecdotes, 1: ix. In a 1742 letter to Horace Mann he compared his father’s Palladian estate at Houghton Hall, Norfolk (and Horace’s ancestral home) to the frigidity of Siberia. Walpole to Mann, July 14, 1742, in HWC, 17: 495. 14. Walpole, Anecdotes, 1: xvii. 15.  David Duane McKinney, “History and Revivalism: Horace Walpole’s Promotion of the Gothic Style of Architecture,” unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Virginia, 1992), 43. 16.  Walpole to Mary Berry, June 30, 1789, in HWC, 11: 22. 17.  Walpole’s overturning of the values of the humanist tradition that privileged the antique over the medieval world had some precedent in English writing in which the Goths were understood to have introduced both political freedom and virtuous manners, both of which were corrupted by the Renaissance re-introduction of antiquity. Lawrence E. Klein, “Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 32, no. 3 (1989): 583–605, especially 593–94.

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18.  Horace Walpole, “Detached Thoughts,” in The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols. (London: GG and J. Robinson & J. Edwards, 1798), 4: 368. 19.  The scholarship on these issues is extensive. See in particular Elizabeth Bohls, “Disinterstedness and the Denial of the Particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the Subject of Aesthetics,” Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Mattick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–51. 20.  Walpole to Montagu, November 13, 1760, in HWC, 9: 320. 21. Walpole to Cole, May 22, 1777, in HWC 1: 45–46. See also Jeremy Musson, “King’s College Chapel: Aesthetic and Architectural Responses,” in King’s College Chapel, 1515–2015: Art, Music, and Religion in Cambridge, ed. Jean-Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman (London: Harvey Miller, 2014), 30. 22.  Walpole to Bentley, March 2, 1754, in HWC, 35: 161. See also Walpole to Bentley, November 3, 1754, in HWC, 35: 184. 23.  Walpole to Bentley, November 3, 1754, in HWC, 35: 184. 24.  Lady Llanover, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delaney (1700–1788), 3 vols. (London 1862), 1: 177–78; and Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality, 132–34. 25.  Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7. 26. Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality, 38, 87–88. 27. Mark D. Jordan, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. 179–208. 28.  Clara Tuite, “Cloistered Closets: Enlightenment Pornography, the Confessional State, Homosexual Persecution, and The Monk,” Romanticism on the Net 8 (1997): 22. 29.  Patrick O’Malley, “The Epistemology of the Cloister: Victorian England’s Queer Catholicism,” GLQ 15, no. 4 (2009): 535–64. 30.  Michael Symes, “Flintwork, Freedom, and Fantasy: The Landscape at West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire,” Garden History 33, no. 1 (2005): 1–30; Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism, and Secret Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 97–114. 31.  For a fuller account of Bateman’s patronage, see Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality, 119–44. 32.  Walpole to Mann, April 27, 1753, in HWC, 20: 372. 33.  Horace Walpole, Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, 2nd ed. (London, 1784), Preface. Walpole to Montagu, August 23, 1765, in HWC, 10: 168. 34.  Marcie Frank, “Horace Walpole’s Family Romances,” Modern Philology 100, no. 3 (2003): 417–35. 35.  The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal, Enlarged 26 (1798): 323–27; Paul Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 287–308, 292.

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36.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill, 1768), Postscript, R7. All quotations from the play and its postscript (which is paginated separately) are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text. 37.  I have also consulted the Broadview edition of The Mysterious Mother in my work on this essay: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story, and, The Mysterious Mother: a Tragedy, ed. Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003). 38.  Epilogue to be spoken by Mrs. Clive. First printed in Horace Walpole, The Works (1798), 4: 397. 39. George Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 63–83, esp. 71.

6 • Defiance of Authority and the Visionary Power of Negation in The Mysterious Mother Nicole Mansfield Wright

Why is there such a remarkable proliferation of terms of negation—­ including no, nor, and not, and words with affixes including un- and -less— in Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768)? While scant attention has been devoted to the play’s linguistic elements, I argue that the prevalence of negation cumulatively and gradually conveys the play’s endorsement of defiance of corrupt institutional authority, albeit indirectly. Rather than explicitly contesting the whims and directives of the powerful, the play’s characters use negation in ways that demand more rigorous cognitive engagement from the audience. Walpole’s verbal formulations prime the audience to envision alternatives to the political order of clerical authoritarianism that Friar Benedict attempts to impose in Narbonne. Instead of offering spiritual aid to the residents he ­counsels—including the penitent Countess of Narbonne (who for sixteen years has strived to atone for committing incest with her son, Edmund) and her ingenuous ward Adeliza—Benedict demands their unquestioning compliance, strategizes to seize their property, violates their dignity and privacy, and urges them to sin for his own material gain. Commentators from Walpole’s heyday through our own time have tended to focus on the play’s sensationalistic sexual content, neglecting its political critique. Reading of Walpole’s efforts to associate The Mysterious Mother with the venerable tradition of Greek tragedy, Joseph Haslewood—a well-connected bibliophile and editor who managed to obtain one of the few copies that Walpole distributed—objected; he contrasted the incest-centered Oedipus Rex, whose protagonist he classified as a “political culprit,” with Walpole’s play, which he called a “tale of domestic misery.”1 Surveying more recent criticism, I concur with Paul Baines that some biographical and psychoanalytic interpre-

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tations of The Mysterious Mother that dwell on Walpole’s sexuality “reduce the play to a document of self-recognition.”2 Indicating a more expansive critical scope, E. J. Clery identifies the play as a political vehicle by tracing Walpole’s departure from some of his incest theme source material—apolitical French medieval narrative poems—in favor of resuming the classical tragedy convention in which the family serves as an allegory for the state.3 Indeed, substantial passages of the play are devoted not primarily to sexual mores but to political matters. I show that the play advocates for questioning the intrusive and self-serving practices of leaders who abuse their authority and guides the audience to envision institutional overhaul that would bring about social and moral renewal. In particular, The Mysterious Mother radically imagines an observer’s admiring endorsement of a female leader (the Countess) as emotionally self-regulating, qualified to reign, and perhaps preferable to male rulers. Set on the eve of the Reformation, the play also raises the prospect of this same female leader spearheading the reform of the morally degenerate Church, defying the male clergyman who seeks to manipulate and humiliate her and transfer her kingdom to papal control. The political vision of The Mysterious Mother is not only manifest in the events of the plot; it is more subtly laced through its diction and syntax. I argue that this perspective is fostered not through what is depicted directly in the world of the play but rather by the unrelenting demands Walpole places on his audience to imagine what is not present or not in view: the characters speak continually of bygone days, absent people, eventualities that may come to pass. I demonstrate that the proliferation of negation in the play, in tandem with the scarcity of positive, substantive descriptors, cues readers (for the play’s audience has been largely readers, rather than spectators) to imagine what is not extant and thus to engage more strenuously in considering an alternative moral and political order to the grim, venal, and unforgiving conditions in which the play’s characters are mired. “What awfull silence!” exclaims Florian, a soldier and friend accompanying Edmund, the Count venturing to return to the home from which he has been exiled for sixteen years: the kingdom of his mother the Countess.4 With this sentence—the very first line of the first act—Florian breaks the prevailing quiet even as he directs attention to it. The play’s audience is thus primed to hold in tension opposing sensory conditions and affective states: silence and cacophony, awe and fear. Throughout the play, other characters’ verbal balancing acts simultaneously acknowledge a dispirited present reality and convey

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reminders of a vastly different past. “But come, thou hast known other days— canst tell / Of banquettings and dancings—’twas not always thus,” Florian cajoles Peter, the elderly porter of the Countess’s castle (I.2: 5). Peter likewise harks back to the realm’s harmonious bygone days: “No, no—time was—my lord, the Count of Narbonne / A prosp’rous gentleman, were he alive, / We should not know these moping melancholies” (I.2: 5). Although their words may seem pessimistic, they convey recognition that the status quo is not the only possible mode of existence. As the philosopher Henri Bergson explained in his discourse on the process of conceiving of things or experiences that no longer or never did exist: “To think the object A as non-existent is first to think the object and consequently to think it existent; it is then to think that another reality, with which it is incompatible, supplants it.”5 Even as the men situate the joyful kingdom as a memory, a state of affairs that no longer exists, they bring this past into view, displacing the present. Given that the realm once thrived, it follows that it could do so again someday. The men’s statements feature instances of what linguists including ­Gunnel Tottie refer to as nonaffixal negations (stand-alone words including no, nor, and not), formations that abound in The Mysterious Mother.6 The play is also rife with affixal negations, that is, words with prefixes such as un- and suffixes such as -less. The affixes are known as “bound morphemes”—“bound” because they do not stand on their own as words. A “morpheme” is the smallest unit of language that can connote meaning. Terms and phrases of negation require more intensive cognition than do positive descriptions, because they are not straightforward.7 Walpole’s characters frequently describe themselves and others in terms of what they are not and what they do not do. The Countess is variously described by Benedict and herself as “[u]njust, uncharitable” (I.5: 22); “unapt” (III.3: 60); and “unhing’d” (V.4: 106; V.2: 95). She fears divulging to the world her “unheard-of sins” (III.1: 51). Benedict accuses her of bringing calamity upon her son through her “unbelief” (III.3: 62). Notably, the prefix un- is ambiguous in that it can either reverse or negate an extant condition or indicate that a given condition never existed in the first place. The affixal negations associated with the Countess’s supposed moral defects suggest that these qualities are alterable rather than permanent. The Countess ruefully recalls that in her joyous days as a young bride “untutor’d by affliction,” she obliviously “[t]hought none unhappy” (I.4: 17). Deprived of her beloved husband by his fatal hunting accident, she sought to assuage her grief by disguising herself as a servant and coupling with the son who so closely resembled

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his father. Through the subsequent years, mindful of her sin of incest, she learns to notice the suffering of her subjects in Narbonne and commits most of her time to helping those in need. While terms of negation are frequently applied to the deceptive, guiltridden Countess, they are also notably invoked regarding her guileless ward, Adeliza, later revealed to be her daughter and the result of her incestuous encounter with Edmund. In the case of the Countess, prefixal adjectives of negation seem to connote lack or defect.8 When applied to Adeliza, by contrast, such terms instead designate moral innocence and virtue. Adeliza is a maiden of “[u]nblemish’d innocence” (V.5: 108); she is “unknowing” (V.6: 114) and “unhappy” (IV.4: 82). Yet these qualities are not ultimately as beneficial as they first seem; they render Adeliza credulous and vulnerable to the predations of Benedict, who—aware that Edmund is her father—treacherously advises the two to marry. As the sin-wracked mother is linguistically linked to her innocent daughter, her redeeming qualities come into sharper relief. More important, her deviation from standards of feminine pliability equips her to disbelieve and defy the treacherous Benedict. The prevalence of terms of negation and the relative dearth of positive ­adjectives—or other articulations of concrete attributes of extant objects, persons, and events—generate an effect that contrasts significantly with Walpole’s penchant in his other writings for positive description and for fleshing out the material world. In her analysis of The Castle of Otranto, Jill Campbell observes the “very peculiar collection of objects and bodies that fill its fictional world” and the “hypermateriality” of characters’ bodies, some of which are described as oversized or grotesque, such as the gigantic helmet that crushes the heir to death at the beginning of that novel.9 George Haggerty points out the exacting and copious details Walpole included in the “long and architecturally detailed travelogues” that he sent to friends.10 In a representative letter, Walpole gives a precise account of an entrance: “The width of the iron gates is six feet two, and they are seven feet ten inches high. Each pilaster is one foot wide: the whole width with the interstices is eight feet ten. The ornament over the gates is four feet to the point. Perhaps you will understand me from this scrawl.”11 Such detailed description is scarce in The Mysterious Mother. The physical world of the play remains largely abstract or undescribed, more rigorously exercising the audience’s powers of imagination than if lavish verbal inventories of the characters’ surroundings were supplied by the playwright. In foregrounding negation—and the demands its places on cognition— throughout the play, Walpole shared in the philosophical considerations of

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one of the most prominent thinkers of his era. Five years before The Mysterious Mother was completed, Immanuel Kant examined these themes in his early essay “Versuch den Begriff der negative Grössen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen” (Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, 1763). Kant focused in the essay on two types of negation: “deprivation (privatio),” which echoed Aristotle’s concept in the Metaphysics, and “lack (defectus, absentia).”12 A significant passage of the essay is devoted to articulating the linguistic and psychological differences between “pleasure” (Lust in the original German), “displeasure” (Unlust), and simple “lack of pleasure.”13 Years later, in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), Kant returned to the topic to elaborate on his understanding of negation: Now no one can think a negation determinately without grounding it on the opposed affirmation. The person blind from birth cannot form the least presentation of darkness, because he has no representation of light; the savage has no acquaintance with poverty, because he has none with prosperity. The ignorant person has no concept of his ignorance, because he has none of science, etc. All concepts of negation are thus derivative.14 In the manner distilled by Kant, the negations applied in the case of Walpole’s Countess and her subjects poignantly contrast their present with their past, indicating the comforts and delights they used to enjoy. Throughout the play, events that did occur are recounted in terms of what did not happen: “No angel whisper’d it; no dæmon spoke it,” Benedict tells the Countess, leading her to believe that although he has not been informed explicitly that her exiled son is dead, he believes it to be the case (III.3: 63). When lightning cracks a monument, the Countess uses negation to strengthen her resolve not to indulge in superstition:     light’nings play not to announce our fate: No whirlwinds rise to prophecy to mites: Nor, like inquisitors, does heav’n dress up In flames the victims it intends to punish; Making a holiday for greater sinners. (III.1: 51) The play depicts a world that is not reassuringly legible but is instead devoid of signs that offer themselves up for easy interpretation. Its inhabitants must undertake the difficult task of formulating their own judgment and vision for how society ought to be governed.

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In The Castle of Otranto, as Laura Mandell has noted, credulity is correlated with status; the gullibility and fear of the lowly are portrayed as comical, while the emotions of aristocrats are presented as valid.15 In The Mysterious Mother, by contrast, characters from a variety of social positions—the Countess, Friar Martin, the gatekeeper Peter, and even Benedict—are susceptible to folk superstition and religious dogma and accept at face value information they are given rather than using their powers of reason to determine the truth.16 While the dearth of substantive positive descriptors may be attributed in part to the form of drama (which generally features less description of objects or persons than do poetry and novels), the play’s abundance of terms of negation is atypical. Nor can such proliferation simply be attributed to the era in which the play was developed. For a time, the reverse trend prevailed: some eighteenth-century grammarians advocated for reducing phrasing involving negation, such as multiple negatives, which they viewed as impeding clarity of expression.17 One hypothesis for authors’ deliberate choice of affixal negation over non-affixal negation goes beyond clarity or other concerns, such as maintaining poetic meter: compared to its non-affixal counterpart, affixal negation is seen as emphatically articulating “an extreme opposite” and thus imbuing the descriptor with maximal emotional force.18 Such a distinction is especially salient given that emotional impact is the definitive criterion of the gothic aesthetic. The hypothesis is borne out by the language of the play: consider how Edmund builds up his courage by recalling the Countess’s injunction, “That death but bars the possibility / Of frailty, and embalms untainted honour” (II.1: 31). Unlike the more prosaic phrase not tainted, Edmund’s “untainted” has the heft of finality, of the power of an individual to earn a reputation that will prevail into eternity, overriding the rumors and disinformation propagated by leaders such as Benedict, who gain control by exacerbating the “shame and guilt” of members of their flock (II.1: 30). While un- terms are sometimes associated in Standard English usage with disorder or destruction—as in unravel or unleash—Walpole’s characters use verbs of negation constructively, to communicate their aims to revitalize social relations to restore honesty and transparency. Edmund orders Benedict: “Unriddle, priest. My soul is too impatient, / To wait th’ impertinence of flow’ry dialect” (IV.5: 89). More overtly, Florian later commands Benedict, “By my good sword, thou shalt unriddle, priest” (V.3: 100). He rebukes him for his efforts “[t]o coin delusion, that this fair domain / May become holy patrimony” (V.3: 100). To openly call for such undoing is to assail the obfuscation and

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corruption through which Friar Benedict and the papal authorities retain and grow their power. At other points, negation is used to convey grand envisioning of the rebirth of a blighted polity in which emotional bonds of all descriptions—within families and between servants and masters—have been weakened or severed due to the distrust cultivated by clerical greed. Benedict schemes to weaken the Countess because he recognizes that her virtue has the power to revitalize Narbonne: This woman was not cast in human mould: Ten such would foil a council, would unbuild Our Roman church—In her, devotion’s real: Our beads, our hymns, our saints, amuse her not (I.3: 10) In the diaphanous, abstract environment of Walpole’s Narbonne, to be “real” is not to have tangible substance but rather to endure and resist manipulation and material enticements; note that the apparatus of worship, encompassing chaplets and rosaries, is here dismissively reduced to “beads,” evoking cheap trinkets. The friar, impressed by what he views as the Countess’s temerity, fears that she would “unbuild” not any single physical edifice but rather the international power structure of the Church. Other passages in The Mysterious Mother likewise associate terms of negation with the Countess’s ability to hold sway over the powerful men in her midst. Upon hearing that Benedict has succeeded in his machinations to bring about the incestuous marriage of Adeliza and Edmund, the Countess enjoins Florian, “[U]nsay / The monst’rous tale”; she knows her request is futile, but it signifies an act of defiance, bearing as it does a glimmer of belief that her words could exert such power (V.5: 111). Admiring his mother’s authoritative speech in an earlier scene, Edmund admits in an aside that she has demonstrated the capacity to reign: Why, this is majesty. Sounds of such accent Ne’er struck mine ear till now. Commanding sex! Strength, courage, all our boasted attributes, Want estimation; ev’n the preheminence We vaunt in wisdom, seems a borrow’d ray, When virtue deigns to speak with female organs. Yes, O my mother, I will learn t’obey: I will believe, that, harsh as thy decrees,

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They wear the warrant of benign intention. Make but the blooming Adeliza mine, And bear, of me unquestion’d, Narbonne’s sceptre (III.3: 69) A key difference between the efforts made by the Countess and Benedict to convey their authority is that the Countess’s “decrees” are made with the public good in mind. Unlike Benedict, she does not simply arrogate power to herself by dint of her role within the hierarchy of a mighty institution. Where she could simply invoke her status as the wife of the deceased ruler to justify her advancement in his stead, she instead proves herself worthy of governing her inherited dominion. In underscoring characters’ efforts to chart their course independently despite the forces imposed by institutional authority, the un- terms in The Mysterious Mother are reminiscent of counterfactual or imagined morally freighted feats of reversal in Shakespeare, whose literary influence on The Mysterious Mother has been noted from the 1940s onward.19 Walpole’s use of negation is reminiscent of passages ranging from Kent’s reply in Lear, “I cannot wish the fault undone” (referring to the birth of his illegitimate son), to Lady Macbeth’s “[U]nsex me here / And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty.”20 These wishes or demands for reversals may be repented of, retroactively denied, or incompletely fulfilled, but in each case the speaker’s original, blameless state is brought to mind—even if only through uttered negation— alongside their current moral condition. Walpole’s non-affixal negations are at times reminiscent of Shakespeare’s homophonic punning on know and no: “I know, I know it not,” Benedict states of the Countess’s secret, in a rare admission of the limits of his power; he has failed to induce her to divulge her sin to him in the sacrament of confession (I.3: 12).21 Given the verbal pattern established in The Mysterious Mother, it is fitting that the play’s final lines—Edmund’s valedictory speech following the Countess’s suicide—are bookended by terms of negation: No; to th’ embattled foe I will present This hated form—and welcome be the sabre That leaves no atom of it undefac’d! (V.7: 120) Here Edmund declares that he will return to the war front and give his life in battle as part of the Christian forces against the Muslim armies—a striking reversal from earlier in the play, where he explains why he abandoned and disavowed the international military campaign in which soldiers were led to

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combat and death under the banner of religion. At that point, he states that Muslim fighters did nothing to harm him and thus the violence he wreaked against them was unwarranted. Although part of a death wish, the term “undefac’d” evokes an original state of integrity and innocence. In a play that dwells not in the visible world so much as in the realm of the abstract and immaterial, “atom” is a conspicuous term, cueing the audience to imagine, once again, something meaningful yet invisible to the naked eye. The play leaves the audience with a final image of an entity of defiant integrity—­ravaged in body but glorified in honor.

Notes 1. Joseph Haslewood, “The Mysterious Mother,” in Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, with Original Disquisitions, Articles of Biography, and Other Literary Antiquities, ed. Egerton Brydges, second ed., 10 vols. (London, 1815), 10: 307–17, 315. 2.  Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 287–309, 306. 3.  E. J. Clery shows that previous iterations of the incest plot featured in The Mysterious Mother—thirteenth-century dits, or French verse narratives, and the sixteenthcentury Heptaméron of Margaret of Navarre (identified by Walpole as an important component of his source material)—feature discord within families of commoners, such that “the actions of the protagonists have no immediate political bearing.” Walpole converted the story into the form of classical tragedy in which the fate of the family is bound up with the implosion of the state. See Clery, “Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire,” Essays and Studies 54 (2001): 23–46, 31. 4.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), I.1: 1. All quotations from the play are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text. In developing this essay, I also consulted the Oxford edition of the play: Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, in Five Romantic Plays: 1768–1821, ed. Paul Baines and Edward Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–69. 5.  Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), trans. Arthur Mitchell, ed. Keith AnsellPearson, Michael Kolkman, and Michael Vaughan; with a new introduction by Keith Ansell-Pearson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 182. 6.  Gunnel Tottie, Negation in English Speech and Writing: A Study in Variation (San Diego: Academic Press, 1991), 45. 7.  Mark A. Sherman, “Bound to Be Easier? The Negative Prefix and Sentence Comprehension,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12, no. 1 (1973): 76–84, 73.

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8.  Surveying others’ research ranging back to the 1890s, Lawrence R. Horn observes: “In German, Swedish, French, and English, as these lexical studies illustrate, disproportionately many negatively affixed adjectives are depreciatory, derogatory, or evaluatively negative in denotation or connotation.” Lawrence R. Horn, “An Un-Paper for the Unsyntactician,” in Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley’s Legacy, ed. Salikoko S. Mufwene, Elaine J. Francis, and Rebecca S. Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005): 332. 9.  Jill Campbell, “‘I Am No Giant’: Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love among Men,” The Eighteenth Century 39, no. 3, Constructions of Incest in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England (Fall 1998): 240, 247. 10.  George E. Haggerty, Horace Walpole’s Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 97. 11.  Walpole to Rev. William Cole, July 15, 1769, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 1: 179; electronic edition. Quoted in Haggerty, Horace Walpole’s Letters, 97. 12.  Immanuel Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,” in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. and ed. David Walford with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 204–41, 217. In examining Kant’s concept of negation, I consulted Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998), 303; and Tolga Güngör, “Nothing: Kant’s Analysis and the Hegelian Critique,” Ph.D. dissertation (University of Essex, 2017), ch. 3. 13.  Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept,” 219. 14.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 555. 15.  Laura Mandell, introduction to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole and The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), xi–xxi, xx. 16.  For analysis of the depiction of superstitious belief in the context of the period’s scientific developments, see Al Coppola’s essay in this volume. Another contributor, Nicole Garret, examines the Countess’s views on superstition in light of maternal characterizations in fictions of the era. 17.  Gabriella Mazzon, A History of English Negation (London: Pearson Longman, 2004), 91. In contrast to substantial research on negation in medieval and Renaissance literary works, scholars of eighteenth-century literature have shown less interest in this topic. It would be illuminating to quantify and evaluate patterns of usage in eighteenthcentury literary fiction. 18.  Wolf-Peter Funk, “Adjectives with Negative Affixes in Modern English and the Problem of Synonymy,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 19: 364–86, 367. 19. Peter Sabor characterizes Walpole’s aesthetic in The Mysterious Mother as “pseudo-Shakespearian blank verse.” Peter Sabor, “‘An Old Tragedy on a Disgusting

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Subject’: Horace Walpole and The Mysterious Mother,” in Writing and Censorship in Britain, ed. Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (London: Routledge, 1992), 91–106, 94. Michael Gamer similarly describes Walpole as “an inveterate theatre-goer” who “had a habit of infusing his texts with allusions to Shakespeare.” Michael Gamer, introduction to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, ed. Michael Gamer (London: Penguin, 2001), xiii–xxxv, xxx. 20.  William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare (1997; reprinted, London: Thomson Learning, 2005), 1.1.16: 158; and Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, The Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 5.1.41–42, 146–47. 21.  Holger Schott Syme notes the interplay between know and no in the mercurial king’s speech reflecting on his loss of status in Richard III: “Typography or writing requires speech to unfold the ambiguity of the homophones, since ‘no’ becomes ‘know’ only when spoken.” Syme, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 188. For known and none, see R. E. Zachrisson, The English Pronunciation at Shakespeare’s Time as Taught by William Bullokar with Word-Lists from All His Works (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1927), 108.

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PART II S tag ing Th e M y s t er iou s M o t h er

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7 • Wilful Walpole: Performing Publication and The Mysterious Mother Marcie Frank

The mystery of the Countess of Narbonne, the mysterious mother for whom Horace Walpole’s gothic tragedy is named, is established at the outset of the play by elaborate, varied, and even contradictory discussions of her motivations before she appears. The porter describes her virtuous piety; the priests Martin and Benedict discuss her proud secrecy. If self-reliant despair lends her some dignity when she first comes onstage at the end of the Act I, Florian’s reflections on her treatment of her son Edmund at the beginning of Act II complicate without rendering comprehensible her character. He even depicts her mourning the death of her husband as hypocritical:             Sable chambers, The winking lamp, and pomp of midnight woe, Are but a specious theatre, on which Th’ inconstant mind with decency forgets Its inward tribute.1 Language resonant with that of The Castle of Otranto introduces his ironic question: “Who can doubt the love / Which to a father’s shade devotes the son?” (II.1: 27). The implied answer: the mysterious mother who has banished that son and determined that he can enjoy his inheritance only from afar. The male line, Florian asserts, has been interrupted by the excessive performance of female grief set in a “specious theatre.” The mystery of the mysterious mother is sustained until the play’s end, when the Countess reveals to Edmund that his marriage to Adeliza is incestuous not only because she is his sister but also because she is his daughter, the offspring of a sexual encounter he had enjoyed, unbeknownst to himself,

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with his own mother, who disguised herself as his beloved Beatrice on the very night of her husband’s death. The Countess then kills herself. Though she had initially inspired pity, her crime is revealed as one consciously committed in “a most odious moment, of a depraved imagination” (Postscript, R5), as Walpole himself described in the Postscript. The dark reversal of the Countess’s status does not restore the respectability of the Church, for Martin and Benedict’s skeptical distrust is revealed to have been motivated by their scheme to acquire her property. The play is thus evacuated of any internal ground of moral judgment. Walpole knew that the Countess’s consciousness of her crime, compounded by the threat of double incest, would render the play unperformable, yet he “could not resist the impulse of adapting it to the scene” (R1).2 He exhibited a similar ambivalence about its publication. In this paper, I suggest that the “specious theatre” of The Mysterious Mother, with its ambiguous relation to performance and its strange publication history, provides us with a template for Walpole’s other endeavors. The problem of inheritance had also dominated The Castle of Otranto, in which the generational transmission of the castle was bound to questions of legitimacy and delivered in gendered patterns of degeneration and ascendancy. Manfred, the grandson of the usurping upstart Ricardo, chamberlain to Alphonso the Good, cannot bequeath the property to his weak son Conrad, who is crushed to death by the giant helmet in the novel’s first pages. Various schemes to boost his line by exploiting his female resources—his wife Hippolita, his daughter Matilda, and his ward Isabella—lead instead to the restoration of Theodore, the legitimate heir. The vigorous futurity promised by Theodore’s marriage to the beautiful Isabella, however, is called into question in the novel’s final lines describing it as a melancholy affair. The degree of irony in this resolution is difficult to determine, especially since it is compounded by the presentation of the problem of inheritance in the first preface. There, in the guise of William Marshall, the ostensible translator of a found manuscript, Walpole wishes for a better moral than that the sins of the fathers will be visited upon later generations. He thereby, with an indeterminate degree of seriousness, both inscribes the problem of inheritance and calls its relevance into question. Robert Hamm has insightfully observed that the ghost of Hamlet is the presiding spirit of The Castle of Otranto, though he portrays Walpole as asserting the superiority of the novel to the play as a vehicle for terror.3 Hamlet lies behind The Mysterious Mother as well: the Countess reprises Gertrude, the incarnation of a desiring mother whose disinheriting of her son by an incestu-

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ous marriage Walpole renders even more perverse. To adduce the speciousness of the theater in support of Hamm’s argument, however, would involve forgetting that these words are uttered by Florian and imagined as performed. Furthermore, “specious” did not always have the negative connotations that it has now. Up through the seventeenth century it meant beautiful, fair, or fair-seeming, though it passed into the sense of the “merely” apparent in the eighteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Though Florian uses the negative meaning, the word could have retained its older, now obsolete, sense for Walpole. In any case, we should resist hearing in “specious theatre” a condemnation of false performances that are false because they are performances, that is to say, hearing it anti-theatrically, for novels and plays were not mutually exclusive in Walpole’s hands but mutually enhancing.4 Performed publicly or in the closet, read alone in silence or aloud in a group, Walpole’s writing across the genres of narrative and drama is theatrical.5 Though (like his other dramatic works) The Mysterious Mother lacks any substantial performance history, its publication is performative. Traversal across the genres of novel and drama and the media of print and performance is not singular to Walpole, but performative publication may well be. Walpole recognized that the suppression of the Countess’s secret was essential to the design of the play. As he observed in the Postscript for the edition of fifty he initially printed at Strawberry Hill in 1768, in order “to palliate the crime, and raise the character of the criminal . . . the audience must be prejudiced in her favour” (Postscript, R4–5). “For this reason,” he further explained, “I suppressed the story till the last scene; and bestowed every ornament of sense, unbiggoted [sic] piety, and interesting contrition, on the character that was at last to raise universal indignation” (Postscript, R5). He singled out some features of the play for critical appreciation: “terror and pity naturally ar[i]se from the subject . . . the moral is just” (Postscript, R7), and it conforms to the three neoclassical unities. Nevertheless, he distinguished his desire “of striking a little out of the  common road, and to introduce some novelty on our stage” (Postscript, R8–S9). He risked the disgust he knew the play would provoke. He apologized for the offense even while he implied it was justified for the introduction of the new character of the mysterious mother. He echoed these thoughts in “Thoughts on Tragedy,” composed in 1775 but only published in the posthumous complete works of 1798 edited by Mary Berry. The “Thoughts” take the form of three letters to Robert Jephson, whose play The Count of Narbonne was a successful adaptation of The Castle of Otranto that, as its title suggests, amalgamated elements of The Mysterious Mother.

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Jephson’s play premiered in 1781 and was performed thirty-seven times up to 1798. “If there is any merit in my play,” Walpole wrote about The Mysterious Mother to Jephson, “I think it is in interrupting the spectator’s fathoming the whole story till the last, and in making every scene tend to advance the catastrophe.”6 Walpole located his achievement in the play’s structuring paradox: it plays the suspenseful momentum of disclosure against full recognition and understanding in the concluding revelation of the double incest. Exhibiting a self-consciousness about his strengths and weaknesses as a playwright, Walpole remarked in “Thoughts on Tragedy” on his attraction to the topic of incest and passed on a story idea for one of his favorite subjects: Don Carlos. As he explained, “Why I gave up this fruitful canvas, was merely because the passion is incestuous, as is most unfortunately that of my Mysterious Mother, though at different points in time, and that of Carlos a pardonable and not disgusting one. I shall rejoice at having left it, if you will adopt it.”7 Suggesting that Jephson adopt a story less controversial than his own, Walpole here encouraged his protégé by his own example. As these thoughts make evident, Walpole relished his own provocative effects on others, whether to inspire or to disgust. In the short preface he wrote for the edition of the play he let Dodsley print in London in 1781, he claimed to be publishing only to prevent piracy, though when no pirated edition materialized, Walpole withdrew it. He again warded off blame with apology: “he cannot be more blamed than he blames himself for having undertaken so disagreeable a story, and for hazarding the publicity by letting it go out of his own hands.”8 As he acknowledged in a letter of July 3, 1781, to William Mason, the play had acquired too much publicity to be fully suppressed.9 Peter Sabor has observed that Walpole’s vexed attitude toward publication was taken to a “compulsive” level with The Mysterious Mother: he desired to circulate in print and to withhold himself from such circulation, by means of which he aimed to control critical response.10 He finally provided a corrected copy for inclusion in his collected works when a Dublin edition surfaced in 1791. The timing of Dodsley’s publication of The Mysterious Mother raises the possibility that Walpole may have been prompted to publish his own tragedy by the performance of Jephson’s play. The preface to Dodsley’s edition is dated April 29, 1781; Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne was printed by Thomas Cadell with a dedication from Jephson to Walpole dated November 17, 1781, the date of its first performance, according to The London Stage.11 Between January 25, 1780, and December 3, 1781, Walpole and Jephson exchanged eight letters as

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they collaborated on getting the play produced. Walpole not only loaned Alphonso’s armor for the production but also wrote to Miss Yonge on October 22, 1781, begging her to take the role of the Countess.12 After a slight disagreement over scenery in which Walpole let Jephson have his way, he wrote on December 3, 1781, “I can safely allow for the anxiety of a parent for his favorite offspring.”13 Perhaps having circulated his own play in print made it possible for him to take a back seat to Jephson (fig. 7.1). Though it is not mentioned in Walpole’s letter to Miss Yonge, Shearer West has proposed that the dress she wore in performance was also on loan from Walpole.14 Walpole was right to be concerned about the reactions The Mysterious Mother would produce. Frances Burney recorded her disgust upon the discovery of the Countess’s secret when she participated in a closet reading of the play at court. Having found a copy printed at Strawberry Hill in the Queen’s collection in November 1786, Burney described her excitement turning to aversion: she felt “a sort of indignant aversion rise fast and warm in my mind against the Wilful Author of a story so horrible: all the entertainment and pleasure I received from Mr. Walpole seemed extinguished by his lecture.”15 Burney’s strong response, as her narrative of her reading experience shows, derives from her initial enjoyment of the play and the interest it elicited in the character of the Countess. Her indignant aversion bespeaks a betrayal of expectations, which she directs against the “Wilful Author of a story so horrible.” Both Walpole’s consistent reflections on the disgust the play must induce and Burney’s response indicate that the play’s streamlined acceleration made its ultimate revelation all the more offensive. In many respects an ideal venue for self-expression and the manipulation of response, The Mysterious Mother occasioned an emblematic performance of Walpole’s authorship. That theater pervaded Walpole’s authorship can be seen across his writings. Though the first edition of The Castle of Otranto was published pseudonymously, Walpole owned the second edition, sheltering his authorship under Shakespeare’s mantle. Marshall Brown has described it as a formal transmutation of Restoration tragedy.16 Walpole’s treatment of his 1773 comedy Nature will Prevail mirrors that of his tragedy: he sent it to George Colman the Elder at Covent Garden, who “pressed to have it enlarged,” but then, as Short Notes on the Life of Horatio Walpole records, he “would not take the trouble to do [so] for so slight and extemporary a performance.”17 Earlier in his career, Walpole had written The Dear Witches (1743), a political pamphlet in dramatic form that parodies the witches scene in Macbeth. It was laid out with a list of dramatis personae, five scene divisions, and scene and stage directions when it

Fig. 7.1 A. Birrell after S. Harding, Miss Younge in the Character of The Countess of ­Narbonne. Published by T. Macklin. Stipple engraving. Frontispiece from The Count of Narbonne, a Tragedy (Dublin: H. Chamberlaine, 1781). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 49 3730.2.

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was published in the Whig journal Old England.18 He also enjoyed his own capacity to produce disgust in Tale IV of the Hieroglyphic Tales, in which the Archbishop of Tuum drinks an aborted fetus he had mistaken for a peach in brandy.19 Critics have long agreed that Walpole’s oeuvre exhibits a remarkable consistency across genres and media, including architecture, gardening, and collecting, which has led to psycho-biographical reflections and disquisitions on taste. Sean Silver has recently proposed that the design of and writing about the villa at Strawberry Hill are emblematic of Walpole’s understanding of history.20 In the digital museum Silver created to accompany his book The Mind is a Collection, he points out that, as a private residence deliberately constructed in the public eye, Strawberry Hill served as a sort of enlarged Wunderkammer that supplied visitors with a meticulously curated experience of interiority.21 Silver locates The Mysterious Mother at the heart of this interiority, both because of the mysterious and psychically disturbing content of the play and because of its nested installation in the Beauclerk Closet, the only room in the Beauclerk Tower of Strawberry Hill. Housing the seven soot-and-water illustrations of the play by Lady Diana Beauclerk, the closet also contained copies of the play and a desk. The closet and its contents were described in the Appendix added in 1781 to The Description of Mr. Walpole’s Villa (1774), though it was off-limits to those visitors who bought tickets to tour the building.22 Though Silver appreciates that Walpole staged the experience of his private abode, he misses the full significance of Walpole’s theatricality (fig. 7.2). This, the penultimate drawing of the Beauclerk series, depicts the moment of the Countess revealing her shocking secret to Edmund and Adeliza, who has fainted. Like the others, this one is evocative in its depiction of an identifiable scene from an unperformable play that achieves legibility because the figures presented adopt theatrical poses, as can be seen when it is compared to the image that served as the frontispiece for Jephson’s play in Longman’s anthology of plays (fig. 7.3). In this image, which depicts Isabella about to descend to the underground passage that links the castle to the monastery, the backdrop is clearly a stage set, in contrast to the forest that provides the natural backdrop to Lady Beauclerk’s drawing.23 Yet they share a visual vocabulary of gesture. In both, the central female figures’ arms draw out the expressions of alarm and sorrow depicted on their faces according to Charles Le Brun’s codification of the emotions that was shared across the visual and performing arts. Even though Jephson’s play was performed many times on the public stage whereas Walpole’s was not, both images belong to the same genre of theatrical

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Fig. 7.2 Diana Beauclerk, Act 5th, Scene 6th: The Countess of Narbonne, Edmund and Adeliza, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale ­University. SH Contents B373 no. 6++ Box 300.

illustration. The most significant difference between them is that of medium: whereas the image from Jephson’s play was infinitely reproducible in print, Lady Beauclerk’s drawings were singular. Silver praises Walpole’s canny understanding that withholding access would increase people’s desire, but he makes too much of the play’s inaccessibility when he describes Burney’s desire to read it as frustrated without acknowledging that she actually read it. Silver portrays Walpole contributing to a public discourse of inwardness in his use of concealment in order more explicitly to display, which, he argues, ultimately makes the contexts of exhibition more significant than the objects themselves. But here he shares the disappointment of “interested observer” John Anderton, who, when he finally obtained access to the Beauclerk drawings, found them “but poor.” The pleasure of penetrating the withheld secret, with or without the concomitant evaluation, seemed paramount to Silver; otherwise it is difficult to understand his reluctance to “spoil” the plot of The Mysterious Mother. But Walpole was not

Fig. 7.3 Englehart after Cook, The Count of Narbonne. Act 1, Scene 1: ­Theodore—She Hastened to the Cave and Vanished from My Sight. Published 1807, by Longman. Etching. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. LWL MSS 33.

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simply both announcing and withholding a secret. In his production of The Mysterious Mother, that is to say, in authoring it, printing it, and attempting to control its circulation, he was performing the making public via print of a text that selects its own coterie. The value of Burney’s response is that, in describing the refusal to join, it makes apparent the stakes of Walpole’s provocations to inspire or disgust. James Lilley has an account of Walpole’s concept of the unique that both builds upon and refines Silver and thus helps to pinpoint the singularity of Walpole’s performance of publication in a cultural climate of production and consumption whose theatricality was general. He brilliantly grasps the affective intensities and strenuous demands of Walpole’s double conception of “uniquity” as collectible: the singularity with no intrinsic value that is common and may even have been produced more than once.24 For example, Walpole’s curiosities included a monstrous birth and an old Roman shoe whose worth was not dependent on its former wearer. Both of these objects operated on the margins of the market, remaining collectible only to the discerning eye. The “specious theatre” of The Mysterious Mother conforms to both of these aspects of uniquity. Depicting the suspension of the patrilineal line so that the disgusting generativity of the maternal can be revealed and then expunged, the play’s subject matter is monstrous birth. Unperformable and yet intermittently in circulation, the play’s singularity is guaranteed by its appearances in print. Although patterns of publication, retraction, and self-publication can be found in other writers, Walpole was unique in his ownership of one of the presses upon which it was produced. He could thus exert more control over its public, semi-public, and private circulation as a means to constitute the differences between the in-group and the more general audience. As The Mysterious Mother brings out more clearly than any other example, wilful Walpole enjoyed provoking and amusing his coterie. He sought to extend the circle to strangers, provided they proved their eligibility for membership by withstanding his tests, tests that included their capacity to enjoy disgust.

Notes 1.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), II.1: 27. All quotations from the play and its Postscript (which is paginated separately) are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text.

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For work on this paper, I found it useful to consult a current edition of the play: The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, ed. Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2003). 2.  For further discussion of The Mysterious Mother’s exclusion from the stage in the context of other plays about incest, see Jean I. Marsden’s essay in this volume. On the “performability” or “non-performability” of the play as a historical question, see essays by Judith Hawley, Dale Townshend, and David Worrall in this volume as well as Worrall, “Undiscovered 1821 Surrey Theatre Performances of Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother,” Gothic Studies 16 (2014): 1–19. 3.  Robert B. Hamm Jr., “Hamlet and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto,” SEL 49, no. 3 (2009): 667–92. 4.  On the theatricality of The Castle of Otranto, which is written in five acts, see Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22. 5. I make a more detailed case for the theatricality of Walpole’s authorship in “Horace Walpole’s Family Romances,” Modern Philology 100, no. 3 (2003): 417–35, and “Walpole’s Theatricality” in “Horace Walpole: Beyond The Castle of Otranto,” a special feature of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 16 (September 2009), ed. Peter Sabor (AMS Press, 2009), 309–27. 6.  Horace Walpole, “Thoughts on Tragedy,” in Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, ed. Mary Berry, 5 vols. (London, 1798), 2: 312. 7.  Horace Walpole, “Thoughts on Tragedy,” 308. 8.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (London: Dodsley, 1781), vi. 9.  Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 29: 148. Subsequent correspondence citations will be in abbreviated format as HWC. 10.  Peter Sabor, Horace Walpole: Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 4, 6. 11.  The London Stage, Part V, p. 486. 12. HWC, 41: 461, 446–47. 13. HWC, 41: 461. 14.  Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 48. 15.  Quoted in Peter Sabor, ed. Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 141. 16.  Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005), 45–65. 17.  Short Notes on the Life of Horatio Walpole reproduced in W. S. Lewis’s selected Letters of Horace Walpole (London: Folio Society, 1951), xxxiv, xxxv. 18.  See Catherine Alexander, “The Dear Witches: Horace Walpole’s Macbeth,” Review of English Studies 49 (1998): 131–44. I discuss Walpole’s Nature Will Prevail at greater length in “Walpole’s Theatricality.”

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19.  Horace Walpole, Hieroglyphic Tales (London: Pallas Athene Press, 2010), 54. 20.  Sean R. Silver, “Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21 (2009): 535–64. 21. Sean R. Silver, The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and www.mindisacollection.org/wal​ poleathome, accessed December 29, 2018. 22.  Allen Hazen, A Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press (Folkestone and London: Dawson of Pall Mall, 1973), 109. 23.  Though the image has been identified as depicting Miss Yonge in the role of the Countess, she does not appear in the scene. 24.  James D. Lilley, “Studies in Uniquity: Horace Walpole’s Singular Collection,” ELH 80 (2013): 93–124.

8 • Family Dramas: The Mysterious Mother and the Eighteenth-Century Incest Play Jean I. Marsden

In 1786, Frances Burney noted her response to Horace Walpole’s gothic drama The Mysterious Mother, a work she had long wished to read. While she applauded the opening of the play for its representation of what she terms “superstitious fear,” her pleasure quickly turned to disgust, and her praise ended, swallowed up in the heaviest censure: Dreadful was the whole! truly dreadful! a story of so much horror, from atrocious & voluntary guilt, never did I hear! . . . I felt a sort of indignant aversion rise fast & warm in my mind, against the wilful Author of a story so horrible: all of the entertainment & pleasure I had received from Mr. Walpole seemed extinguished by this lecture, which almost made me regard him as the Patron of the vices he had been pleased to record.1 Decades later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge responded with visceral disgust to the play, declaring in his Table Talk that it was “the most disgusting, detestable, vile composition that ever came from the hand of man.”2 Extreme though Burney’s and Coleridge’s responses may seem, Walpole himself described the subject of his tragedy as “disgusting” and “disagreeable” in the preface to the 1781 edition of the play3 and admitted in the Postscript to the original edition of the play that he “never flattered himself that [it] would be proper to appear upon the stage. The subject is so horrid that I thought it would shock, rather than give satisfaction to an audience.”4 He recognized the difficulties posed by his subject matter—incest—and the potential negative impact that the performance of such an inflammatory topic might have on spectators. Yet The Mysterious Mother was not the only play written on the subject of incest, and as Walpole was well aware, several of these incest-centered dramas had

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prospered on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage. What then made The Mysterious Mother so problematic? Examining Walpole’s tragedy within the context of his Restoration and eighteenth-century predecessors whose incest plays did find a place on the stage reveals the taboo that Walpole’s drama violated and that those earlier plays did not, a taboo that provoked his concern and Burney’s aversion. The connections between The Mysterious Mother and other incest dramas have not gone unnoticed. Paul Baines links Walpole’s tragedies to earlier incest plays such as Euripides’s and Racine’s versions of the Phaedra story as well as Voltaire’s more contemporary Sémiramis (1748), identifying Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus as the inspiration, both dramatically and psychosexually, for Walpole’s tragedy.5 Certainly Walpole was familiar with Sophocles’ classic incest drama, but as his letters and other writings reveal, he was also interested in a number of English plays that are less known today although they would have been familiar to a well-read gentleman of Walpole’s generation. These plays, most notably John Dryden’s Don Sebastian (perf. 1689, pub. 1690), Thomas Otway’s Don Carlos (1676), and Edmund Smith’s Phaedra and Hippolitus (1707), were works that were or had been part of the British theatrical repertoire. Walpole had expressed his admiration for all three plays, going so far as to contemplate writing an adaptation of Don Carlos.6 These three incest plays, all of which had appeared successfully on the eighteenth-century stage, demonstrate that audiences accepted and even applauded incest as the flashpoint for tragedy; The Mysterious Mother’s iteration of mother-son incest, however, represented a step too far. Exploring how incest operates in these three plays exposes the fundamental element in Walpole’s play that differentiated it from previous dramas and rendered it, in Coleridge’s words, “disgusting” and “vile,” making it as written “not food for the public” and certainly not for the public stage. Dryden’s late tragedy Don Sebastian was one of the few plays by Dryden that Walpole commended (he found many of his plays unnatural).7 Based on the historical figure of Don Sebastian, King of Portugal, a near-legendary figure who died in battle (?) in 1578, Dryden’s play turns on a fictional case of sibling incest. As the tragedy develops, Sebastian woos and then weds his half sister, the blood relationship unknown to both characters. In the play’s final act, the two discover the fact, but only after they consummate their marriage. Like Walpole’s Edmund and Adeliza, victims of destiny rather than conscious perpetrators of a crime, they agree to separate, Almeyna to a distant convent and Sebastian to a desert hermitage, a fate similar to that of Walpole’s two innocent sinners.

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Although he praised Don Sebastian for some unspecified fine scenes and alluded to it several times in his letters, Walpole’s dramatic interests tended more toward depictions of mother-son incest rather than brother-sister intimacies, perhaps one reason he was not entirely satisfied with the Edmund and Adeliza plot in The Mysterious Mother.8 Two of the tragedies he particularly admired contain variations of mother-son relations. Incest as defined during the eighteenth century included sexual relations between relatives by marriage as well as those by blood, although all forms of incest were seen as equally depraved.9 This broader understanding allowed for a range of tragic plots, including, most frequently, stepmothers and stepsons. Thomas Otway made use of incest through marriage for two of his tragedies, Don Carlos (1676) and The Orphan (1680), although it was the earlier play that particularly intrigued Walpole.10 The tragic plot of the play involves the famous history of Don Carlos, whose father the king of Spain has married Carlos’s beloved against her will.11 In a moment, the passion that had once been pure becomes incestuous, impure, immoral. It is this transformation of lovers into (step)mother and (step) son that drives the plot and results in the tragic catastrophe. Writing to Robert Jephson in a passage littered with exclamation points, Walpole outlines the possibilities of Otway’s play: There is one subject, a very favourite one with me, and yet which I alone was accidentally prevented from meddling with, Don Carlos. Otway . . . has miscarried woefully in Don Carlos . . . how many capital ingredients in that story! Tenderness, cruelty, heroism, policy, pity, terror! The impetuous passions of the prince, the corrected and cooler fondness and virtue of the queen, the king’s dark and cruel vengeance, different shades of policy in Rui Gomez, policy and art with franker passions in the duchess of Eboli—how many contrasts!12 Despite these possibilities and his evident interest in the well-known story, Walpole never did create his own tragedy of Don Carlos, telling Jephson that he had regretfully abandoned such a “fruitful canvas” because “the passion is incestuous as is most unfortunately that of my Mysterious Mother, though at different points of time, and that of Carlos a pardonable and not a disgusting one.”13 Walpole’s explanation is interesting on several counts. First, he sees the plot of The Mysterious Mother and that of Don Carlos as similar in their representation of incest, although not only is the passion between Don Carlos and the queen never consummated but their relationship as mother and son is also of recent date and occurs long after they originally fell in love. The distinction Walpole

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saw was not in the nature of the relationship—mother and son—but in the depravity of the crime; one is “pardonable,” that of his own play “disgusting.” Even closer to the plot of Walpole’s play is the myth of Phaedra and Hippolitus, a story already dramatized in at least three tragedies in Walpole’s library: Euripides’ Hippolitus, Racine’s Phèdre, and Edmund Smith’s Phaedra and Hippolitus.14 All three plays relate the tragedy of Phaedra, a woman criminally in love with her stepson Hippolitus and tortured by her knowledge of her sin, a plotline analogous to Walpole’s Countess and the act that torments her. Walpole was particularly interested in Racine’s drama, which he described as “exquisite” (296), and in Smith’s version of the story, which was one of the few post-Shakespearean English tragedies he regarded favorably. Smith’s Phaedra and Hippolitus was originally staged in 1707, with Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, and Anne Oldfield in the leading roles. It went through multiple editions and remained in the theatrical repertoire through the end of the eighteenth century.15 Smith’s play has several interesting parallels to The Mysterious Mother, the most obvious of these being the nature of the incestuous desire: mother for son, in this case a stepson. Although Phaedra’s incestuous desires are never acted upon, the fact that she desires Hippolitus while considering him her son is made clear. She describes her feelings as a “Bestial Passion” while stressing the exact nature of her sinful desire: Oh! Can you keep it from your selves, unknow it? Or do you think that I’m so gone in Guilt That I can see, can bear the Looks, the Eyes Of one who knows my black detested Crimes, Who knows that Phaedra loves her Son?16 In contrast to Walpole’s secretive Countess, we discover early in the first act the nature of Phaedra’s sin. Phaedra and Hippolitus opens with Lycon, a scheming minister of state, who, much like Walpole’s Benedict, opens the play and plots throughout to destroy the play’s heroine. Smith’s character, however, is more successful than Benedict in prompting his victim to confess her sin, and, under the guise of wise council, he uses it to torment her further, urging her at one point to yield to her husband Theseus’s desires, advice that she regards with horror, exclaiming: In the Father’s arms (Oh horrid Thought! Oh execrable Incest!) Ev’n in the Father’s Arms embrace the Son?17

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As Phaedra’s words make clear, even though committed with her husband, all sexual acts become incestuous because of her ongoing desire for the son. In this she differs from Walpole’s Countess, for whom the son becomes the literal surrogate for the father. Their awareness of the sinfulness of their acts, whether imagined or actual, consumes both women, and, in the end, Phaedra, like the Countess, stabs herself after a fit of guilt-ridden frenzy. While Smith’s play was in general praised by critics, some took offense at Phaedra’s willingness to confess her crime in front of an audience, seeing the event of her speech as an act almost as grotesque as the incestuous desire itself. Even Dryden’s Nourmahal in Aureng-Zebe, as Charles Gildon notes, kept “her brutal Passion to her self, and not like the bolder Phaedra, making Confidants, and breathing her Incestuous Desires in the Face of a whole Court.”18 Having incestuous desires is bad enough; articulating these desires to others constitutes an even greater sin. Walpole also disapproved of these confessions of incest, stressing the illogic, if not the sinfulness, of having a character discuss her sin in front of an audience, digressing from a discussion of Fulke Greville’s writings to state, “With all the difference of Grecian, French and English Manners, it is impossible to conceive that Phaedra trusted her incestuous passion, or Medea her murderous revenge, to a whole troop of attendants.”19 Such acts and desires, criminal in themselves, represent poor stagecraft when announced publicly on stage rather than kept private. It is telling that in this passage Walpole links Phaedra with Medea, implying that in this case, the desires announced on stage are criminal and “disgusting” rather than “pardonable,” as in Don Carlos. I do not mean by drawing these connections to suggest that The Mysterious Mother is merely a pastiche of tropes commonly found in earlier plays. Rather, examining the places where it diverges from the norms seen in other publiclystaged plays illuminates the uniqueness of Walpole’s tragedy and reveals the qualities that would have prevented it in his lifetime from being a stageable drama outside the environs of Strawberry Hill. To illustrate the peculiar nature of Walpole’s tragedy, I would like to turn to a play whose plot displays remarkable parallels to The Mysterious Mother: The Fatal Discovery; or, Love in Ruines (perf. 1697, pub. 1698). Walpole makes no reference to this play, nor is it listed in Hazen’s catalogue of Walpole’s library, but the similarities between Walpole’s play and the anonymous Fatal Discovery were so noticeable that the author of the Advertisement to the 1791 Dublin edition of The Mysterious Mother felt obliged to acknowledge the earlier play. Commenting on the subject matter of The Mysterious Mother, he remarks that earlier audiences were not queasy about watching incest dramas, citing

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a contemptible performance, entitled, The Fatal Discovery; or, Love in Ruines, was actually brought before the public at Drury-lane in 1698. This tragedy is founded on the same circumstances which are the principal objects of the present. The heroine is guilty of incest in the same manner, has a daughter who is brought up unconscious of her real parents, banishes her son, who returns just at the opening of the play; he falls in love with his sister daughter, and marries her. The discovery is made, the lady goes mad, and in her frenzy kills her daughter, and afterwards herself.20 As the Advertisement indicates, the basic outlines of the plot display remarkable similarities to Walpole’s play: a guilt-ravaged woman agonizes about a crime she committed many years ago when she took the place of a maid who had arranged for a tryst with her son. As a result of this liaison, she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. Claiming that the girl is an orphan, she raises her until the age of sixteen when her banished son returns home, sees the beautiful girl, and marries her. Consternation occurs, and the woman stabs herself in a fit of frenzy. Despite these similarities, I do not mean to claim that The Fatal Discovery is the source for Walpole’s play (he claimed the idea came from a real-life event), and the Advertisement for the 1791 Dublin edition refers to this “contemptible performance” only as a means of praising Walpole’s greater delicacy in keeping his play off the public stage. (While less virulently critical of the earlier play, John Genest also commented on the similarities between the two works.)21 Bad though The Fatal Discovery may be, it nonetheless possessed qualities that allowed it to appear on stage, something that would have been impossible for Walpole’s play, no matter how carefully he worked to engage sympathy for his heroine. The most notable differences appear early on in the play. In The Fatal Discovery, the troubled heroine, Beringaria, does not knowingly have sexual relations with her son. Rather, she thought she was arranging to seduce her husband, who had abandoned her bed and arranged an assignation with a maid. Beringaria’s confidante Arapsia later explains the convoluted chain of events to Beringaria’s son: The night before that you were sent to Travel, You’d past an Engagement with a young And foolish Maid i’th’ House to meet that night: Your Father had made such another appointment, Which was by one discovered to your Mother; And my unhappy Lady, in her stead,

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Resolv’d to meet her Husband, but by Accident She did mistake the room, and came to you: But in the morning slipping from her Husband, (As she believ’d) for fear of a discovery, She met my Lord, just come from his Intrigue, And then she found too late her fatal error.22 Like Phaedra, Beringaria has confessed her guilt to a trusted confidante, but in her case the confidante, taking on the role of the playwright, can remind ­Beringaria—and the audience—that her act was no more than a “fatal Accident” possibly condoned by Heaven. Beringaria considers the real source of guilt to be her own “wanton Love” for her husband; she should have considered his desires, not her own, and allowed him to continue with his adulterous behavior. Her act, while not appropriately wifely and submissive, was nothing more than an accident—destructive, yes, but unintentional. By contrast, Walpole’s heroine is not the victim of a fatal error in household geography, something that distinguishes her from her predecessor. The Countess knowingly chooses to consummate her desire with her son. Because of this, Walpole explains, he felt the need to “palliate the crime,” first by creating the figure of the evil monk Benedict and then by creating a situation in which the Countess is “thrown off her guard” by a combination of grief and disappointment; like Beringaria, her “fondness for her husband” was thus in some measure the cause of her guilt.23 Yet the Countess’s act was deliberate, even if it was not premeditated. She explains that at the moment when she waited longingly for her beloved husband’s return from a long sojourn abroad, Love dress’d his image to my longing thoughts In all its warmest colours – but the morn, In which impatience grew almost to sickness, Presented him a bloody corse before me. I rav’d – the storm of disappointed passions Assail’d my reason, fever’d all my blood— (V.6: 114–15) At that moment, she learns of Edmund’s proposition to the maid: Thou canst not harbour a foreboding thought More dire, than I conceiv’d, I executed. Guilt rush’d into my soul—my fancy saw thee Thy father’s image— ....

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Grief, disappointment, opportunity, Rais’d such a tumult in my madding blood, I took the damsel’s place . . . . (V.6: 115–16) This was no accident, no case of mistaken identity. While the Countess’s raw grief, born out of her love for her husband, may be a mitigating factor, there is no doubt that she knew what she was doing, even if she could not foresee the consequences of her crime. What distinguishes the Countess’s crime from that of all other Restoration and eighteenth-century incest plays is that it was knowingly performed. It was this consciously performed act of incest that so horrified and disgusted Burney and Coleridge and that even Walpole himself regarded as “disgusting.” Its clearly premeditated nature would have made The Mysterious Mother unstageable, a fact that Walpole’s friend William Mason implied when he suggested a “very few alterations” that he believed would make the play more palatable. After praising the play, he comments that there is a “capital defect” in the denouement; “To prove the thing feasible,” he sent a “sketch of such alterations as I think necessary.” His advice was to render the incestuous act an accident, the result of the Countess’s supposed jealousy over her husband, in other words to replicate the plot of The Fatal Discovery. Incest is a crime of so horrid a nature that whoever had committed it even ignorantly and by mistake, would have the same sensations of remorse, feel them in the same degree, and express their contrition in the same manner as if they had done it wilfully. If the person in question was a woman of strong natural sense, cultivated understanding, and unaffected piety, she would forget or overlook the only thing that could alleviate her despair, the thought of its being not intended, especially if ill-grounded jealousy had led her into so dreadful an error; for the consequences of the fact being full as terrible, an ingenuous and virtuous mind would still feel the sting of conscience in the severest degree. . . . the very few alterations proposed to be made, are all that are necessary . . . in order to give the principal character a claim to our pity, without diminishing our terror; and to remove that disgust and indignation which she raises at present, in spite of all the dramatic art which the author has used to prevent it.24 Walpole politely rejected Mason’s suggestions (to adopt them, he noted, would destroy the “singularity” of the subject), adding that “should The Mysterious Mother ever be performed when I am dead, it will owe to you its presenta-

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tion.”25 The essential singularity of Walpole’s subject—the Countess, with her past actions and present torment—remained a matter better imagined than embodied. Notes 1.  Frances Burney, Wednesday, 28 November 1786, The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, vol. 1, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 270. 2.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1835), 2: 303. 3.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (London, 1781), v. 4.  Horace Walpole, Postscript to The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill, 1768), R1. All quotations from the play and its postscript (which is paginated separately) are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and further citations are provided parenthetically in the main text. On issues of public performances after Walpole’s death, see David Worrall’s essay in this volume. See also Worrall, “Undiscovered 1821 Surrey Theatre Performances of Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768),” Gothic Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 1–19. Although we do not have the text of the play performed in 1822, Worrall notes that it was condensed from five acts to three, likely in order to add music. Also in this volume, Judith Hawley explores the possibilities of private productions of The Mysterious Mother. 5.  Paul Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 287–309. 6.  Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 10: 298. Subsequent correspondence citations will be in abbreviated format as HWC. 7.  In general Walpole disparaged Dryden’s talent as a playwright; All for Love and Don Sebastian are the only plays by Dryden that he seems to have liked. Walpole cites Don Sebastian in several letters and refers explicitly to its merits in a letter to Robert Jephson. See Walpole, HWC, 41: 297. 8.  In a letter to Jephson from late February 1775, Walpole remarks: “In all my tragedy, Adeliza contents me the least.” HWC, 41: 297. 9.  For a detailed discussion of eighteenth-century views regarding incest, see Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), especially Chapter Two, “Incest and Its Contingencies: Debates in Britain from the Reformation through the Eighteenth Century.” 10. In The Orphan, a character inadvertently sleeps with his brother’s wife, an act that results in the death of all three protagonists in the aftermath of this “pollution.” 11.  The story of Don Carlos (1545–1568), whose prospective bride was married by his father, Philip II of Spain, was a popular subject in history and literature both before and after Otway wrote his tragedy.

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12. Walpole, HWC, 41: 290. 13. Walpole, HWC, 41: 291. 14.  Information regarding the contents of Walpole’s library is taken from Arthur T. Hazen, A Catalog of Horace Walpole’s Library (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). 15.  Smith’s play was revived periodically during the eighteenth century and was especially popular during the 1750s when it was staged at both patent houses. Smith was a Greek scholar, and David Erskine Baker describes Phaedra and Hippolitus as a “scholar’s play.” 16.  Edmund Smith, Phaedra and Hippolitus (London, 1707), 58, 7. 17. Smith, Phaedra and Hippolitus, 35. This lurid passage was omitted in Bell’s 1777 edition of the play. 18.  Charles Gildon, A New Rehearsal, or Bays the Younger. Containing an Examen of The Ambitious Stepmother, Tamerlane, The Biter, The Fair Penitent, The Royal Convert, Ulysses, and Jane Shore. All Written by N. Rowe Esq.; Also a Word or Two upon Mr. Pope’s Rape of the Lock. To which is prefix’d a Vindication of Criticism in General, by the late Earl of Shaftsbury (London, 1714), 69. In Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe (1676), the virtuous hero is lusted after by his stepmother, the villainous Nourmahal. 19.  Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England with Lists of Their Works, 2 vols. (Strawberry Hill, 1758), 1: 163. 20.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (Dublin, 1791), ix. 21.  Genest notes: “This T[ragedy] was written by the Hon. Horace Walpole—it is an admirable play, not calculated for representation—at least the delicacy of the present age would not permit it to be acted—but a Tragedy found on the same circumstances the Fatal Discovery, or Love in Ruins—was acted at D[rury] L[Lane] in 1698.” Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols. (Bath: H.E. Carrington, 1832), 10: 185. 22.  The Fatal Discovery; or, Love in Ruines (London, 1698), 41. 23.  Walpole, Postscript to The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill, 1768), R4. 24.  William Mason to Horace Walpole, May 8, 1769, HWC, 28: 10. On Mason’s proposed amendments to the play and Walpole’s rejection of them, see Dale Townshend’s and Judith Hawley’s essays in this volume, respectively. 25.  Horace Walpole to William Mason, HWC, 28: 16–17.

9 • “The beautiful negligence of a gentleman”: Horace Walpole and Amateur Theatricals Judith Hawley

It is generally assumed that it was because its plot dealt with the scandalous subject matter of incest that Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother did not have a public performance in its day. But the situation is more complex than that. Public reactions to his play were not clear cut. For example, the Monthly Review considered it no less proper for representation than Otway’s Orphan, which includes a triple suicide.1 Moreover, David Worrall has discovered that it was adapted and performed at the Surrey Theatre under Thomas Dibdin’s management—admittedly, not till 1821, thus after Walpole’s death. He calculates it must have been seen by about “sixteen thousand people [who] didn’t riot, didn’t complain to the newspapers or otherwise signal their disapprobation of the public dramatization—in central London—of one of society’s supposedly most sequestered vices.”2 The context in 1821, as Worrall deftly demonstrates, was different from the context in which the play was written in 1768; nonetheless, Walpole does seem to have envisioned a public performance and even wrote a comic epilogue for Kitty Clive to deliver, yet admitted “I am not so sure she would like to speak it.”3 But the responses of even his close circle to the story of illicit passion quickly made him realize that, for the sake of his reputation, he must suppress it. Within weeks of completing it, Walpole admitted to his childhood friend George Montagu that he did not “think it would do for the stage.”4 In this paper, I will consider why Walpole did not “think it would do for the stage” and what that might tell us about theatrical culture in the second half of the eighteenth century. Pursuing these questions will allow us both to consider The Mysterious Mother from a theater history point of view and to view theater history from a different vantage point. Walpole’s lurid tragedy was never performed in one of London’s patent theaters, that is,

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the Theatres Royal in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. But licensed performance was not the only option available to playwrights in the late eighteenth century. So if it would not “do” for the stage, what kind of venue was The Mysterious Mother suited to? What kind of work did Walpole think it was, and what might that tell us about theatrical culture in the second half of the eighteenth century? Perhaps we could read it as a closet drama? Closet dramas, written to be read silently or out loud in small groups, were fairly common in the early modern period and enjoyed increased popularity in the Romantic era when melodrama, pantomime, and comedy dominated the public stage. Although it predates Joanna Baillie’s revival of the closet drama by about thirty years—Walpole was a pioneer in drama as well as in the novel—The Mysterious Mother shares some aspects of that genre. According to Marta Straznicky, closet drama was more common among communities that felt isolated from mainstream culture. She describes the form as “part of a larger cultural matrix in which closed spaces, selective interpretive communities, and political dissent are aligned.”5 Still, closet drama is notoriously difficult to define. As Jacqueline Mulhallen points out, the term has a range of meanings from “written to be read rather than performed” to “unperformable” because these plays were deemed either theatrically deficient or not acceptable by the aesthetic or moral standards of the day.6 The first outing of the play was a kind of closet performance, loosely defined. On April 17, 1768, Walpole and Conway read the play to an audience comprising Lady Ailesbury, Lady Lyttelton, and Miss Rich.7 To my knowledge, their responses are not recorded. Other unauthorized closet performances occurred after copies of Walpole’s text made their way into circulation. Walpole had printed fifty copies of the play at Strawberry Hill Press for private circulation, and books are wont to stray.8 About eighteen months later, Walpole learned that Montagu and a group of male friends had “found” his play at Montagu’s house and held off on gambling and drinking until they had read it through together. Montagu reports, “They would have got it by heart. However, a few similes they have retained, and cap one another with some of the lines that struck them most.”9 Walpole was not pleased: “I beg you would keep it under lock and key; it is not at all food for the public.”10 So even Walpole thought this limited kind of public performance would not do and urged the privileged owners to lock it up. But manuscript copies were made and circulated, and eventually pirated editions were threatened, which Walpole did his best to prevent or to circumvent until he gave up the attempt in 1791.11 Horace

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Mann did not see a copy of it until 1779 when his nephew brought it out to him in Florence. He was delighted with it and thought it perfect for a closet performance: The subject may be too horrid for the stage, but the judicious management of it by preparing the reader for the catastrophe, the sublime ideas and expressions so admirably adapted to the personages, make it a delicious entertainment for the closet. How could you, my dear Sir, conceal it from me so long! My nephew and I continually talk of it with ecstasy. He had almost got it by heart on his journey, and frequently recites passages out of it as we walk together in my little garden by moonlight before supper. I shall soon be as perfect in it as he is.12 The repetition of selected passages of the play is not the same as a full performance but learning it off by heart would mean that its effect was more lasting than that of a single performance. A strangely delicious closet performance occurred in 1786 when Fanny Burney chanced upon a copy of the 1781 printing that Lord Harcourt had lent to Queen Caroline. Curious about this work by her acquaintance and innocent of the nature of the play, she staged a closet reading in the palace. The story she tells of her increasing horror as she realized what her friends were in for makes an amusing passage in diaries.13 Walpole did not rule out public performance completely. In the 1768 letter to Montagu quoted earlier, after admitting he did “not think it would do for the stage,” he rather wistfully added, “though I wish to see it acted.”14 The 1769 letter to Montagu is also carefully balanced: “it is not at all food for the public—at least not till I am food for worms, good Percy.”15 He was leaving open the possibility of a posthumous performance. Earlier in the year he seems to have been in consultation with his friend William Mason about how he might adapt the work for public performance. Mason sent him several sheets of suggested revisions intended to reduce the criminality of the Countess to make her more sympathetic to the audience and thus to make it more likely that the play would be accepted by theater managers.16 Walpole seemed to take these revisions seriously. When he was preparing the text of the play for Dodsley in 1781, he asked Mason to send them again, as he had lost them. Mason sent him a marked-up copy of the 1768 text.17 Yet, privately Walpole rejected Mason’s suggestions because he felt they totally destroyed his object, “which was to exhibit a character whose sincere penitence was not degraded by superstitious bigotry,” as he wrote on the back of Mason’s letter in 1769.18 Nonetheless, Walpole assured him he would adopt

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his alterations and thanked him profusely for taking such pains with his play for, “as Mr Gray could tell you, I cannot correct myself. I write I neither know how or why, and always make worse what I try to amend.”19 Walpole’s attitude to correction is, I suggest, connected to his attitude to the possibilities of public performance of The Mysterious Mother. We can see this more clearly in another letter to Mason, this time about other works produced at the Strawberry Hill Press. He defiantly declared: “I hope future edition-mongers will say of those of Strawberry Hill, they have all the beautiful negligence of a gentleman.”20 As a scholar and an editor, my first thought is that Walpole is boasting of a culpable carelessness, neglect, and lack of regard for precision. But I think he has in mind an earlier meaning of the term negligence: “Originally: careless indifference, as in appearance or dress, or in literary or artistic style. Later: freedom from artificiality or restraint. Also: an instance of this. Now rare.”21 So, he revels in an indifference to professional standards, an indifference that grants him freedom from restraint. Crucially, it is a freedom granted by his class status. Whether discussing the moral character of the Countess in his play or the correct printing of characters at Officina Arbuteana, Walpole expresses an aristocratic disdain for the vulgarity of professionals. This is behind his 1769 quarrel with Montagu: it is not an age to encourage anybody, that has the least vanity, to step forth. There is a total extinction of all taste: our authors are vulgar, gross, illiberal: the theatre swarms with wretched translations, and ballad operas, and we have nothing new but improving abuse.22 While he had to admit that the subject matter of The Mysterious Mother was too shocking for a general audience, his disdain for the current state of the theater was a major motive for holding it back. He complained to Robert Jephson about the unworthiness of actors.23 Walpole also directed blame at theater managers who, because of their fealty to convention and dependence on the ticket sales, were unwilling to foster truly original writing on stage. To Montagu Walpole fulminated: “nor am I disposed to expose myself to the impertinences of that jackanapes Garrick, who lets nothing appear but his own wretched stuff, or that of creatures still duller, who suffer him to alter their pieces as he pleases.”24 Though he was on polite terms with Garrick, he repeatedly badmouthed him in private.25 He encouraged Jephson not to produce his Count of Narbonne—an adaptation of The Castle of Otranto that also contains elements of The Mysterious Mother—at Covent Garden under

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the Sheridans but rather in his home town of Dublin where he could oversee the rehearsals.26 Moreover, Walpole, though singular in many respects, was not the only one who was dissatisfied with the practices of the patent theaters. The Mysterious Mother can be seen as part of a larger process occurring at the margins of the professional theater that challenged its economic and cultural dominance. David Worrall, Jane Moody, and others have documented the attack mounted against the monopoly of the patent theaters by the rambunctious minor theaters in the later eighteenth century.27 To counter this threat, the patent theaters staged more spectacular productions and pantomimes to claw back the audience. In response to the perceived increase in the vulgarity of both the productions and the audiences at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, members of the social elite, including a number of Walpole’s inner circle, took to staging their own private theatricals in which they could control both the repertoire and the audience, admitting only people they had vetted.28 Private theatricals became fashionable because of their exclusive as well as their participatory nature. They became such a fixture in the social calendar that many of them were announced and reviewed in the press alongside those performed at the patent theaters. Walpole included details of both amateur and professional performances in his Collection of Prologues and Epilogues and other Pieces relative to the Stage . . . from the Year 1780, the volume of clippings that accompanied his vast collection of “Theatre of the Reign of George the 3d” (Hazen 1810).29 In his correspondence he described many private theatricals that he attended.30 He also found an imaginative charge and political resonance in private theatricals; he used them as a framing device for The Dear Witches, his satirical allegory of the party-political shenanigans around the fall of Robert Walpole.31 There is no record of a full amateur staging of The Mysterious Mother, but I suggest that it emerged out of this dilettante culture. The jury is out on the artistic merit of private theatricals. Yet, although Walpole’s lackadaisical attitude to errors might bolster the assumption that the dilettante has lower standards than the professional, he was far from equating “amateur” with “bad.” Describing a private production of Murphy’s All in the Wrong staged at Ham Commons in 1782, Walpole gushed that “the eldest Miss Hobart, so lovely and so modest, was not acting, she was the thing itself.”32 Discussing the Richmond House theatricals, Walpole insisted that writers as well as actors needed to be refined: “Why are there so few genteel comedies, but because most comedies are written by men not of that sphere?”33 For

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Walpole, these elite amateurs not only embodied rather than performed their roles, they also embodied taste. The upper classes were well schooled in music, dancing, and the fine arts, and some were keen to stretch these accomplishments further. Their financial resources made it possible for them to achieve their ambitions: some built their own theaters; many employed professional craftsmen, actors, dancers, and musicians. Mostly they adopted the repertoire of the patent theaters, producing a succession of comedies and cut-down Shakespeare. Some, especially those in Walpole’s circle, wrote their own plays. Henry Seymour Conway performed in his own adaptation of False Appearances at Richmond House in 1788.34 Mary Berry’s satirical comedy The Fashionable Friends was staged by Anne Damer at Strawberry Hill in 1801. The most prolific amateur playwright was Walpole’s friend Elizabeth Craven, the Margravine of Anspach, who wrote, produced, and acted in a succession of plays in her Gothic-style theater at Brandenburgh House, Hammersmith, between about 1790 and 1805.35 Some scripts written by amateur playwrights made it to the public theaters.36 Craven’s comedy The Miniature Picture had a run of three nights at Drury Lane in 1780. The Maid of the Oaks, a five-act musical entertainment by General John Burgoyne (one of the “boys” who joined in the impromptu reading of The Mysterious Mother with George Montagu), was staged at Drury Lane in 1774. In 1802, Berry’s Fashionable Friends ran for three nights at Drury Lane. Berry subsequently complained that her play was damned because it was thought to be a Pic Nic Society production.37 This subscription club performed at the Tottenham Street Theatre in 1802 but was hounded out of existence by a hostile press campaign orchestrated by the playwright-owner of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Richard ­Brinsley Sheridan, who perceived them as a threat to his box office. Walpole was not in principle opposed to the social elites writing for the public. His short entertainment called Nature Will Prevail was frequently performed after the main play at the Little Theatre, Haymarket, between 1777 and 1788. His objection was to the effects of the commercial imperative. When Conway’s False Appearances enjoyed a run of six nights at Drury Lane in April 1789, it was adapted for those sitting in the cheap seats, as Walpole wrote in a letter to playwright-turned-reformer Hannah More: “The additional character of the Abbé pleased much—it was added by the advice of the players to enliven it—that is, to stretch the jaws of the pit and galleries.”38 In works such as his Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors—an everexpanding labor of love, first printed at the Strawberry Hill Press in 1758 and augmented and reissued in various editions—he built a case for the cumula-

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tive contribution of the upper classes to culture as producers as well as consumers of literature. He was not so blinded by his class that he could not see the faults of his eminent authors and frequently girded himself up to produce his most withering wit at their expense. Yet he valued this category of writers for two reasons. The first is that they were not career writers: their authorship was secondary to or sometimes the product of their service to the state. The second is that their independence from the market, in his view, made them better able to establish standards of taste and excellence. For Walpole, these values were exemplified by peers who served their country and the muses, men such as “Tiptoft and Rivers.” “The earls of Oxford and Dorset struck out new lights for the dramas, without making the multitude laugh or weep at ridiculous representations of scripture. To the two former we owe PRINTING, to the two latter, TASTE.”39 That these noblemen enriched themselves at their country’s expense and had reputations for violence and cruelty was less important to Walpole than their contributions to literary and theatrical culture. Walpole, who served his country as a Member of Parliament for many years and was himself the son of an Earl with a dubious reputation, might have been looking to these peers in order to justify his own forays into the theater. For Walpole, “the beautiful negligence of a gentleman” represented a freedom from rules and the liberty to experiment. While his Countess breaks moral laws, he chafed at literary codes. In his postscript to The Mysterious Mother, Walpole objected that British theater followed French rules and conventions and relied on translations from the French, who are “Enslaved . . . to rules.” He preferred “an ampler latitude of thought,” in pursuance of which he had introduced “some novelty on our stage.” He boasted that “the cast of the whole play [is] unlike any other that I am acquainted with”; in particular, the character of the Countess “is certainly new.”40 Novelty, originality, freedom. These are his watchwords. Mostly, Walpole asserts these freedoms for himself, but I think he was hinting that by exercising such freedoms, gentlemen might raise standards of taste and reform the theater. The Mysterious Mother was a closet drama in a different way in that Walpole built a closet to hold his work, a closet that both concealed and spectacularly displayed it, embodying his mixed feelings about how much exposure he wanted for his private passions. After circulating the copies he had printed at Strawberry Hill among friends, in 1775 he commissioned another amateur, Lady Diana Beauclerk, to provide illustrations to the play. The following year he built the Beauclerk Tower to house the drawings.41 On the one hand, these creations increased the visibility of his play: the tower could be seen from the

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road, and Lady Di’s drawings presented “an acceptable, feminized spectacle” of the play that would not have shocked Frances Burney and her friends;42 on the other, only selected guests were admitted to the closet and the play text, bound in gilded blue morocco, was enclosed within the drawer of a desk.43 In a brilliant essay on Walpole and “Female Genius,” Cynthia Roman demonstrates that his championing of Lady Di, Anne Damer, and other women artists, most of whom, like him, were negligent of social and sexual conventions, was part of a concerted campaign against the institutional professionalization of the Royal Academy.44 He valued their lack of training, their leisured ease, and their independence from the marketplace. He also insisted on the role of the elite in establishing a school of British art to counter the preference for the French. His promotion of amateur performers and writers in the theater similarly worked to oppose what he saw as the vulgarity of the professional theater. The way he wrote his The Mysterious Mother and managed its reception demonstrated a negligence that was far from careless. The existence of this elite amateur culture in tension with the professional theater should prompt a reappraisal of the richer complexities of theater history.

Notes 1. The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal, Enlarged, 23, n.s. (1797): 248–54, excerpted in Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother, A Tragedy, ed. Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), 293–95. 2.  David Worrall, “Undiscovered 1821 Surrey Theatre Performances of Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother,” Gothic Studies 16 (2014): 15. See “I beg you would keep it under lock and key”: The Mystery of the 1821 Mysterious Mother Performances” by David Worrall in this volume. 3.  Horace Walpole to George Montagu, April 15, 1768, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 10: 260, http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence/. Subsequent correspondence citations will be in abbreviated format as HWC. 4. HWC, 10: 259. It was finished March 15, 1768. 5. Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77. 6.  Jacqueline Mulhallen, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), 4. 7. HWC, 10: 260.

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8.  Walpole recorded that he printed fifty copies of The Mysterious Mother between June 14 and August 6, 1768. Horace Walpole, “Journal of the Printing Office,” manuscript. The Lewis Walpole Library, 49 2506A. 9.  George Montagu to Walpole, September 18, 1769, in HWC, 10: 297. 10.  Walpole to Montagu, October 16, 1769, in HWC, 10: 298. 11.  The Lewis Walpole Library holds seven copies in MS (Mss Vols. 140–146). Five copies were made in 1768; LWL Mss Vol. 145 dates from after 1781 as it includes transcripts from printed editions; LWL Mss Vol. 144 was made in 1785 from Horace Mann’s 1768 copy. LWL Mss Vol. 143 contains William Cole’s notes on the play. Walpole had copies of the play printed at Strawberry Hill Press in 1768. When an unauthorized edition was advertised in Dublin and London in 1781, Walpole had Dodsley print an authorized text. Advertising it proved enough to forestall the pirates, so he suppressed the publication. He did not oppose the pirated 1791 edition. The publication history of the play is covered more fully by Dale Townshend in his contribution to this volume. 12.  Horace Mann to Walpole, September 25, 1779, HWC, 24: 517. 13.  Frances Burney, Journal Letter to Susanna Phillips, November 29, 1786, in Journals and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 249–50. 14.  Walpole to Montagu, April 15, 1768, HWC, 10: 259. 15. Walpole to Montagu, October 16, 1769, HWC, 10: 298, alluding to 1 Henry IV, V iv. 16.  Mason to Walpole, May 8, 1769, HWC, 28: 15. 17.  Walpole to Mason, May 6, 1781; Mason to Walpole, May 15, 1781; Walpole to Mason, May 22, 1781, in HWC, 29: 139–44. On Mason’s proposed emendations, see also Townshend’s essay in this volume. 18. HWC, 28: 9. 19.  Walpole to Mason, May 11, 1769, HWC, 28: 16–17. 20.  Walpole to Mason, May 15, 1773, HWC, 28: 88, again referring to Gray’s complaints about his inability to prepare a correct text. 21. “negligence 3, n.,” OED Online, December 2018 (Oxford University Press), www.oed.com/view/Entry/125868?redirectedFrom=negligence. 22.  Walpole to Montagu, October 16, 1769, HWC, 10: 298. 23.  Walpole to Robert Jephson, July 13, 1777, HWC, 41: 361–64. Walpole made similar complaints about actors in his “Thoughts on Tragedy in Three Letters to Robert Jephson, Esq.,” in Works, 2: 305–14. 24. HWC, 10: 259–60. 25.  See, e.g., HWC, 14: 170, 31: 152, 38: 317, 38: 524–55. 26.  Walpole to Robert Jephson, January 27, 1780, HWC, 41: 411. For additional discussions of the relations between Walpole’s play and The Count of Narbonne, see the essays by Frank and Marsden in this volume.

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27.  See, for example, David Worrall, Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1773–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 28.  For an overview of this subject, see Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978); for more recent studies that challenge some of her findings, see Judith Hawley and Mary Isbell, eds., Amateur Theatre Studies, a special issue of NineteenthCentury Theatre and Film 38, no. 2 (2011). See also Gillian Russell, “Private Theatricals,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191–203. 29.  A Collection of Prologues and Epilogues and other pieces relative to the Stage in the reign of King George the third. From the year 1780 (LWL, 49 1810 v. 58). 30.  See, for example, his account of the famous 1787 Richmond House theatricals: HWC, 33: 563–64. 31.  This satire was published in Old England, June 18, 1743. A copy in Walpole’s hand survives in his Commonplace Book; he has added an address to the printer and extensive annotations identifying the targets of the satire (LWL, Folio 49 2616 II Ms, ff. 75–92). 32.  Walpole to Lady Ossory, November 10, 1782, HWC, 33: 369. 33.  Walpole to Lady Ossory, June 14, 1787, HWC, 33: 563. 34.  H. S. Conway’s False Appearances was adapted from Louis de Boissy’s Le Dehors Trompeur; ou, L’Homme du Jour. It was first performed on May 31, 1788, at Richmond House. It ran for six nights at Drury Lane from April 20, 1789. See HWC, 31: 263, 31: 266, 35: 391, 39: 293. 35.  See Judith Hawley, “Elizabeth and Keppel Craven and The Domestic Drama of Mother-Son Relations,” in Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theatre 1660–1830, ed. Elaine McGirr and Laura Engell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 199–216. 36.  References to all these works are drawn from The London Stage, 1660–1800, Parts 4 and 5, ed. George Winchester Stone Jr. and Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962–68), accessed via the database Eighteenth-­ Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage (Adam Matthew Digital, 2019). 37. On the Pic Nic Society, see Judith Hawley, “Dibdin and the Dilettantes,” in Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, ed. Oskar Cox Jensen, David Kennerley, and Ian Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 94–107. For Berry’s complaints, see her preface to The Fashionable Friends, in A Comparative View of Social Life in England and France . . . To which are now first added . . . Fashionable Friends, A Comedy, &c., a new edition (London: R. Bentley, 1844). 38.  Walpole to Hannah More, April 22, 1789, HWC, 31: 293.

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39. Works, I: 332–33. He is referring to John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester; Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers; Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; and Thomas Sackville, 1st Baron Buckhurst and 1st Earl of Dorset. 40.  Horace Walpole, Postscript, in The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), S9, R6. 41.  For further discussion of the drawings, see the essays by Marcie Frank, Nicole Garrett, and Cynthia E. Roman in this volume. The tower can be seen in a watercolor by Joseph Charles Barrow (1789), https://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:4703360. 42.  Paul Baines, “‘The Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 303. 43.  This copy is now at The Lewis Walpole Library, 49 2528B. 44.  Cynthia Roman, “The Art of Lady Diana Beauclerk: Horace Walpole and Female Genius,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 155–69.

10 • “I beg you would keep it under lock and key”: The Mystery of the 1821 Mysterious Mother Performances David Worrall

This paper sets out the circumstances of ten performances of Horace Walpole’s five-act tragedy, The Mysterious Mother (1768), in May 1821 at the Surrey Theatre, St. George’s Fields, London, then under the management of Thomas John Dibdin (1771–1841).1 Since no public performance is otherwise recorded until 2001, this three-act production of Walpole’s notorious drama of incest, re-titled Narbonne Castle: Or, The Mysterious Mother, significantly alters our understanding of the play’s subsequent reception history. In short, it is a mystery as to why it has ever been considered too risqué for performance. That the play performed at the Surrey was Walpole’s is beyond doubt, since Dibdin billed it as “Never Acted . . . a new Serious Melodramatic Romance, in 3 Acts, founded on a Tragic Play written by the late HORACE WALPOLE, EARL OF ORFORD, and now presented for the FIRST TIME,” under the title, Narbonne Castle: Or, The Mysterious Mother (fig. 10.1).2 At the time of the Surrey production, although Walpole had been dead for twenty-four years, both Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron, were still alive, both of them having recently written closet dramas—The Cenci, 1819, and Manfred, 1817, respectively—with themes related to incest.3 Despite evidence of this high-profile contemporary interest in incest plays, modern editors have assumed that The Mysterious Mother received no contemporary staging. Frederick S. Frank notes (accurately) that Walpole circulated it “only among close friends, never permitting it to be performed except as a closet drama or private theatricale,” but Paul Baines states that the play “seems never to have been publicly performed, and it is unlikely that it could have been licensed for performance without very significant rewriting.”4 Unwittingly, a Glasgow Citizens Theatre, Scotland, production in 2001 billed it as “never per-

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Fig. 10.1 Playbill for Narbonne Castle, or, The Mysterious Mother. The Surrey Theatre, May 6, 1821. © The British Library Board.

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formed until now.”5 Charles Beecher Hogan believed “The Mysterious Mother was never publicly produced,” while noting the “persistent, but so far unauthenticated, rumour . . . [of a] private performance somewhere in Ireland,” a rumor originating in an unreferenced statement in Sir Egerton Brydges’s Censura Literaria (1805–09).6 Critical collapse around its performance history has been accompanied by bafflement over the Countess’s sexuality. In 2003 Frank commented that the Countess “surrendered to unspeakable sexual urges.”7 Beecher Hogan’s report of rumors of a private performance, difficult to corroborate as suitably far away from Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, but evidently circulating by the early 1800s, no doubt helped generate a mystique of the play’s taboo content. In reality, the opposite was true. In September 1769, about a year after its publication, The Mysterious Mother was given an impromptu, multi-part read-through, if not actually a full performance, at Cobb mansion, Adderbury, near Banbury, Oxfordshire, at that time the sixteenth-century rented home of Walpole’s bachelor friend George Montagu (c. 1713–80). The narrative he provided offers an unusual insight into provincial eighteenth-century homosocial culture at leisure. Montagu wrote to Walpole: “I have had such a house full of schoolboys for a week that their noise still tingles in my ears. Thank God their holidays are over, and they are gone. Sir George Osborn [b. 1742], Col. [John] Burgoyne [b. 1739], Capt. [George] Boscawen [b. 1745], young Osborn [b. 1743], a parson of theirs and one of their squires came all upon me on a sudden and lived riotously from morning to night.” Of course, they were not really “schoolboys” on “holidays” but adults (including a baronet and army officers) having a good time and obviously enjoying Montagu’s convivial hospitality. Part of their fun was to have a collective read-through of Walpole’s play. Montagu reported: The boys found your tragedy of The Mysterious Mother, and boys as they are the[y] had no patience till they finished it and we read the acts amongst us, for my lungs could not Pritchard it through. They left off quinze, gambling and claret, and were the Florians of your play; the churchman indeed looked grave, but they threw him his Ten Commandments and bottle of port and amused themselves without. They would have got it by heart. However, a few similes they have retained, and cap with one another some of the lines that struck them most.8 The details arising from this account are fascinating. Whether they acted it out in addition to collectively reading it through is unclear. Inevitably, one of

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them would have been required to play the star female role, the Countess. We learn that The Mysterious Mother was more fun than “quinze [cards], gambling and claret.” That some of the group “retained . . . some of the lines that struck them most,” trying to “cap [and compete] with one another,” and perhaps even attempted to “have got it by heart.” Despite what was obviously a boisterous time, Montagu himself paid sufficiently close attention to its narrative to appreciate Florian’s pivotal role as Edmund’s less entangled heroic counterpart. However, perhaps the most important detail is that they were reading it out loud and not simply to themselves in private. This is clear from Montagu, at about 56 years of age, the oldest of the group, declaring that his own “lungs could not Pritchard it through.” This is a reference to the actress, Hannah Pritchard (1709–68), who had died barely a year earlier. Although famous for her role as Lady Macbeth opposite Garrick, Montagu may also have been remembering her powerful singing voice, a legacy of her early career in the open-air booths of Bartholomew Fair. Strikingly, the sole indicator of possible moral misgivings about Walpole’s play is the reference to the unnamed parson who opted out. Nevertheless, the “schoolboys” “amused themselves without [him].” Whether this response was specific to The Mysterious Mother is uncertain. Ever since Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), Anglican clergy were wary of becoming involved with theater or acting in case word got back to their sponsors or congregation. Whatever its status as an amateur theatrical, whether it was fully performed, semi-staged, or merely a communal reading out aloud, the Adderbury episode provides a rare glimpse of The Mysterious Mother as a text freely selected by a culturally homogenous set of English gentry without pretense to any ambitions for the stage or professional theater. It was in response to this chaotic but exuberant run-through that Walpole wrote back to Montagu in frequently quoted lines, “I am sorry those boys got at my tragedy. I beg you would keep it under lock and key; it is not at all food for the public.”9 Walpole had taken a month to reply. Evidently there was no urgency and, in any case, once performed, it would inevitably be performed again, some time, some place. And it was. The crucial material factor which enabled the lawful production of the Surrey Theatre’s Narbonne Castle in 1821 was the playhouse’s location south of the river Thames, literally on the Surrey side and outside the Westminster boundary of the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction for stage censorship. Consequently, no licensing copy or other manuscript exists for Narbonne Castle. It was probably the Surrey’s less affluent audience catchment that made it

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commercially unviable to produce a printed edition. With no printed edition and no manuscript extant, our knowledge of the production derives from the playbill, newspaper advertising (which closely matches copy for the playbills), and a few press reviews. The schedules and playbills make it clear that the production was an abridged and musicalized version of Walpole’s original. The intricate array of legislative conditions helps explain why Dibdin produced Narbonne Castle as a three-act “Serious Melodramatic Romance” rather than as a five-act spoken tragedy. These were not elective alterations. There is no reason to assume that Dibdin’s production was voluntarily redacted or that he in any way sought to diminish The Mysterious Mother’s presentation of maternal sexuality and incest. Its abridgment to three acts, still retaining the tag of “Serious,” made it another complex by-product of the contemporary licensing laws and their regulation of this type of playhouse. Although Dibdin billed it as a melodrama, in common with the other “illegitimate” theaters, the Surrey Theatre’s license required it to perform only pantomime or “burletta.” Again, this adds a further level of complexity when trying to provide Narbonne Castle with an accurate generic description. Burletta was poorly defined but, effectively, it was a dramatic form employing a large proportion of songs set to musical accompaniment, pieced out where necessary with dialogue in the form of recitative.10 However, by the 1820s, “melodrama” had also become the preferred tag by which illegitimates and patent houses alike described their musicalized dramas. The type and degree of musicality in Narbonne Castle were significant for its performance viability within the Surrey’s legal context. The musical content of illegitimate theater productions was perennially contentious because its quantity defined whether these playhouses, beyond the reach of the 1737 Licensing Act (10 George 2.c.28), had conformed to the conditions of their licensing. The patentees, as well as the Lord Chamberlain, were alert to the illegitimates’ attempts to circumvent their licensing restrictions by performing spoken dramas with only token musical accompaniment. As one contemporary noted, “Some plays of a higher order have been brought forward at the minor theatres; but at the end of a few sentences the harpsichord is sounded . . . that the piece may come under the denomination of a melo-drama.”11 Whatever the advertised genre, the test of legality for the illegitimate theatres invariably lay with the quantity of music played. This is why the Surrey playbills emphasized the totality of musical content, promising “A New Overture, New Music, &c. &c.,” including a “Dirge, Invocation and Melodramatic Music.” In other words, Dibdin’s musicalization of Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother had noth-

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ing to do with elective aesthetic considerations but was simply a quantitative requirement of theater licensing, a condition stipulated by the Covent Garden and Drury Lane patentees’ monopoly (strictly speaking, duopoly) over the spoken word. Its reduction from five acts to three almost certainly arose from trading off the necessity of introducing as much music in Narbonne Castle as would secure the Surrey’s continued licensing while still retaining sufficient recitative and spoken text from The Mysterious Mother as to make it recognizable as deriving from Walpole’s original play. Dibdin’s decision to stage Narbonne Castle was probably at least partly based on his experience of having been prompter (stage manager, in today’s terms) at Drury Lane during Byron’s tenure on its management committee until he left to manage the Surrey in 1817. It would be difficult to underestimate the degree of belligerence by the royal patent theaters against playhouses such as the Surrey. When the new Waterloo Bridge opened in 1818, playhouses such as the Royal Coburg (the present-day Old Vic) and the Surrey drew audiences to the south side of the Thames. The patentees were worried their perquisite over spoken-word dramas would be under threat. In a letter of March 1820, using its old name to demean its status, Dibdin’s “Circus” was warned by the patentees of “manifold infringements of their rights” and “that, if you do not, in future, confine your performances strictly within the powers of your license, they will be under the painful necessity of having recourse to such measures as the laws have provided.”12 Productions at the Surrey such as Edward Ball’s Edda; Or The Hermit of Warkworth, A Melo-Dramatic Romance (Founded on the Rev. Dr. Percy’s Celebrated Tale) (1820) were likely formulated to give the type of populist gravitas the patentees most feared. As early as February 1818 Dibdin had seized the opportunity of staging Coleridge’s Zapolya; A Christmas Tale after it was rejected by Drury Lane. Adapting serious dramas into “illegitimate” formats became almost a Surrey house specialty and constituted obvious precursors to their version of The Mysterious Mother. Even before his arrival at the Surrey in 1817, Dibdin had adapted Joanna Baillie’s Constantine Palaelogus into a “melodrame” called Constantine and Valeria.13 Such shows clearly rattled the patentees. Dibdin’s billing Narbonne Castle as a “Serious” entertainment, while also emphasizing its high degree of musical content, illustrates the legal tightrope he needed to walk. Even by the time he left Drury Lane, Dibdin would probably have been aware of the rumors about incest linked to Byron.14 He would certainly have noticed that the preface to Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (1821) implicated him

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by name when Byron tried to defend his conduct on the committee against the perennial charge that Drury Lane performed too many burlettas and pantomimes. Byron claimed “Manager Dibdin assured me” that spoken dramas were unprofitable. Threatened with prosecution by the patentees if he dared perform spoken drama at the Surrey, Byron now seemed to be blaming him for its absence at Drury Lane. It was an impossible position. Of course, as Byron admitted, “I have been absent from England nearly five years.”15 Whatever the perceived slight, real or imaginary, Dibdin’s knowledge of the preface to Marino Faliero was emblazoned on Narbonne Castle’s opening night playbill: A NOBLE AUTHOR, in his recent Preface to “THE DOGE OF VENICE,” gives it as his Opinion, that “THE MYSTERIOUS MOTHER” is a Tragedy of the HIGHEST ORDER—There are, however, in its Fable Circumstances of so dreadfully terrific a nature, that [a] most material Alteration in its Construction has been thought necessary, which it is hoped has been effected without Injury either to the Poetry, or the intense and powerful Interest which pervades the Romance till the conclusion of its final Scene.16 Given the complexity of the licensing laws, Dibdin’s announcement that a “most material Alteration in its Construction has been thought necessary,” probably was at least as much a forewarning that he had complied with The Mysterious Mother’s mandatory musicalization as it was a statement about the producer’s moral perspective. As mentioned above, Dibdin’s main anxiety about running the Surrey was not so much the thematic content of his shows but rather the degree of their likelihood to incur persecution by the patentees on the grounds of deficient musicality. Unlikely though it may seem, an efficient way of deflecting unwanted attention was through the playbill. Georgian playbills, despite their apparent simplicity, were multivalent artifacts. Together with newspaper advertising, they were texts (lithography was yet to introduce imagery) mediating between the audience and the promised performance.17 The Narbonne Castle playbill simultaneously invited the audience to a sensational evening (“Circumstances of so dreadfully terrific a nature”) but also reassured them that the terror had been contained through a “most material Alteration in its Construction.” Dibdin’s reassurances were, of course, a feint to attract public curiosity. As he knew, as long as it contained the required quantity of music to keep the patentees happy, the Surrey was in no danger of suppression on account of content. Dibdin never sent Surrey

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plays to the Lord Chamberlain. The Surrey lay outside Westminster, beyond reach of censorship. As Frederick Burwick correctly notes in his study of Romantic period incest dramas, “No legal ban prohibited the stage representation of incest.” Indeed, as Burwick notes, four years later the Surrey staged Atala and Chactas; or, The Law of the Desert (1825), a play by his brother, Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin (1768–1833), and an adaptation of François-René de Chateaubriand’s tale of sibling incest, Atala, ou Les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert (1801). Burwick thinks it likely that the “material Alteration” referred to on The Mysterious Mother playbill “did not excise the double incest plot, but it did replace the mother’s lust by the less probable motivation that she had entered her son’s bedchamber to protect the young girl’s innocence.”18 As to the actual actresses who played the Countess, Georgina Lock in the Lewis Walpole Library/Yale Center for British Art production is only the third person to have played that role (assuming we ignore Montagu’s boozy friends since we don’t know who played what). Although there were few reviews of the Surrey production (its incest plot created no stir and few contemporary reviewers ventured south of the Thames), The Cornucopia or Literary and Dramatic Mirror refers to the play as “the Countess of Narbonne,” an erroneous conflation of the title but one that suggests the role’s original impact.19 The Drama; or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine reviewer describes the Countess as having “a certain unpleasant hysterical catch in her voice” (“We mean . . . no disparagement to Miss Taylor, who really is a very good actress”), perhaps suggesting that Dibdin sensationalized the incest plot by heightening the histrionic contrasts of her delivery.20 The Surrey Countess can now be confidently identified as Margaret Taylor (her dates of birth and death at present unknown), who appears in an anonymously engraved stipple dated 1817 as Miss Taylor of the Surry [sic] Theatre, after a painting by Rose Emma Drummond (Victoria & Albert Museum; fig. 10.2). This can be correlated with another stipple, Miss Margaret Taylor, by James Hopwood (c. 1752–1819), again after Drummond, dated 1819 (Scottish National Portrait Gallery). However, perhaps the most pertinent of facts about Dibdin’s Narbonne Castle was that it was performed at least ten times.21 Some playbills puffed their usual claims (“The Melodrame of Narbonne Castle encreases in popularity every Evening”), but it clearly had a successful run.22 The Surrey’s seating capacity (on 1813 figures) suggests that it held around 2,500 people but it was almost certainly enlarged during its 1817 refurbishment. Assuming two-thirds-full houses, the ten Surrey performances suggest an audience total for Narbonne Castle of around 16,500 people. Buried away at the back of Allardyce Nicoll’s A

Fig. 10.2 After Rose Emma Drummond, Miss Taylor of The Surry Theatre. Published July 1, 1817, by John Bell. Stipple engraving. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Portraits Box 96.

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History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama 1800–1850 (1930) is a reference to a December 1840 Surrey revival of Narbonne Castle; or, The Mysterious Mother.23 In 1821 sixteen thousand people didn’t riot, didn’t complain to the newspapers or otherwise signal their disapprobation of the public dramatization—in central London—of one of society’s supposedly most sequestered vices. Almost from the date of its first publication no one obeyed Walpole’s stricture to “keep it under lock and key.” Notes 1.  I am grateful to The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut, for a Research Fellowship during which much of the research for this conference paper was undertaken. The paper revises my essay, “Undiscovered 1821 Surrey Theatre Performances of Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother (1768),” Gothic Studies 16 (2014): 1–19. 2.  Playbills, The Surrey Theatre, May 10, 1821. 3.  For discussion of The Mysterious Mother’s relation to Restoration and eighteenthcentury plays involving incest, see Jean I. Marsden’s essay in this volume. 4.  The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, ed. Frederick S. Frank (London: Broadview Press, 2003), 25; Paul Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 28 (1999): 287–309, 302. 5.  Elizabeth Mahoney, “Horace Walpole’s Skeletons Come Out in Glasgow,” The Guardian, February 3, 2001. 6.  Charles Beecher Hogan, “The ‘Theatre of Geo. 3,’” in Horace Walpole, Writer, Politician, and Connoisseur: Essays on the 250th Anniversary of Walpole’s Birth, ed. Warren Hunting Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 227–40; Egerton Brydges, Censura Literaria. Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, with Original Disquisitions, Articles of Biography, and Other Literary Antiquities, 10 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805–09), 9: 189. 7.  The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, ed. Frederick S. Frank (London: Broadview Press, 2003), 31. 8.  George Montagu to Horace Walpole, September 18, 1769, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 10: 297. Subsequent correspondence citations will be in abbreviated format as HWC. 9.  Horace Walpole to George Montagu, October 16, 1769, HWC, 10: 298. 10.  On the legal and political pressures enforcing “burletta” or musicalized dramas on London theaters outside of Westminster, see David Worrall, “Busby, Burletta, and Barnwell: Music, Stage, and Audience,” The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832: The Road to the Stage (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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11.  James Henry Lawrence, Dramatic Emancipation, or Strictures on the State of the Theatres, and the Consequent Degeneration of the Drama (1813), 382. 12.  Thomas Dibdin, The Reminiscences of Thomas Dibdin (1837), 2: 184. 13. Dibdin, Reminiscences, 2: 136–37. 14.  D. L. Macdonald, “Incest, Narcissism, and Demonality in Byron’s Manfred,” Mosaic 25 (1992): 25–38; Alan Richardson, “Rethinking Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind,” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 31 (2000): 553–72. 15.  George Gordon, Lord Byron, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts, With Notes. The Prophecy of Dante, A Poem (1821), xviin–xixn. 16.  Playbills, The Surrey Theatre, May 10, 1821. 17.  Christopher Balme, “Playbills and the Theatrical Public Sphere,” in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance History, ed. Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 37–62. 18.  Frederick Burwick, “Incest on the Romantic Stage: Baillie, Byron, and the Shelleys,” in Decadent Romanticism, 1780–1914, ed. Kostas Boyiopoulos and Mark Sandy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 27–41. 19.  The Cornucopia or Literary and Dramatic Mirror, June 1821, 91–92. 20.  The Drama; or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine. For May 1821, 50. 21.  Playbills, Surrey Theatre, May 10, 11 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 1821. 22.  Playbills, Surrey Theatre, May 18, 1821. 23.  December 8, 1840; Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Nineteenth-Century Drama 1800–1850, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 2: 500.

PART III T h e Ya l e P e r f o r m a n c e

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11 • Abridged Version of The Mysterious Mother by Horace Walpole abridged by David Worrall directed by Misty G. Anderson

Countess of Narbonne Count Edmund, her Son Florian, his friend Adeliza Benedict Martin Peter Porter Servant

Georgina Lock Carlos Guanche Gilberto Saenz Chelsea Phillips Charlie Gillespie Justin Crisp Dale Townshend Stephen Clarke

ACT I [The platform before the castle; background, castle, towers, abbey. ENTER FLORIAN] S C ENE I Florian. What awful silence! How these antique towers And vacant courts dull the suspended soul, Till expectation wears the cast of fear; And fear, half-ready to become devotion, Mumbles a kind of mental orison. I met a peasant, and enquired my way: The churl, not rude of speech, but like the tenant Of some night-haunted ruin, bore an aspect

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Of horror, worn to habitude. None there, said he, are welcome, But now and then a mass-priest, and the poor, To whom the pious Countess deals her alms On covenant, that each revolving night They beg of heav’n the health of her son’s soul, And her own. What precious mummery! Her son in exile, She wastes on monks and beggars his inheritance, For his soul’s health! I never knew a woman But lov’d our bodies or our souls too well. S C ENE II [ENTER PETER THE PORTER] Porter. Methought I heard a stranger’s voice—What lack you, sir? Florian. Good fellow, who inhabits here? Porter. I do. Florian. Belike this castle is not thine. Porter. Belike so: But be it whose it may, this is no haunt For revellers and gallants—pass your way. Florian. Thou churl! Is this your Gallic hospitality? Thy lady, on my life, would not thus rudely Chide from her presence a bewilder’d knight. Porter. [Aside] Angels defend us! What a reprobate! Thou know’st my lady then! Thou know’st her not. Canst thou in hair-cloths vex those dainty limbs? Canst thou on reeking pavements and cold marble, In meditation pass the live-long night? Florian. Father grey-beard, I cry you mercy.

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Porter. Time was, my lord, the Count of Narbonne, A prosperous gentleman; were he alive, We should not know these moping melancholies. Heaven rest his soul! I marvel not my lady Cherishes his remembrance, for he was Comely to sight, and wondrous goodly built They say his son Count Edmund’s mainly like him. Florian. What if I bring tidings of Count Edmund? Porter. [Recalling a portentious dream] Last night the raven croak’d, and from the bars Of our lodge-fire flitted a messenger— I knew no good would follow. Oh! No, no.—He must not here—alas! He must not here set foot. I prithee, say, does my old master’s heir Still breathe this vital air? Is he in France? I would make a weary pilgrimage To kiss his gracious hands, and at my feet Lay my old bones. Florian. But say, why Narbonne’s heir from Narbonne’s lands Is banish’d, driven by a ruthless mother? Porter. Ah! Sir, ’tis hard indeed—but spare his mother; Such virtue never dwelt in female form. But so—Count Edmund being not sixteen, A lusty youth, his father’s very image. I come to the point—Her name was Beatrice; Aye, Beatrice— A rogueish eye—she ne’er would look on me. This Beatrice— But hark! My lady comes—retire a while Beyond the yews—anon I’ll tell you more. [Porter and Florian down left, The COUNTESS in weeds, with a crucifix in her hand issues from the back of the house, crossing upstage and circling back to exit down stage right. When she is gone, FLORIAN and PORTER back to center.] Porter. ’Tis ever thus. At break of morn, she hies to yonder abbey,

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And prostate o’er some monumental stone, Seems more to wait her doom, than ask to shun it. But hush—Who moves up yonder avenue? It is he, Benedict, My lady’s confessor, with Friar Martin, Quick hie thee hence, should that same meddling monk Observe our conference, there were fine work toward. Loiter about yon grange; I come to thee there. [EXIT PORTER and FLORIAN] S C ENE III [ENTER BENEDICT and MARTIN] Benedict.—Ay! Sift her, sift her— I tell thee, brother, This woman was not cast in human mould. Ten such would foil a council, would unbuild Our Roman church—In her, devotion’s real. She prays because she feels, and feels, because a sinner. Martin. What is this secret sin, this untold tale, That art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse? Loss of a husband, sixteen years enjoy’d And dead as many could not stamp such sorrow. Benedict. My mind has more than once imputed blood To this incessant mourner. Beatrice, The damsel for whose sake she holds in exile Her only son, has never, since the night Of his incontinence, been seen or heard of. Martin. ’Tis clear! ’tis clear! Benedict. I have oft shifted my discourse to murder; She notes it not. Her muscles hold their place, Not discompos’d, no sudden flushing, no faltering lip. I’ve fixed on love, The failure of the sex, and aptest cause Of each attendant crime.

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Martin. Aye, brother, there we master all their craft. Benedict. Still, brother, do you err. The Count Her husband, so ador’d and so lamented, Won not her fancy, till the nuptial rites Had with the sting of pleasure taught her passion. Martin. Then whither turn To worm her secret out? Benedict. I know not that. Nay, one unguarded moment may disclose This mystic tale—then, brother, what a harvest. Or soon, or late, A praying woman must become our spoil. Martin. Her zeal may falter. Benedict. I nurse her in new horrors; form her tenants To fancy visions, phantoms; and report them. She mocks their fond credulity—but trust me, Her memory retains their colouring. Martin. This is masterly. Benedict. Oh! Were I seated high as my ambition I’d place this naked foot on necks of monarchs. Martin. By humbler arts our mighty fabric rose. Win power by craft; wear it with ostentation. Gain to the Holy See this fair domain A crimson bonnet may reward your toils. Benedict. Never, while Edmund lives. This steady woman Can ne’er be pious with so many virtues; Justice is interwoven in her frame; Nor will she wrong the son she will not see. She loves him not; yet is mistress of his fortunes. Usurp’d from her own wants, she sets apart A scanty portion only for her ward, Young Adeliza. Martin. ’Twere wise to school this maiden, lead the train

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Of young ideas to a fancied object. A mental spouse. Benedict. This is already done—but Edmund’s death Were hopes more solid. Martin. First report him dead; His letters intercepted. Benedict. Greatly thought. Lo! Where comes Our patroness—leave me. [EXIT MARTIN, BENEDICT retires to castle.] S C ENE IV [ENTER COUNTESS alone] Countess. Alas! Must guilt ground our very virtues? Grow they on sin alone, and not on grace? While Narbonne liv’d, my fully-sated soul Thought none unhappy—for it did not think! Well! Peace is fled, Ne’er to return! Nor dare I snap the thread Of life. Eternity has scope Enough to punish me, tho’ I should borrow A few short hours to sacrifice to Charity. S C ENE V [ENTER BENEDICT] Benedict. I sought you, lady. Countess. Happily I’m found. Who needs the widow’s mite? Benedict. None asks your aid. Your gracious foresight still prevents occasion. Countess. No more of this, good father. I suspect not One of your holy order of dissembling.

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Suspect not me of loving flattery. Will it give me virtues? Benedict. The church could seal Your pardon—but you scorn it. Yours are Pagan virtues: As such I praise them—but as such condemn them. Countess. Father, my crimes are Pagan. Why shakes my soul With nightly terrors? ’Tis from within I tremble. Death would be felicity. What joys have I? I have lost my husband: My own decree has banish’d my own son. Benedict. Last night I dreamt your son was with the blessed. Countess. Would heav’n he were! Benedict. Do you then wish his death? Countess. Should I not wish him blest? Benedict. Madam, I must not hear this language. You do abuse my patience. It ill beseems My holy function to give countenance By lending ear to such pernicious tenets. I am wrapt Beyond my bearing! Your son is dead! Countess. Father, we no prophetic demon bear Within our breast but conscience. That has spoken. ’Tis that voice has told me, ’Twas my son’s birth, not his mortality, Must drown my soul in woe. Benedict. Unjust, uncharitable as your words, I pardon them. Countess. Forgive me, Father. Discretion does not guide my words. What peace is there for me! [agonized] Benedict. In the neighb’ring district

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There lives a holy man, whose sanctity Is mark’d with wondrous gifts. Consult with him. Countess. Consult a holy man? Inquire of him? Good father, wherefore? What should I inquire? Must I be taught of him, that guilt is woe? Must I learn That minutes stamp’d with crimes are past recall? That joys are momentary, and remorse Eternal? Death alone can certify, Whether, when justice’s full dues exacted, Mercy shall grant one drop to slake my torment. —Here, father, break off; you to your calling; I to my tears and mournful occupation.

ACT II S C ENE I [ENTER EDMUND and FLORIAN] Edmund. Doubt not my friend. Hardships of war Have chased out the bloom of comeliness And stamped this face with harsher lineaments That well may mock the prying of a mother’s eye. A mother, Thro’ whose firm nerves tumultuous instinct’s flood Ne’er gush’d to tell her, this is your son! Florian. If not her love, my lord, suspect her hatred. Hatred is distemper’d love. Edmund. Why should she hate me? For that my opening passion’s swelling ardour Prompted congenial necessary joy, Was that a cause? No, Florian; she herself was woman then, A sensual woman. She might have pardon’d what she felt so well. Florian. Forgive me, Edmund, nor think I preach.

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You have often told me, That night, the very night that to your arms Gave pretty Beatrice’s melting beauties, Was the same night on which your father died. Edmund. ’Tis true— Wouldst thou have turn’d thee from a willing girl, To sing a requiem to thy father’s soul? I thought my mother busied with her tears While I stole to Beatrice’s chamber. How my mother Became appriz’d I know not; but her heart Grew estrang’d. Estrang’d! Florian. ’Twas the trick Of over-acted sorrow. Grief fatigues. Edmund. Still must I doubt; still deem some mystery Beyond a widow’s pious artifice. But, to me her hand is bounteous As her heart is cold. Narbonne’s revenues are as fully mine As if I held them by the strength of charters. Florian. Why set them on the hazard then? Edmund. I am weary, Florian, Of such a vagrant life. Befits it me, Sprung from a race of heroes, Narbonne’s prince, To lend my causal arm’s approved valour To quarrels, nor my country’s nor my own? I fought at Buda ’gainst the Turk—a holy war, So was it deem’d—I smote the turban’d race Mattered it to me whether crescent or cross prevailed? Florian. True, my lord. Deadly feuds For obsolete offences. Edmund. Thy reproof, My friend, is just. But had I not cause A tender cause, that prompted my return?

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This cruel parent, whom I blame, and mourn, Has won my love, by winning my respect. She cannot surely, After such perils, wounds by her command Encounter’d, after sixteen exil’d years, Spurn me when kneeling. Thinkst thou ’tis possible? Florian. I would not think it; but a host of priests Surround her. They, good men, are seldom found To please the cause of pity. You shall be beggar’d, that the saint your mother May, by cowl’d sychophants and canting jugglers, Be hail’d a new Teresa. Pray be not seen here; let’s again to th’ wars. Edmund. No, Florian, my dull’d soul is sick of riot, ’Tis time to bid adieu to vagrant pleasure And fix the wanderer love. Domestic bliss— Florian. Yes, your fair pensioner, young Adeliza, Has sober’d your inconstancy. She must be fruitful. Edmund. Pass we this levity—’tis true, Adeliza Is beauty’s type renewed. Florian. Is she kind? Edmund. Cold as the metal bars that part her from me. Florian. How gain’d you then admittance? Edmund. This whole month, While waiting your arrival, I have haunted Her convent’s parlour. O Florian, union with that favour’d maiden Might reconcile my mother. Hark! I hear voices that seem approaching. [‘or, I hear someone approaching’] They cannot know me—see! [EXIT FLORIAN, while EDMUND puts on a cloak]

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S C ENE II [procession of children, using projected animation] Children [recorded]. Hear us! Harmless orphans hear! Hush her sorrows; calm her breast. Give her, what she gives us, rest. [ENTER MARTIN down stage left, watching EDMUND] Edmund. Sweet Children—In whose behalf Raise these little suppliants Their artless hands to heaven? Martin. You seem A stranger, or you could but know, sir knight, That Narbonne’s pious Countess dwells within: A lady most disconsolate. Her lord Was snatch’d away in lusty life’s full vantage, But no account made up! No absolution! Hence, his weeping relict o’er his spot of doom A goodly cross erected. Thither we Proceed to chaunt our holy dirge, and offer Due intercession for his soul’s repose. Edmund. I knew his son. Martin. Edmund? Where sojourns he? Edmund. In the grave. Martin. Is Edmund dead? Say how. Edmund. He fell at Budapest: And not to his dishonour. Martin. Sixteen fatal years Has Narbonne’s province groaned beneath the hand Of desolation—for what crimes we know not! Edmund. I feel your country’s woes: I lov’d Edmund: Revere his father’s ashes. I will visit The ruin’d monument—and at our leisure Could with some conf’rence with you.

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Martin. [Aside] This is well. Where is your haunt? Edmund. A mile without the town Hard by St. Bridget’s nunnery. Martin. There expect me [Aside] I must to Benedict. [EXIT MARTIN, EDMUND] [Sound of storms, orphan queues reprise] S C ENE III [ENTER COUNTESS, in distress, followed by PORTER] Porter. Return, my gracious lady. Tho’ the storm Abates his clamours, do not go forth. I saw the lightning Burst on the monument. The shield of Narbonne’s arms Shiver’d to splinters, down with hideous crash The cross came tumbling—then I fled— Hark! Sure I heard a groan! Countess. Wretches like me, good Peter, dread no storms. ’Tis my soul’s proper language. Behold she comes a voluntary victim. Injured shade! Shade of my Narbonne Accept her destin’d head. Porter. For pity! Gracious dame, what words are these? In any mouth less holy they would seem A magic incantation. Last year’s eclipse fell out Because your maidens crossed a gypsy’s palm To know what was become of Beatrice. Who knows, but sudden malady Took off the damsel? Beatrice might, or might not, Have sepulture within the castle walls. Countess. Peace fool. Thy equivocation Has stain’d my name with murder’s foul suspicion! Things foreign rise and load me with their blackness. Erroneous imputation must be borne,

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Lest, while unravelling the knotty web, I lend a clue may vibrate to my heart. But who comes here? Retire. [They withdraw upstage right into dark] S C ENE IV [ENTER FLORIAN] Florian. ’Tis not far off the time the porter will’d me Expect him here. Oh, Edmund, may my prosperous care Restore thee to thy state. And aid thy love of Adeliza. Countess. Methought he spoke of love and Adeliza! Who may it be? Porter. I never heard his name Countess. [approaching] Stranger, did chance or purpose guide thy steps To this lone dwelling? Florian. Pardon, gentle lady, If curious to behold the pious matron Whom Narbonne’s plains obey, I sought this castle. Countess. Me! Stranger. Is affliction then so rare? None dwell here But melancholy, sorrow, and contrition. Florian. Pleasure has charms, but so has virtue too. Countess. Your courtly phrase, young knight, bespeaks a birth Above the vulgar. Porter. Lady, ’tis the hour of prayer. Countess. Stranger, I’m summoned hence. At St. Bridget’s nunnery tomorrow, If you can spare some moments from your pastime, In presence of the abbess, I would talk with thee. [EXIT COUNTESS]

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S C ENE V [FLORIAN alone] Florian. So, this is well, my introduction made. It follows that I move her for her son. Women oft wear the mask Of piety to draw respect, or hide The loss of it. While snuffing incense, and devoutly wanton, The Pagan goddess grows a Christian saint. Well! Edmund, whatso’er thy mother be, I’ll put her virtue or hypocrisy To the severest test— Countess, expect me! [EXIT FLORIAN] [Loud thunderclap—to black, then new slide of the garden]

ACT III S C ENE I [A small garden. The COUNTESS, alone] Countess. The monument destroy’d—Well! what of that! Were every thunderbolt addressed to me, No one would miss me. We know the doom we merit. Fie! Fie! I blush to recollect my weakness. My Edmund may be dead: poor Adeliza May taste the cup of woe that I have drugged. What wretch could be a blacker criminal than I am? Were faggots placed Around me and the fatal torch applied Wouldst disclose the frightful scene? Would it teach the world unheard of sins? How dare I be esteemed? Be known my crimes! My Edmund! Has not a mother’s hand Afflicted him enough? [ENTER SERVANT, from down stage right]

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Servant. Madam, young Adeliza Intreats to speak with you. The lady abbess Sickens to death. Countess. Admit her—[EXIT SERVANT] Now, my soul, Recall thy calm. S C ENE II Countess. Approach, sweet maid. Thy melancholy mein Speaks thy compassionate and feeling heart. [ADELIZA enters, falls at her feet] Adeliza. Oh! Can I hear this praise, And not expire in blushes at thy feet? Recall thy words: Thy Adeliza merits no encomium. I am not innocent! Countess. Thou dearest orphan to my bosom come. Purity like thine affrights itself with fancied guilt. Adeliza. In vain you chear me. I am most unworthy. Other discourse than thine has charm’d mine ear; Nor dare I now presume to call thee mother. Countess. My lovely innocence, restrain thy tears. I know thy secret; know, why beats and throbs Thy little heart with unaccustom’d tumult. Adeliza. Impossible! Countess. I will tell it thee. Thou hast conversed With a young knight. Adeliza. Amazement! Who informed thee? Pent in her chamber, sickness has detained Our abbess from the parlour. There I saw him Of as he came alone. Countess. He talked of love?

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Adeliza. He did. Countess. [Aside] ’Tis well. This is the stranger I beheld this morning. Adeliza. He sorrows for a father—something too He uttered of a large inheritance That should be his. Countess. Thou dost love this stranger? Adeliza. Yes, with such love as that I feel for thee. His earnest words Sound like the precepts of a tender parent. And next to thee, methinks I could obey him. Countess. Be calm, my lovely orphan! Hush thy fears. Heaven knows how fondly, anxiously, I love thee! The stranger’s not to blame. Myself will task him, And know if he deserves thee. Now retire, Nor slack thy duty to the expiring saint. [EXIT ADELIZA] S C ENE III [ENTER BENEDICT] Benedict. The dew of grace rest on this dwelling. Countess. Thanks, my ghostly friend. Benedict. Or I mistake, in your sad eye, I spell affliction’s signature. Countess. To tutor my unapt and ill-schooled nature, You come then, with doctrines and authority. If ought can medicate a soul unsound as mine. Benedict. You mock my friendship, and miscall my zeal. Learn the measure of your woes. Learn, if the mother’s fortitude can brave The bolt the woman’s arrogance defied. Countess. The mother, said’st thou?

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Benedict. Yes, imperious dame. On Buda’s plain thy slaughtered Edmund lies. An unbeliever’s weapon cleft his heart. Countess. In the grave, thou sayest, My Edmund sleeps—how didst thou learn his fate? Priest, mock me not! Benedict. Then you lov’d him! Countess. Lov’d him!—oh! Nature, bleeding at my heart, Hearest thou this?—Lov’d him!—Ha! I am thy mistress yet; nor will I brook Insolent reproof. Produce thy warrant, Assure my Edmund’s death—or dread his vengeance! Benedict. My warrant is at hand [Goes out and returns with EDMUND] Benedict. This gentleman Beheld thy Edmund breathless on the ground. Countess. Hah! Is this sorcery? Or is’t my husband? [Swoons] Edmund. Look up! O ever dear! Behold thy son! It is thy Edmund’s voice. Dumb still! I have kill’d her! — My brain grows hot. Benedict. My lord, restrain your passion; See! She revives. Edmund. Art thou, or not, a mother? Countess. Hah! Where am I? Why do you hold me? Was it not my Narbonne? Edmund. Alas, she raves! Countess. Hah! Whom! Quick, answer—Count of Narbonne, dost thou live? Benedict. Madam, behold your son: he kneels for pardon. Countess. Distraction!

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What means this complicated scene of horrors? Art thou my husband wing’d from other orbs To taunt my soul? What is this dubious form? Art thou my dead or my living son? Edmund. I am Thy living Edmund. Let these scalding tears Attest th’existence of thy suff’ring son. Countess. Ah! Touch me not! Edmund. How! In that cruel breast Revive then all sensations except affection? But now—to thy eyes I seemed my father? At least for that resemblance-sake embrace me. Countess. Horror on horror! Blasted be thy tongue. Benedict. Lady, I doubt not, Your blessing first obtained and gracious pardon, He will obey your pleasure, and return To stranger climes. Edmund. ’Tis false; I will not hence. Am I not Narbonne’s prince? Who shall banish me? Countess. Edmund, hear me! Thou art my son, and I will prove a mother. But I’m thy sovereign too. This state is mine. —Benedict, attend me. Tomorrow, Edmund, shalt thou learn my pleasure. [EXIT COUNTESS and BENEDICT] Edmund. [alone] Why, this is majesty. Commanding sex! Strength, courage, all our boasted attributes Seems a borrowed ray, When virtue deigns to speak with female organs. Yes, O my mother, I will learn t’obey. Make but the blooming Adeliza mine, And bear, of me unquestion’d, Narbonne’s sceptre

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Till life’s expiring lamp resumes its wasted oil no more. [EXIT]

ACT IV S C ENE I [ENTER MARTIN and BENEDICT, to sounds of chant] Martin. I know thy spirit well; But till this hour I have not seen thy passions Boil o’er the bounds of prudence. Benedict. Mistake me not, good brother I would not know one half that I suspect Till I have acted as if not suspecting. ’Tis time enough to make up our account, When we confess and kneel for absolution. Martin. Still does thy genius soar above mankind! How many fathers of our holy church In Benedict I view. Benedict. No flattery, brother ’Tis true the church owes Benedict some thanks. Enemies to Rome are Benedict’s foes. For her, I forgot I am a man. Interest bids us crush This cockatrice and her egg. Already to those vagrants she inclines As if the rogues, that preach reform to others, Like idiots, minded to reform themselves. Martin. Be cautious, brother: you may lose the lady. Benedict. She is already lost. I cannot dupe, and therefore must destroy her. Martin. How may this be accomplished? Benedict. Ask me not. I guess her fatal secret.

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Martin. I tremble! Benedict. Dastard, tremble if we fail. S C ENE II [ADELIZA crosses in a nun’s habit] Peace, dotard, peace! Nor when the lamb is nigh, must eagles wrangle. [to Adeliza] Why sighs that gentle bosom? Adeliza. Ah, holy father, the pious abbess is at peace. We go to bear her parting blessing to the Countess. Benedict. It must not be. By me she wills you Restrain your steps within the cloister’s pale, Nor grant access but to one stranger knight. The Countess commands. S C ENE III [ENTER COUNTESS] Countess. Hah! Adeliza! I charged thee guard thy convent—wherefore then This disobedience? Benedict. Madam, I was urging The fitness of your orders. Adeliza. [crossing to COUNTESS and kneeling] Oh, no. I am the thing you made me. Crush me, spurn me I will not murmur. Should you bid me die I know ’twere meant in kindness. Countess. Bid thee die! My own detested life but lingers round thee! My child, retire: I am much discompos’d.

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Benedict. Be patient lady: This fair domain, thou know’st, acknowledges The sovereignty of the church. Thy rebel son Dares not attempt— Countess. Again I bid thee peace. There is no question of Lord Edmund. Leave us: I have to talk with her alone. Now tremble at voices supernatural; and forfeit The spoils the tempest throws into our lap. [EXIT BENEDICT and MARTIN] S C ENE IV Countess. [raising Adeliza] Now, Adeliza, summon all thy courage, Retrace my precepts past; nor let a tear Profane a moment that’s worth a martyrdom. Adeliza. The virgin veil shall guard my spotless hours, Assure my peace, and saint me for hereafter. Countess. It cannot be— To Narbonne thou must bid a last adieu! And with the stranger knight depart a bride. Adeliza. Unhappy me! Too sure I have o’er burthened Thy charity, if thou wouldst drive me from thee, Restrain thy alms, dear lady. Countess. O Adeliza, Thy words now slake, and now augment my fever! Hear my last breath. Avoid the scorpion pleasure. Death lurks beneath the velvet of his lip. O retrospect of horror—To the altar! Haste, Adeliza,—vow thou wilt be wretched! Adeliza. Does thou then doom me to eternal sorrows? Hast thou deceived me? Countess. [Aside] How she melts me! What have I said?—my lovely innocence,

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Thou art my only thought—O! was thou form’d The child of sin?—and I dare not embrace thee? Yet curse the hour that stamp’d thee with a being! Adeliza. Alas! Was I then born the child of sin? Who were my parents? I will pray for them? Countess. Oh! If the bolt must come, here let it strike me! [Flinging herself to the ground] Adeliza. Oh! Raise thee from the earth. What is my lot? Wilt thou yet cherish me? Countess. Ah! Canst thou doubt this conflict of the soul? Oh! ’tis to shield thee from this world of sorrows That thou must fly, must wed, must never view The towers of Narbonne more; must never know The doom reserv’d for thy sad patroness Fly, ’ere my rage forget distinction, nature, And make a medley of unheard-of crimes. Fly, ere it be too late. Adeliza. Alas! She raves—I will call for help. [EXIT] Countess. She’s gone. —That pang, great God, was my last sacrifice. Now recollect thyself, my soul consummate The pomp of horror with tremendous coolness. ’Tis fit that reason punish passion’s crime. —Reason! Alas! ’tis one of my convulsions. Down I sink, lost in eternal anguish [EXIT COUNTESS in haste] S C ENE V [ENTER BENEDICT and ADELIZA] Adeliza. She is not here. Shall we not follow her? Benedict. Thou knows’t her not.

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Her transport is fictitious. Adeliza. I tremble for her life. Benedict. Thou art young. I know this Countess: An arrant heretic. She scoffs the church. Her days are number’d; and thou shalt do wisely To quit her. Adeliza. Alas! She bids me go. She bids me wed The stranger knight that woo’d me at our parlour. [weeping] Benedict. And thou shalt take her at her word, Myself with joining your hands—and lo! In happy hour Who comes to meet her boon? S C ENE VI [ENTER EDMUND, to ADELIZA, escorting her downstage] Edmund. In tears! —that cowl Shall not protect th’ injurious tongue, that dares Insult thy innocence. Benedict. My gracious lord, Yourself and virgin coyness must be chidden. Edmund. Unriddle, priest. My soul is too impatient To wait th’ impertinence of flow’ry dialect. [to Adeliza] Dost thou consent, sweet passion of my soul? Adeliza. Forebear! It must not be—Thou shalt not wed a beggar. This orphan, this abandon’d wanderer, Taunted with poverty, with shameful origin. Benedict. Lovely Adeliza Plac’d in your arms can never feel affliction. This the good Countess knows. Edmund. By my sire’s soul I will not thank her. Has she dar’d to scorn thee,

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Thou beauteous excellence?—In her very presence I will espouse thee. Benedict. [Aside] By heav’n all’s lost Should they meet now. Pray be advis’d Heaven knows how dear I tender your felicity. The chapel is a few paces hence. Arriv’d there, I will speedily pronounce A few solemn words. Edmund. Well, be it so. My fair one This holy man advises well. Adeliza. Yes, heaven! To thee I fly; thou art my only refuge. [EXIT EDMUND and ADELIZA]

ACT V S C ENE I [The scene continues. ENTER BENEDICT, to the sound of church bells] Benedict. The business is dispatch’d. Their hands are join’d. The puling moppet struggled with her wishes; Invok’d each saint to witness her refusal; Nor heeded, tho’ I swore their golden harps Were tun’d to greet her hymenal hours. Th’ impetuous Count would have forerun the rites. The maid, affrighted, at such tumultuous unaccustom’d onset, Sunk lifeless on the pavement. Thus am I reveng’d. Proud dame of Narbonne, lo! A bare-foot monk Thus pays thy scorn, thus vindicates his altars. S C ENE II [ENTER PORTER] Porter. Ah! Woe of woes! Good father, haste thee in. And speak sweet words of comfort to our mistress

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Her brain is much disturbed. Benedict. Goodman exorcist. Thy pains are unavailing. Her sins press her. Guilt has unhing’d her reason. Porter. She raves upon her son And thinks he came in vision. Benedict. ’Twas no vision. Porter. How? Benedict. He has spoken with her. Porter. Go to, it could not be. Benedict. I tell thee, Edmund, Thy quondam master’s son has seen his mother. Porter. Oh! Joyous sounds! Where is my noble lord? Benedict. Here—and undone. S C ENE III [ENTER FLORIAN, to AUDIENCE] Florian. These sixteen years Has my friend Edmund pin’d in banishment: While masses, mummings, goblins and processions Usurp’d his heritage, and made of Narbonne A theatre of holy interludes And fainted frauds. But day darts on these spells Th’ enlightened age eschews such vile deceits And truth shall do mankind, and Edmund, justice. S C ENE IV [ENTER COUNTESS, BENEDICT, PORTER] Countess. I dare not shoot the gulph!—ha! Benedict Thou art a priest, thy mission should be holy. Quick, do thy work.

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—’Tis not the wound; it is the consequence! Porter. Split, my heart, At this sad sight. Florian. Stand off! Thou art an accomplice. Madam, it was your morning’s gracious pleasure I should attend you. Countess. Ha! Who are thou? Florian. Have you forgot me, lady? Countess. Memory is full. A head distract as mine can hold Two only objects, guilt and eternity! Florian. He is return’d, your son—have you not seen him? Countess. Would I had never! Florian. This villainous monk has stepp’d twixt you and nature; And misreported of the noblest gentleman That treads on Christian ground—Are you a mother? Countess. Ye saints! This was the demon prompted it—avaunt! He beckons me—I will not—lies my lord Not bleeding in the porch? I’ll tear my hair And bathe his wounds. My strength, my reason fail—darkness surrounds me! Let me die here. [sinks down onto a bench] Florian. This is too much for art. Benedict. No, ’tis fictitious all—’twas I inspired The horrors she has been so kind to utter At my suggestion. [ASIDE] Artful woman Thou subtle emblem of thy sex, composed Of madness and deceit—but since thy brain

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Has lost its poize, I will send those shall shake it Beyond recovery of its reeling bias. [EXIT BENEDICT] [COUNTESS makes a sign to PORTER to retire] S C ENE V Countess. This interval is well—’tis thy last boon; Tremendous Providence! And I will use it As ’twere th’ elixir of descending mercy. A woman’s words, a mother’s woe!—but honour If I believe this garb, is thy profession. Florian. A soldier’s honour is his virtue. A soldier and his honour Exist together, and together perish. Countess. ’Tis enough. Nor suffer th’ ebbing moments more inquiry. Adeliza, my orphan shall be thine—nay, start not, sir, Your loves are known to me. Florian. I love Adeliza? Lady, recall thy wand’ring memory. Tho’s the licentious camp and rapine’s holiday Have been my school; deem not so reprobate My morals, that my eye would note no distance Between the harlot’s glance and my friend’s bride. Countess. Thy friend? What friend? Florian. Lord Edmund. Countess. What of him? Florian. Is Adeliza’s lord; her wedded bridegroom. Countess. Confusion! Phrenzy! Blast me, all ye furies. Edmund and Adeliza! When? Where? How? Edmund and Adeliza! Quick, unsay The monstrous tale—oh, prodigy of ruin.

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Does my own son then boil with fiercer fires Then scorch’d his impious mother’s madding veins? Florian. What means this agony? Didst thou not grant The maiden to his wishes? Countess. Did I not couple Distinctions horrible. Plan unnatural rites To grace my funeral pile, and meet the furies. Florian. Amazement!—Will hasten—grant, ye powers My speed be not too late! [EXIT FLORIAN] S C ENE VI [ENTER EDMUND and ADELIZA. They kneel to the COUNTESS] Edmund. Dear parent, look on us, and bless your children. Countess. My children! Horror! Horror! Yes, too sure Ye are my children!—Edmund loose that hand; ’Tis poison to thy soul!—hell has no venom Like a child’s touch!—oh! Agonizing thought! Who made this marriage? Whose unhallow’d breath Pronounced the incestuous sounds? Edmund. Incest! Good heavens! Countess. Yes, thou devoted victim! Let thy blood Curdle to stone! Perdition circumvents thee. Lo! Where this monster stands! Thy mother! Mistress! The mother of thy daughter, sister, wife! The pillar of accumulated horrors! Hear, tremble! Edmund. Yes, I do tremble, though thy words are phrenzy So black must be the passions that inspired it. Countess. O Edmund, I have burst the bond Of every tie—when thou shalt know the crimes In which this fury did involve thy youth, It will seem piety to curse me, Edmund.

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Oh! Impious night! Hah! Is not that my lord? He shakes the curtains of the nuptial couch, And starts to find a son there! [Wildly] Edmund. Gracious heaven! Grant that these shocking images be raving! Adeliza. Sweet lady, be composed. Benedict shall discharge us from our vows. Countess. For a short interval lend me reason, Heaven—It must be known The fullness of my crime. Ye know how fondly my luxurious fancy Doated upon my lord. For eighteen months An embassy detained him from my bed. A harbinger announced his near return. Love dressed his image to my longing thoughts In all its warmest colours—but the morn, In which impatience grew almost to sickness, Presented him a bloody corpse before me. I raved—the storm of disappointed passions Assailed my reason, severed all my blood— Whether too warmly pressed, or too officious, To turn the torrent of my grief aside, A damsel, that attended me, disclosed Thy suit, unhappy boy! Edmund. What is to come? Shield me, ye gracious powers from my own thoughts. Countess. My fancy saw thee Thy father’s image— Edmund. Swallow the accursed sound! Nor dare to say— Countess. Yes, thou polluted son! Grief, disappointment, opportunity, Raised such a tumult in my madding blood I took the damsel’s place. And while thy arms

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Twin’d, to thy thinking, round another’s waist, Hear, hell, and tremble—thou didst clasp thy mother! Edmund. Oh! Execrable! [Adeliza faints] Countess. Be that swoon eternal! Nor let her know the rest.—she is thy daughter, Fruit of that monstrous night! Edmund. Infernal woman! [draws his dagger] My dagger must repay a tale like this —no—I must not strike— I dare not punish what you dared commit. Countess. [seeing the dagger] Give me the steel—my arm will not recoil Thus, Edmund, I revenge thee! [stabs herself ] Edmund. Help! Hoa! Help! Countess. Peace! And conceal our shame—quick, frame some legend. S C ENE VII [ENTER FLORIAN, BENEDICT, SERVANT] Countess. Assist the maid—an accident. [they bear off Adeliza] Benedict. Mercy! Heaven! Who did this deed? Countess. Myself. Benedict. What was the cause? Countess. Follow me to yon gulph, and thou wilt know. I answer not to man. Benedict. Bethink thee, lady— Countess. Thought ebbs apace—O Edmund, could a blessing Part from my lips, and not become a curse, I would—poor Adeliza—’tis accomplish’d! [Dies] Benedict. My lord, explain these horrors. Wherefore fell Your mother? And why faints your wife?

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Edmund. My wife? Thou damning priest! I have no wife—thou knows’t it. Thou gavest me indeed—no—rot my tongue Ere the dread sound escape it!—bear away That hateful monk— Benedict. Who was the prophet now? [as he exits, to Florian] Remember me! Edmund. O Florian, we must haste To where fell war assumes its ugliest form: I burn to rush on death! O tender friend! I must not violate Thy guiltless ear!—ha! ’tis my father calls! I dare not see him! [Wildly] Florian. Be compos’d, my lord We are all your friends. Let us comfort Your gentle bride. Edmund. Forbid it, all ye powers. O Florian, bear her to the holy sisters. Say, ’twas my mother’s will she take the veil. I must never behold her—never more. No, to the embattled foe I will present the sabre That leaves no atom of it undefaced. FINIS

12 • Abridging Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother David Worrall

It was a tremendous privilege to get the chance to abridge for a staged reading of Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768) at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in May 2018. I wouldn’t say that I always knew entirely what I’d be doing, but I thought I had a good background to start with. Not that I had any acting or much play editing experience, certainly not much more to fall back on than my rather specialist scholarship in British Georgian theater. However, what I’d noticed about several of the stagings or semi-stagings of eighteenth-century plays I’d seen recently in the U.K. and elsewhere was that, first, some of them were too long for modern audiences and, second, directors often seemed too purist to cut. At five acts, and with Walpole never having sought a public performance, I knew there would be no harm in it, whatever I did. In discussions with Cynthia Roman and Georgina Lock over pizza in Farmington, it looked at first like this might be an open-air performance, possibly staged near some supportive New Haven wall to echo back the voice. As that prospect—perhaps happily—faded, the imperative remained the same. Although I don’t remember us exactly deciding it, cutting Walpole’s “Shakespearean” five-act tragedy down to about 50 minutes looked about right, and certainly appropriate if there remained a possibility of an outside performance. That’s quite a cut. Back in the eighteenth century they weren’t that choosy. They preferred Florizel and Perdita (by David Garrick) over The Winter’s Tale (by Shakespeare). Even if no one today plays Colley Cibber’s or Garrick’s versions of Richard III, the lessons they taught have clearly not been lost and have sometimes been

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quietly incorporated into movie versions. I thought to myself, “Keep it direct and keep it lean, Spartan rather than Rococo.” One of the other things I’d noticed about modern stagings of Georgian plays was the sometimes alarming lack of confidence in the author. Archaic ideas or phrases are just a different global vernacular. The old idiomatic stream flows just beneath the surface, down in the basement of the shared language. No need to labor it. Walpole’s play was never performed in public in his lifetime but, of course, he went to a lot of theater, witnessing both public theater at Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket and private theatricals in the houses of the rich. He saw a lot of acting and actors. The eighteenth-century performer was a very contingent being, not someone looking to consciously pursue Enlightenment ideological projects. As actors, unless they were particularly conscientious and read the whole play through as well, they would only receive their “parts.” Their “parts” were not the whole text but just their own lines written out by the prompter’s scribe (which had to be handed back in at the end of the performance to go into the company’s crucial repository of “parts”). Their “part” gave them only the line ending of the previous speaker as a cue together with their own lines in full. Everything about eighteenth-century century theater was fast-moving. Paradoxically, it moved at the speed of manuscript. Very fast. The rate of churn and turnover of their performance schedule was similarly rapid. For their thirty-week seasons in the London royal theaters (hopefully before going off on independently organized summer tours to Ireland or the mainland provinces), they would be on a hectic schedule. If tonight it was Nahum Tate’s 1681 version of King Lear (in which both Cordelia and Lear get to live), then the next night it might be Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), and the night after that, Elizabeth Inchbald’s Such Things Are (1787), a reworking of the perennial white-woman-in-the-seraglio plot. The night after that, still going at full speed, it might be Richard Cumberland’s The Mysterious Husband (1783), not so much a riff on Walpole as a warning that, apparently safely tucked away in France, incest lurked. A wayward English father and son might, unknown to each other, inadvertently share the same Parisian mistress. And, potentially, they might both have fathered children with her. This was quite an important thing for me to remember. Walpole, and Cumberland after him, were touching on old, scary family scandals showing no signs of going away.

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The potential audiences were vast. There were many seasoned theatergoers. By the end of the eighteenth century, annual London theater seat sales were approaching around one million. Not that they are quite commensurate, but this was about the same number as the city’s population. These were huge, and practiced, audiences demanding not only a stock repertory (as long as it changed nightly) but also expecting to encounter new writing. While today we wait for the first reviews to trickle in before committing to buy, in those days first nights were nearly always sold out. Everything was on this tremendous scale. For those actors who moonlighted as playwrights, they knew what worked, how gestures, movements, entrances, and exits had a dramatic syntax they could usually rely on. They saw it night after night, every night different. All of these things crowded into my mind as I contemplated cutting five acts into one while still aiming to retain the integrity of Walpole’s original. I left the play alone with exactly the same structure and sequence and discarded anything and everything superfluous. The professional actors Walpole would have seen had no time for delay and not much time for regret. I did the cutting phrase by phrase and speech by speech, keeping to Walpole’s narrative sequence. No flashbacks, no fast-forwards. It was simply a case of jettisoning baggage. In the eighteenth century they would have done the same. Contemporary plays were often faithfully printed including all the author’s text but with whole stretches of lines accompanied by printed columns of inverted commas in the margin alongside the tag, “Omitted in the representation,” or, “N.B. those passages marked with inverted commas are omitted in representation.” In those days they cut without a second thought. As a practical procedure, I downloaded onto my tablet a Hathi Trust image of the 1791 London edition (perhaps not authorized by him but published while Walpole was still alive) and set up my laptop alongside it. Then, with an open new document ready to cut-and-go, I typed out The Mysterious Mother, cutting simultaneously as I read, doing an act at a time. This revealed the most amazing thing. Buried beneath all the period linguistic efflorescence, the mini-digressions, the expansions and cute similes lay Walpole’s pure melodramatic line. By reducing each piece of dialogue back into its original question-and-answer format or its dead-ended interruptions, declarations, or abrupt assertions, I could see that Walpole had laid down a continuous running narrative, clear and sure. It was a wonder to see it unfold, never wandering but there it was, just inches below the surface. It was a

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mystical experience. He had put it all there and, as far as I knew, nobody had unearthed it before, Walpole’s clear melodramatic line running like a golden thread. Maybe this is just another editorial fallacy, but there it was, Walpole’s original dramatic vision seemed set out before me, perfectly pristine. And it worked. I hadn’t altered anything. Structurally, all I’d really done was to foreshorten the beginning of the play. I cut more at the beginning than at the end. Having read it (and taught it) several times, I knew The Mysterious Mother culminated in the explosive confessions and revelations of Act V. The final act could speak for itself. I didn’t much cut Act V but allowed it to flow. My only ethical or historical misgivings, if one can call it that, were around the two Friars. What became ever clearer, because the mechanisms activating the action were highlighted by the cutting process, is that the play is as much about Martin and Benedict’s machinations and surveillance as it is about the Countess’s sexual misdemeanors. Luckily, Martin and Benedict pretty much self-caricature as vehicles for Walpole’s anti-French, anti-Catholic sentiment. By doing so, it raises the question to what degree they reduce the dramatic culpability of the Countess. If that’s a wholly wider question for a wholly different occasion, perhaps it’s now appropriate to get down to my editorial procedures. Principally, I aimed to retain Walpole’s text, sequence, and structure (with nothing added) and pare back to what I began to think of as The Mysterious Mother’s melodramatic line. It’s a process of revealing rather than a process of intervention. This is the beginning of Act I, Scene 3, the first entrance of Benedict and Martin, with the cuts from Walpole’s original indicated by the score-throughs. Some of the clues about how to proceed, of course, were latent in Walpole’s own, mid-dialogue, scene opening where they walk onstage, talking: Benedict: -Ay! Sift her, sift her—    As if I had not prob’d her very soul,    And wound me round her heart—I tell thee, brother,     This woman was not cast in human mould.     Ten such would foil a council, would unbuild     Our Roman church—In her devotion’s real.    Our beads, our hymns, our saints, amuse her not:    Nay, not confession, not repeating o’er    Her darling sins, has any charms for her.

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   I have mark’d her praying: not one wand’ring thought    Seems to steal meaning from her words—     She prays because she feels, and feels, because a sinner. Martin: What is this secret sin, this untold tale,     That art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse?     Loss of a husband, sixteen years enjoy’d     And dead as many could not stamp such sorrow.    Nor could she be his death’s artificer,    And now affect to weep it—I have heard,    That chasing, as he homeward rode, a stag,    Chaf’d by the hounds, with sudden onset slew    Th’ adventurous Count Benedict: ’Twas so; and yet, my brother,     My mind has more than once imputed blood     To this incessant mourner. Beatrice,     The damsel for whose sake she holds in exile     Her only son, has never, since the night     Of his incontinence, been seen or heard of. Martin: ’Tis clear! ’tis clear! Nor will her prudent tongue    Accuse its owner. Benedict: Judge not rashly, brother.     I have oft shifted my discourse to murder;     She notes it not. This is how I worked, not altering the sequence, not adding anything, not modernizing but just letting the dramatic line articulate. The only real—actually dramatic—problem I encountered lay in cueing the audience to remember the existence of Beatrice. To my mind there are similar problems in his novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), where most of the characters are woefully two-dimensional and difficult for the reader to hold in place and distinguish, one from another. Walpole seems to have passed on the problem in amplified form to The Mysterious Mother. Although she never appears on stage, Beatrice is the woman around whom the bed-trick pivots because the Countess takes her place when she sleeps with her son, Edmund. However, Beatrice is never seen by the audience. She isn’t required to make an appearance. While the reader (and audience) have no problem appreciating that Adeliza, the betrothed of Edmund, is simultaneously the daughter of Edmund’s mother and of Edmund himself, the narrative agency of Beatrice is

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more difficult to nudge into place. My remedy was simply where Beatrice is referred to as “her,” to replace it with another iteration of “Beatrice.” Clumsy but necessary. Of course, with director Misty Anderson and performers Georgina Lock, Carlos Guanche, Gilberto Saenz, Chelsea Phillips, Charlie Gillespie, Justin Crisp, Dale Townshend, and Stephen Clarke, I needn’t have worried.

13 • Staging The Mysterious Mother Misty G. Anderson

When Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, asked me if I would be willing to stage Horace Walpole’s 1768 The Mysterious Mother as part of the year’s “Walpolooza” events, I was honored, but I confess that I hesitated at first. Walpole himself “did not think it would do for the stage.” Burney and Coleridge both proclaimed their disgust with play and playwright after reading it, though Burney’s Edwy and Elgiva and her reading at court show her fascination, while the less squeamish Shelley, inspired by Walpole, dove headlong into the gothic-incest nexus with The Cenci. But I realized that I, too, “wish to see it acted,” and the conference performance might well be my only chance.1 Our 2018 production was an elaborate staged reading, a year in the preparation but with fewer than three days to work together in person. As I told the cast at the beginning of our abbreviated process, the only way out of such a play is over the top. The central and “too horrid” subject of incest made for giddy players in the 1769 private theatrical (the wild “schoolboys” George Osborn, John Burgoyne, and Capt. George Boscawen at George Montagu’s house), an experience we repeated in our first Farmington table read. Too late to turn back, we also had to ask ourselves: was this, as Walpole feared, “a tragedy that can never appear on any stage”? Reader, we did it anyway. We used the simplest of blocking that allowed actors to navigate the Yale Center for British Art’s small lecture hall stage with certainty while holding scripts in hand. The arc created by a fixed overhead spot established the playing area. The upstage corners of the space were comparatively dark and served as retreats or hiding spaces for eavesdropping characters. The edge

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of the lit area formed a circumnavigational path for the tormented Countess (Georgina Lock). The monastics Father Benedict (Dr. Charlie Gillespie) and Father Martin (Rev. Dr. Justin Crisp) used it as well, adding serpentine, labyrinth-like patterns as they disgorged their plots to secure the Countess’s confession. Adeliza (Dr. Chelsea Phillips) tended to center, embodying the space between the Countess and Edmund (Carlos Guanche) with unwitting vulnerability. With no backstage or wings, the cast took seats on the front row corresponding to the spaces of the castle and the monastery. Florian (Gilberto Saenz) and Edmund strutted, Adeliza melted, and the priests gleefully rubbed their hands together in a pantomime of villainy. We tried to remain on just this side of pantomime exaggeration to find both the absurdity and the horror of the situation. Guided by George Haggerty’s observations in Queer Gothic, we tried to produce the hypertheatricality Walpole evoked and helped to usher onto the early nineteenth-century stage with digital projections and animations. With the help of Alice Trent’s design, we unfolded Walpole’s tale in the valley between a shadowy gothic castle and a monastery, as fog rolled, thunder rumbled, and crows cawed (fig. 13.1). The 55-minute production, with all tech run out of

Fig. 13.1 Alice Trent, Digital Set Design for “Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother: A Staged Reading,” May 2, 2018, at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. ­Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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­ eynote, included twenty-six discrete animated slides with sound cues. The K clean grey lines of the signature Louis Kahn concrete walls of the Yale Center for British Art’s auditorium played a leading role in the production, forced into the part of visual straight man to Walpole’s haunting yet campy play. Onto their smooth surface we projected a ruined castle among cliffs and roiling fog, then a ruined monument. Turning Kahn’s high modernism into grey castle walls felt wicked, and we contemplated the architect spinning in his grave as the projector forced the concrete monument to modernism to bear the image of the ruin and the emotional chaos of the fall of the house of Narbonne. The soundscape began with Ola Gjeilo’s 2012 “Ubi Caritas,” an homage to medieval choral textures. Other sound cues included short pieces of Gregorian chant, most performed by Benedictine nuns and monks, a child singing “Ave Maria” at the Countess’s first entrance, and a Greek Orthodox boys’ choir layered over droning to form our “chorus of orphans,” with their ghostly avatars floating in the foreground. A clap of thunder erupted from a dark screen, underscoring the Countess’s unraveling as the action transitioned to a garden with a blasted monument in Act III, and a final thunderclap and a screen that flickered against rain, then faded to black, closed the play. Though the staging was necessarily simple, there was nothing low-budget about the costumes, which came from various theater and opera companies in the area. Cynthia Roman assembled nearly fully realized versions of Lady Diana Beauclerk’s drawings, which lent the production a grandeur and sumptuousness beyond the scale of a staged reading. The gilded details of Phillips’s, Saenz’s, and Guanche’s costumes shone in the stark light and against Kahn’s smooth grey walls. In contrast to Crisp and Gillespie in their Franciscan brown cowls, Lock in her widow’s weeds telegraphed the psychological torment already at a high pitch as the play opens in medias res. It was both fitting and an additional gift from the universe that amid this experiment in campy gothic overexpression, Florian’s (Saenz’s) costume had originally been made for a young Nathan Lane in an early production of Into the Woods. In order to make the play performable in an hour, David Worrall had removed most of the sometimes leaden theological monologues, much to the chagrin of our Yale Divinity graduates, one an Episcopal priest (Crisp) and the other a Roman Catholic theologian and performance studies scholar (Gillespie) playing the evil priest-tormenters. But the presence of religious debates over agency, will, and guilt necessarily haunted our production, while Crisp’s and Gillespie’s real-life vocations added a delicious frisson for those in the know. Both commented on the play’s “refusal to distinguish between sacred,

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political, academic, and theatrical power” as well as the “conscious confrontation” between historical and contemporary interpretations of religion.”2 Benedict longs for power to “place this naked foot on the necks of monarchs / And make them bow to creeds myself would laugh at” (I.3). He plays out his lust for power, laced with sexual frustration, on the Countess, who, with her castle, figures the threat of secular territory beyond the reach of the Church. But Gillespie and Crisp made sure this dynamic never became a simple cartoon of priestly corruption. The Iago-like incommensurability of Gillespie’s Benedict, his determination to extract the Countess’s confession and to claim her as a confessing Catholic, is fueled by the contest between a passing orthodox and an emerging secular age. Benedict’s fight for her soul and his parting words, “Who was the prophet now? Remember me!” signify for him the triumph of papal authority over her defiance. Outside the circuit of heterosexuality, he has found a way to inseminate from the space of the seminary by other means. What Stuart Curran has noted of The Cenci applies equally well to The Mysterious Mother: “The paternal power in this play is almost mystical, a direct reflection of God’s authority and the Pope’s. A daughter’s rebellion, like an angel’s, opens an intolerable breach in the fixed hierarchy of nature, which, tyranny or not, must be maintained.”3 Walpole revels in the rupture, glorifying it in the Countess’s regal bearing and steadfast refusal to submit to the authority of the Church. The Countess’s refusal to make a confession and her genuine psychological torment make her modern. She is Walpole’s walking trope of the modern secular subject who defies clerical authority and who must bear her own sins, no matter what the psychological cost. She has refused absolution and “vows she will not load her sinking soul with incantations” (I.1), in contrast to the machinations of the priests, who want both her subjection and her money. Georgina Lock gave us a Countess who could defy Benedict but then implode under the weight of her guilt, folding in from the solar plexus, from the womb, as she contemplated the horror of her situation. Her majesty, wilting into near collapse, was the gestic signature of the erotic and religious crisis at hand. The Countess dislocates guilt from a distinctly religious to a psychological territory and bears her own sins. As a woman who refused to be sexually passive or religiously compliant with the Mother Church at the dawn of the Reformation, the Countess defies the terms of both gender and piety in favor of a modernity that embodies the tension between spiritual and secular accounts of the human condition. Knowledge becomes carnal knowledge; secret sins are both religious defiance and sexual perversity. In one of the few moments we could

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Fig. 13.2 Charles Gillespie, Carlos Guanche, and Georgina Lock as Friar Benedict, Count Edmund, and Countess of Narbonne in “Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother: A Staged Reading,” May 2, 2018, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.

block carefully under the constraints of time and book-in-hand production, we arranged a reverse pietà, in which the Countess collapses into Edmund’s arms, while Fr. Benedict looks down with fiendish pleasure on what he takes for a kinetic confession (fig. 13.2). Kahn’s grey concrete wall in the Yale Center for British Art auditorium was ultimately the inanimate star of the show, painted in digital gloom to reflect back the anxiety of gothic real estate, that visible manifestation of sex (sublimated, reproductive, or other), wealth, and Church authority in eighteenth-­ century literature and art. The nunnery and the abbey are familiar, even clichéd locations for transgressive figures. In The Mysterious Mother’s Reformation setting, they are adjacent territories in which Church and patrilineal authority are contested. The sexual nature of the Countess’s crimes in the double incest plot are also problems of inheritance and ownership that echo in modern arrangements of gender and power, even in a secular age. George Haggerty has thoughtfully mapped these connections, which set the terms of a struggle over bodies and spaces that also shapes Benedict’s description of his own psychological and sexual sacrifices.4 Benedict exclaims of Rome and the Church “For her, I forgot I am a man” (IV.1). In the uncut original text, Martin affirms that “Rome is no city; ’tis the human heart,” and that institutional power has psychological as well as material sources that take up residence

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in us.5 We tried to make our insights about the embodiment of political and religious history as well as the campy pleasures and supernatural episodes of The Mysterious Mother’s plot available for our twenty-first-century audience, which was a combination of academic specialists and curiosity seekers. I like to think that Walpole, architecturally enthralled by the Catholic church and drawn to themes of guilt, sin, and queer transgression, would have enjoyed our approach. Notes 1.  Horace Walpole to Montagu, April 15, 1768, The Yale Edition of Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 10: 259. 2.  Justin Crisp and Charles Gillespie, “Playing Walpole’s Friars,” 18th Century Common, www.18thcenturycommon.org/friars/, April 19, 2019. 3.  Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 67. 4.  Haggerty observes that “the heteronormativity of sexual violence and the patriarchal law of the father on which Catholicism depends” leaves sexuality and religion “inextricably bound” in the English cultural imagination. See Queer Gothic (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 64. 5.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy (Strawberry Hill, 1768), IV.1: 72.

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PART IV “ Th is c op y i s to b e k e p t i n t h e B e a u cl e r c - cl o s e t t o e x p l a i n L a d y D i B e a u cl e r c ’ s D r aw i n g s . H . W. ”

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Facsimile of Horace Walpole’s Copy of the 1768 Strawberry Hill Edition

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Facsimile of Horace Walpole’s copy of The Mysterious Mother, Strawberry Hill, 1768. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 49 2528B.

14 • The Beauclerk Closet Drawings: Seven Illustrations of The Mysterious Mother Cynthia E. Roman

Even as Horace Walpole declared his play The Mysterious Mother to be a “disagreeable story,” a “disgusting play” that is “not at all food for the public,” he lavished hyperbolic praise on a series of “incomparable drawings” by Lady Diana Beauclerk that illustrates seven scenes from the tragedy. Writing to his friend Horace Mann, Walpole asserted that the Beauclerk illustrations “would be fully worthy of the best Shakespeare plays—such drawings that Salvator Rosa and Guido Reni could not surpass their expression and beauty.”1 He fashioned Beauclerk’s work—modest in scale and in execution by most connoisseurial or aesthetic standards—as the epitome of female genius.2 He assigned Beauclerk an important place in his history of modern English art and enshrined her “sacred” drawings at Strawberry Hill in an expressly designed closet, in fact dubbed the “Beauclerk Closet.”3 Wilmarth S. Lewis shared Walpole’s effusive enthusiasm for the illustrations in his quest to acquire them for his collection. In his book Rescuing Horace Walpole, Lewis included Beauclerk’s drawings for The Mysterious Mother as “Choice 11” out of just 26 he presented as the most treasured Walpoliana from his collection at Farmington. At first encounter in the dealer’s shop, Lewis was “transfixed” by the annotations on the verso of each sheet of the coveted drawings. Lewis immediately recognized that the scene, act, and subject of each illustration were inscribed in Walpole’s hand. Before he acquired the six extant drawings in 1962 from Pickering and Chatto in London, Lewis recounted that when asked what he most wanted to find, he answered promptly that it was Beauclerk’s illustrations.4 Lewis noted, perhaps with some chagrin, that Walpole’s play “The Mysterious Mother is known today only to students of eighteenth-century tragedy, a

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small audience.”5 While Lewis may have found this regrettable, a small, elite coterie was exactly what Walpole contrived for Beauclerk’s illustrations of the tragedy. Even as he wrote to his friend Horace Mann that the drawings “do not shock and disgust like their original, the tragedy,” Walpole placed the works in his bespoke closet and withheld viewing of them to all but a few select visitors.6 The performative showing and withholding of the Beauclerk drawings at Strawberry Hill perpetuated, even amplified, “the cultivated air of mystery that surrounded his text” (see the essay by Dale Townshend in this volume). Eighteenth-century audiences would of course appreciate the dual meaning of closet which can signal both to Walpole’s play as a closet drama, meant to be read privately rather than staged for a public audience, and to the small, private room or closet intended as a sequestered repository of curiosities. Both these meanings of closet befit Walpole’s efforts to control the circulation and reading of the play and to restrict viewing of the illustrations to those among his own aristocratic circles.7 Walpole’s compulsion to limit access to his play in this way meant that a fitting illustrator would also belong to the same elite circle. Diana Beauclerk (née Spencer) met the prerequisites. She was born in 1734, the eldest daughter of Charles, 5th Earl of Sunderland and 3rd Duke of Marlborough, and his wife the Honourable Elizabeth Trevor. Married twice, first to Frederick St. John, second Viscount Bolingbroke, and then to Topham Beauclerk, she was lady of the bedchamber to Queen Charlotte from 1762 to 1768. Her pursuits in the arts presumably began as a leisure activity common to the education of many privileged young women of the time.8 For Beauclerk, however, making art became an increasingly important aspect of her life and reputation, culminating with the dedicated patronage of her friend Horace Walpole. A comfortable familiarity is apparent in the transactions between artist and patron. When Beauclerk, who was among the recipients of a copy of the play, delivered her illustrations of The Mysterious Mother to Walpole in December 1775, several years after the first printing of the play in 1768, she sent a brief informal letter to him that concluded with the niceties of a close personal friendship, sharing that she was going to town for the night and inquiring if he had any commands.9 Soon after their delivery, Walpole installed the drawings in the Beauclerk Closet, a purpose-built room at Strawberry Hill (fig. 14.1). Walpole’s A Description of the Villa at Strawberry Hill, which served for posterity and functioned practically as a guide for visiting the house and its contents, included a lengthy account of the closet and its contents.10

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Figure 14.1 Two scenes from The Mysterious Mother on display in The Beauclerk Closet during the exhibition Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill, 2018–2019. Strawberry Hill House & Garden. Photo: Kilian O’Sullivan.

The Beauclerc [sic] Closet, Is a hexagon, built in 1776, and designed by Mr. Essex, architect, of Cambridge, who drew the ceiling, door, window, and surbase. In the window is a lion and two fleurs de lys, royally crowned, ancient, but repaired and ornamented by Price; and being bearings in the royal arms, serve for Beauclerc. The closet is hung with Indian blue damask, and was built on purpose to receive seven incomparable drawings of lady Diana Beauclerc for Mr. Walpole’s tragedy of the Mysterious Mother. The beauty and grace of the figures and of the children are inimitable; the

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e­ xpression of the passions most masterly, particularly in the devotion of the countess with the porter, of Benedict in the scene with Martin, and the tenderness, despair, and resolution of the countess in the last scene; in which is a new stroke of double passion in Edmund, whose right hand is clenched and ready to strike with anger, the left hand relents. In the scene of the children, some are evidently vulgar, the others children of rank; and the first child, that pretends to look down and does leer upwards, is charming. Only two scenes are represented in all the seven, and yet all are varied; and the ground in the first, by a very uncommon effect, evidently descends and rises again. These sublime drawings, the first histories she ever attempted, were all conceived and executed in a fortnight.11 Additional items in the Beauclerk Closet augmented the space as a tribute to the accomplishments of amateur genius more generally. These included a portrait of Beauclerk holding the instruments of an artist—a porte-crayon and portfolio—by John Powell that is a reduced copy after a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, fashionable portrait painter and President of the Royal Academy. Much of the other work on display in the Closet was by other high-­ranking, non-professional artists. All the pictures are framed in black and gold, a scheme favored by Walpole for his association of it with a gothic aesthetic. A writing table of Clay’s ware—“highly varnished; it is black, with blue and white ornaments in a gothic pattern, designed by Paul Sandby”—significantly holds and secretes away in “one of the drawers the play of the Mysterious Mother, to explain the drawings, bound in blue leather and gilt.”12 In relegating the volume to a desk drawer, in the space of the closet, Walpole upstaged his own text with Beauclerk’s drawings as the principal means of conveying, even performing the plot and passions of his tragic story. In keeping with Walpole’s practices, it would not be fanciful to assume that his hiding of the text was in fact a ploy to pique curiosity about it. The Beauclerk Closet was the last room to be built at Strawberry Hill. Tucked in off the back stair on the upper floor of the Beauclerk tower, it functioned as a private retreat from the public spaces of state apartments. Quite small and intimate, the room accommodated no more than a few people at a time.13 Ostensibly the miniature size of the room is appropriate to the scale of the drawings, which require close viewing, but it is also likely that the space is intentionally restricting and in keeping with the general smallness of Strawberry Hill upon which Walpole often remarked. Although included in A ­Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, the Beauclerk

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Figure 14.2 Diana Beauclerk, Act 2d, Scene 2d: Edmund and Florian with Procession of Orphans and Benedict, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 1++ Box 300.

Closet was conspicuously excluded from the public tour generally conducted by the housekeeper for those who gained coveted tickets.14 This “semi-secret closet” in Sean Silver’s words—“a public staging of privacy”—emphatically distinguishes by paradox those who are worthy from those who are not.15 Walpole explained that the Closet “is to be sacred and not shown to the profane, as the drawings are not for the eyes of the vulgar.”16 Viewing of the illustrations in the Beauclerk Closet was accordingly reserved for visitors invited and hosted by Walpole himself, just as he attempted to control the circulation of his tragic drama to friends and family. Among testimonies about the exclusive showings of the drawings is that by Lady Mary Hamilton, whose “cuttings in paper card” were also treasured by Walpole as among “Works of Genius at Strawberryhill [sic] by Persons of rank & Gentlemen not Artists.”17 Hamilton was given a showing at least twice. In her Journal for 1784 she recounted: . . . Mr. Walpole was particularly attentive to me and gave himself much trouble, as he saw I enjoyed real pleasure in looking at the pictures and

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other curious and beautiful works of art. He was also so obliging as to show me again (for I was here last year) the beautiful drawings of Lady Di Beauclerk, which are in a closet built on purpose, and which he only opens for his most particular friends. . . . The story is the most horrible to be conceived, but these drawings, though they recall to mind the horrid subject, are most affectingly interesting.18 In contrast to his proprietary treatment of the drawings, by describing Beauclerk’s theatrical scenes, as “the first histories she ever attempted,” Walpole offered them to the public and to posterity as an alternative to professional history painting, almost exclusively by men, at the top of the academic hierarchy of genres. Beauclerk’s non-professional status, accordingly, was made evident in Walpole’s assertion that all seven drawings “were conceived and executed in a fortnight”—that is, with the minimal labor alluded to by Judith Hawley’s characterization of Walpole’s “beautiful negligence of a gentleman” as a freedom from rules and the liberty to experiment (see the essay by Hawley in this volume). At the same time, the genius of Beauclerk’s work gestures importantly to academic rivals. The drawings were executed in bistre or soot-water, a medium favored by old masters, and in Walpole’s description of the “beauty and grace of the figures” in her illustrations “most masterly conveying passion through gesture and expression,” he highlighted features highly valued in academic narrative painting. In their terms The Mysterious Mother “histories” in effect stage the action of the play on the walls of the Beauclerk Closet. Beauclerk composed her figures in a shallow pictorial foreground as actors are choreographed on a proscenium. Facial expression and bodily gesture were contrived to dramatize the plot and passions. The illustration of the Countess with the Porter from Act II, scene 3, for example, demonstrates at once amateur draftsmanship and effective staging of essential plot elements (fig. 14.3). Beauclerk’s apparently rapid application of wash suggests that the drawing was executed hastily and without undue labor, presumably a metric of non-professionalism. At the same time, the Countess’s wretched state is convincingly delineated. She stands before the portal of the Castle of Narbonne, her figure isolated by the framing contours of the architecture. The scene is set outside the protecting shelter of an estate she alone commands in the absence of her deceased husband and her banished son. Her head is bowed in contemplation. Her arms are crossed tightly against her chest in a gesture that further discloses her self-imposed retreat from the world. In her right hand she holds a cross representing her penitent devotion. The porter, Peter, stands nearby with feathered hat in his

Figure 14.3 Diana Beauclerk, Act 2d, Scene 3d: The Countess of Narbonne and Peter, the Porter, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 2++ Box 300.

Figure 14.4 Diana Beauclerk, Act 3d, Scene 3d: The Countess of Narbonne, Edmund and Friar Benedict, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 3++ Box 300.

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right hand. His eyes turn upward as he raises his left hand imploring her to return to shelter before an impending storm. The abbey is visible in the middle distance on the left. A second illustration portrays the treacherous Friar Benedict and his duplicitous companion Friar Martin in Act IV, scene 1 of Walpole’s play as they plot to discover the Countess’s secret (fig. 14.5). Through the sharp grimace

Figure 14.5 Diana Beauclerk, Act 4th, Scene 1st: Friar Benedict and Friar Martin, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 4++ Box 300.

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Figure 14.6 Diana Beauclerk, Act 4th, Scene 3d: The Countess of Narbonne and Adeliza, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 5++ Box 300.

of Benedict’s furrowed brow, which is heightened by the heavy dark contours that delineate his facial features and in his theatrical, exaggerated posture in mid-stride as he forcefully grabs Martin’s wrist, Beauclerk illustrates the intensity of Benedict’s passions, which impetuously “boil over the bounds of prudence.” Benedict’s outstretched arm commands Martin’s attention. As the

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Figure 14.7 Diana Beauclerk, Act 5th, Scene 6th: The Countess of Narbonne, Edmund and Adeliza, 1776. Bistre (soot water). Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. SH Contents B373 no. 6++ Box 300.

gazes of the two friars meet, the alarmed Martin raises his hand in acquiescence. (For descriptions of additional drawings, Figures 14.2, 14.2, 14.6, 14.7, see the essays by Nicole Garret and Marcie Frank in this volume.) What is notable about the “genius” of these drawings is the masterful focus on the inward passions and struggles of the characters.19 Indeed Lady Mary Hamilton’s nuanced assessment of Beauclerk’s illustrations quoted above clearly distinguished the “affectingly interesting” and “beautiful” drawings from the “most horrible” story. Nothing in any of Beauclerk’s scenes conveys the incest at the center of the mystery. That remained secreted in the volume. In this respect, it is significant that Walpole chose Beauclerk’s illustrations to be the outward manifestation of the play. Beauclerk’s pictorial performance of Walpole’s play without the shock and disgust he so insisted made it unfit fulfilled his wish to see the play staged, if only in the protected, private venue of the Beauclerk Closet. In fact, the absence of observably offensive content in the drawings paradoxically points to a complementary (or

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primary) performance of Walpole’s fashioning of an elite coterie of friends and family possessing a superiority of judgment and taste as exclusively fit readers and viewers. While this social and political exclusivity may unsettle many today, since Lewis’s acquisition over fifty years ago, Walpole’s Beauclerk drawings have been available to students and scholars at the library and for visitors at public exhibitions, thus expanding access beyond the deliberately limited audience of Walpole’s lifetime.20 All six drawings are reproduced in the present volume to reach an even wider audience of viewers, together with a full facsimile of the volume of his play that Walpole kept in the Beauclerk Closet. Notes 1.  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, October 31, 1779, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 24: 524. Subsequent citations of Walpole’s correspondence will be in abbreviated format as HWC. 2.  Cynthia Roman, “The Art of Lady Diana Beauclerk: Horace Walpole and Female Genius,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 155–69. 3.  Walpole to Mason, July 6, 1777, HWC, 28: 318. 4.  Wilmarth S. Lewis. Rescuing Horace Walpole (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 107. 5. Lewis, Rescuing Horace Walpole, 110. 6.  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, October 31, 1779, HWC, 24: 524. 7.  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Strahan, 1755). 8.  See Kim Sloan, “A Noble Art”: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: The British Museum Press, 2000); and Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 9.  Lady Diana Beauclerk to Horace Walpole, December 16, 1775, HWC, 41: 321. For a record of a copy given to Diana Beauclerk, see A. T. Hazen, A Bibliography of the Strawberry Hill Press (Folksetone and London: Dawson, 1973), 79, 84. Hazen records that Diana Beauclerk’s copy with her autograph name on the title page is in the Morgan Collection, Special Collections, Princeton University Library, 3974.9.895.28. 10.  Michael Snodin, “Going to Strawberry Hill,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Snodin and Roman, 18. 11.  Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole (Strawberry Hill, 1774), 140–41. This account first appeared in an Appendix to the 1774 edition of A Description of the Villa. The Appendix was printed in 1781. Hazen, Bibliography, 109.

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12.  This copy is reproduced in facsimile in this volume. Walpole wrote on the fly leaf: “This copy is to be kept in the Beauclerc closet to explain Lady Di Beauclerc’s Drawings H.W.” It is now at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 49.2528c. 13.  The room measures 2.9 x 2.5 meters. I am grateful to Julia Reed, Operations and Administration Officer at Strawberry Hill, for providing these measurements. 14.  Snodin, “Going to Strawberry Hill,” 21–22. 15.  Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 178. 16.  Walpole to Mason, July 6, 1777, HWC, 28: 318. 17.  A manuscript list inserted in an extra-illustrated copy of Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa, 1774. The Lewis Walpole Library, 49 2523. 18. HWC, 31: 216. For collected testimonies about viewing Beauclerk’s drawings, see Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story and The Mysterious Mother, A Tragedy, ed. Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), Appendix A. 19.  For a divergent account see Jade Higa, “My Son, My Lover: Gothic Contagion and Material Sexuality in The Mysterious Mother,” in Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830, ed. Laura Engel and Elaine M. McGirr (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 179–97. In support of her thesis that the play was a “Gothic contagion,” Higa emphasizes instead that “visitors found the drawings as horrific as the text.” 20.  Public exhibitions have included A Treasure House in Farmington: The Lewis Walpole Library, 1999–2000, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut; Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, 2009–2010, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection, 2018–2019, Strawberry Hill House and Garden, Twickenham.

Con t ribu tors

Mis t y G. A nder s on, University of Tennessee Knoxville Jill C a mpbell , Yale University Al C opp ol a , John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY M a rc ie Fr a nk , C  oncordia University Nic ol e G a r r e t,Adelphi University J u di t h H aw l e y, Royal Holloway, University of London Jona t h a n K r a mnic k , Y  ale University Je a n I. M a r sden, U  niversity of Connecticut C her y l Ni xon, Fort Lewis College M a t t he w M. R ee v e, Q  ueens University C y n t hi a E . Rom a n, Y  ale University Da l e T ow nshend, Manchester Metropolitan University Dav id Wor r a ll , N  ottingham Trent University Nic ol e M a nsfiel d W r igh t, U  niversity of Colorado Boulder

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Acknowledgmen ts

This publication emerged from a staged reading of The Mysterious Mother together with a one-day mini-conference in 2018, which were sponsored by the Lewis Walpole Library in partnership with the Yale Center for British Art. We are grateful to the Lewis Walpole Library and its founders. None of this would have been possible without W. S. Lewis and Annie Burr Auchincloss Lewis, whose life work and bequest to Yale University have ensured Horace Walpole’s legacy. We celebrate their vision for a center for eighteenth-century studies in Farmington to foster research and programs and publications of work based in the Library’s collections. Our project came to fruition under the then new leadership of Jonathan Kramnick, Director of the Lewis Walpole Library, who embraced our aspirations to experiment with a staged reading of Walpole’s extraordinary play as part of his larger agenda of programs to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Walpole’s birth. The scholarly reassessment of the tragedy that these events fostered underlie the present publication. These events rely on the work of many, and we welcome the opportunity to reflect with gratitude on the contributions of scholars, actors, friends, and colleagues who so generously lent their creativity, scholarship, and energy to imagine that Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother in fact could be performed. It was a truly collaborative effort of the best kind, informed by a confluence of many disciplines and perspectives and producing significant scholarship and no small measure of camaraderie. The live events at the source of this volume occurred in a period before the arrival of COVID-19 made the feasibility of “in-person” events seem tenuous and extraordinary; much of its editing took place under pandemic conditions that made collaborative communica-

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tion about a shared project, even virtually across a continent and ocean, feel especially sweet. While many of us held a long-standing (even closet) fascination with Walpole’s provocative play, generative conversations for our project began with the shared imagination and erudition of the Library’s community of eighteenthcentury scholars, Yale faculty, and staff who were excited to see a play performed that its author protested was unfit for the stage. Special acknowledgment goes to Daniel Gustafson for his engaging insights about Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother in connection with his work on Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700–1832 (2020) during a fellowship at the Library in 2016. Dan’s collaborative framing of the possibilities stirred our excitement and helped to build commitment for this project and to inspire momentum for the performance of The Mysterious Mother. Thank you, Dan! The planning and logistics of the performance and conference were supported by the exceptional work and dedication of the entire staff at the Lewis Walpole Library. We are grateful to Nicole L. Bouché, W. S. Lewis Librarian and Executive Director, and to Michelle Privée, Senior Administrative Assistant. As the Lewises envisioned, the foundation of the Library’s best programs has been the research in the Library’s collections by scholars, who are supported with remarkable diligence and expertise by the Library reading room staff. Special thanks go to Susan Walker, Head of Public Services, and Library Assistants Kristen McDonald and Scott Poglitsch. Our program benefited from the partnership with the Yale Center for British Art to present the staged reading in the lecture hall at the museum. It is always a pleasure to work with colleagues at the YCBA. Amy Meyer, former Director and member of the Lewis Walpole Library Board of Managers, warmly welcomed our program, as she has so generously supported the LWL throughout her tenure. Jane Nowosadko, Head of Public Services, and Beth Miller, Deputy Director for Advancement, helped with event planning and promotion. We are also grateful to the AV staff for lighting, sound, and projection and to Guy Ortelva in Yale Broadcast Services who managed the recording and captioning. Rebecca Martz in the Office of the University Printer provided elegant graphic design for publicity posters and the playbill for the performance. Costumes were selected and provided with the expert assistance of Elinor Watts at Hartford Stage, Mark Adam Rampmeyer and the staff at Goodspeed Costume Collection and Rentals, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Depart-

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ment of Theatre. Alice Trent at the University of Tennessee created videography that was an essential element of the impact of the play’s production. The true stars of the staged reading were the scholar-performers whose ideas and energy contributed so much to the vision and realization of these programs. Many have been Lewis Walpole Library fellows. David Worrall provided an abridged script adapted for our stage reading. Georgina Lock’s inspired performance as the Countess anchored the production. Misty Anderson as director presided over the collaboration of our actor-scholars in the process of discovery and performance. We applaud the performance of all our actors, including Dr. Chelsea Phillips as Adeliza, Dale Townshend as Peter the Porter, and Charlie Gillespie and Justin Crisp as the duo Friars Benedict and Martin. Independent scholar and Lewis Walpole Library Board of Manager Member Stephen Clarke played the servant. The cast was rounded out with the assistance of Joseph Roach, who found for us two wonderfully talented undergraduates in the Yale Program in Theater and Performance Studies: Carlos Guanche as Count Edmund and Gilberto Saenz as his friend Florian. Special thanks go to Catherine Sheehy, Dramaturg in the Yale School of Drama and Resident Dramaturg at the Yale Repertory Theatre, for participating in the rehearsals and moderating an actor talk-back after the play. Turning the performance and the papers from the mini-conference into a book involved a whole host of additional efforts as well as the assistance of additional contributors. Foremost we are grateful for the significant scholarship and enthusiastic dedication of our conference participants and authors: Misty G. Anderson, Al Coppola, Marcie Frank, Nicole Garret, Judith Hawley, Jean I. Marsden, Cheryl Nixon, Matthew M. Reeve, Dale Townshend, David Worrall, and Nicole Mansfield Wright. In envisioning this volume, we always aspired to keep it closely grounded in the rich and unusual cluster of 2018 events, so what we asked of our conference speakers required restraint as well as patient diligence: to prepare versions of their papers suitable for reading and for lasting preservation in print without embarking on major re-castings or expansions of their arguments. Our contributors entered into the demands of this aim with a gracious and willing spirit. For this stage of the project’s development, we again give thanks to Jonathan Kramnick, who in his role as Editor (with Steve Pincus) of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press advocated for the publication of the proceedings. We are grateful for the expert guidance of Adina Berk, Senior Editor in History at the Press, and the assistance of Ash Lago in preparing the manuscript and Kristy Leonard in

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contracts. We appreciate the time and careful attention and endorsement that the anonymous reviewers gave to our project. At the Lewis Walpole Library, we are grateful too in this phase of our project for the continuing support of Susan Walker, whose good cheer and willingness to lend a hand in sorting technology, formatting, and a host of other obstacles in preparing the manuscript are enormously appreciated. True to form, Kristen McDonald organized images and permissions and aided with other sundry tasks with the utmost reliability and grace. Additional thanks for images go to Michael Frost at Yale University Library’s Department of Manuscripts and Archives, to Christopher Zollo at the Medical Historical Library in Yale School of Medicine, and to Julia Reed at Strawberry Hill House. For unfailingly efficient and patient assistance with production of the book, we are grateful to Charlie Clark, Project Manager and Editor at Newgen North America. We have greatly relished our collaboration with each other throughout this project’s several phases and feel very fortunate to have drawn on the talents and dedicated efforts of so many at every stage. Cynthia E. Roman and Jill Campbell

Index

Page locators in italics indicate figures. audience, 5; eighteenth-century numbers, 113, 133, 170; ending of The Mysterious Mother concealed from, 2–3, 24, 30, 32, 38–39, 93–95, 98, 98–100, 130; “Grecian,” 15; intensive cognition required of, 77–81, 85; and orphan figure, 23, 24, 28; splitsubject attitude, 50   Baillie, Joanna, 114, 129 Baines, Paul, 71, 73, 77–78, 104, 124 Baker, David Erskine, 11 Ball, Edward, 129 Barrett, Thomas, 10 Barry, Elizabeth, 106 Bateman, Dicky, 68, 69 Beatrice (character, The Mysterious Mother), 2, 15, 25, 172–73 Beauclerk, Diana, 6, 10, 120, 329, 330. See also illustrations for The Mysterious Mother Beauclerk, Topham, 14 Beauclerk Closet, 6, 97, 329–40 Beauclerk Tower, 97, 119–20, 332 Beecher Hogan, Charles, 126

Abelard, 63 Addison, Joseph, 67 Adeliza (character, The Mysterious Mother), 3–4; as central orphan character, 24–25; desire to claim Countess as a mother, 24–25, 29, 32–33, 43; illustrations of, 43–45, 44, 47n19, 97–98, 98, 337, 338; marriage to Edmund, 4, 23, 34, 83, 91–92 advice literature for mothers, 38, 46n6 All in the Wrong (Murphy), 117 amateur theatricals, 113, 117–23 Anderson, Misty G., 1, 137, 173 Anderton, John, 98 Anecdotes on Painting (Walpole), 64–67 antiquaries, writings of, 14, 63–64 architecture: Gothic, 64–73, 66; as proto-psychoanalytic space, 73; sixteenth-century classicism, 65, 67; in Walpole’s travelogues, 80 Aristotle, 15, 81 Atala, ou Les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert (Chateaubriand), 131 Atala and Chactas; or, The Law of the Desert (Dibdin), 131

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belief systems, 4–5 Benedict (character, The Mysterious Mother): authoritarianism attempted by, 77; illustrations of, 335, 336, 336–38; and negation, 82–83; psychological and sexual sacrifices, 178; treachery of, 3–4, 80, 106, 109, 336, 336–38; view of Countess as too logical, 39–40; Worrall’s abridgement of lines, 171–72 Bentley, Richard, 64 Beringaria (character, The Fatal Discovery), 108–9 Berry, Mary, 67, 93, 118 Bertucci, Paola, 51 Betterton, Thomas, 106 Biographia Dramatica, 13 Boscawen, George, 126, 174 Bowers, Toni, 37–38, 42 Brandenburgh House, Hammersmith, 118 Brown, Marshall, 95 Brydges, Egerton, 126 Bull, Richard, 10 Burgoyne, John, 118, 126, 174 Burney, Frances, 18, 95, 98, 100, 103, 174; closet performance staged by, 115 Burwick, Frederick, 131 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 19, 124, 129–30   Cadell, Thomas, 94 Camden, William, 64 “camp,” 68, 73, 176 Campbell, Jill, 1, 80 Carlos, Don, 94, 104–6, 107, 111n11 Castle, Terry, 29 castle motif, 5, 40, 48–49 The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 2, 10, 48–50, 82, 91; Count of Narbonne as

adaptation of, 93–98, 96, 99, 116–17; editions of, 95; giant helmet scene, 49, 80; prefaces to, 49–50 Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors (Walpole), 118–19 Catholicism: aesthetic and sensory trappings of, 62; confession replaced by psychoanalysis, 72; Dissolution of the Monasteries, 62, 64–65, 71, 73; Gothic-Catholic past, 64–67; historical roots of gothic in, 62, 64–67; and homoeroticism, 68–69; structures of knowledge and power upset by Countess, 72–73; villainy of monks in literature, 3, 40, 53–55, 71– 72, 92. See also crypto-Catholicism The Cenci (Shelley), 124, 174, 177 Charlemont (James Caulfeild, 4th Viscount), 12 Charlotte, Queen, 330 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 131 child: dependency of betrayed, 24; longing for parent, 26; powerlessness of, 20, 30; redefined as orphan, 23. See also orphan, figure of; orphaning The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 Chute, John, 9, 14, 68 Cibber, Colley, 168 circumstance, 38, 40, 43, 45 Clarke, Stephen, 137, 173 classicism, 65, 67 class status, 116–20, 333–34 Clery, E. J., 78 Clive, Catherine “Kitty,” 18, 73, 113 cloister, as anticipation of homosexual closet, 69 closet, as term, 69, 330 closet drama, 13–14, 114–15, 330. See also theater Cobb mansion, Adderbury, 126–27 Cole, William, 10, 14, 62, 68, 121n11

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 20, 103, 129, 174 Collection of Prologues and Epilogues and other Pieces relative to the Stage . . . from the Year 1780 (Walpole), 117 Collier, Jeremy, 127 Colman, George the Elder, 95 Constantine Palaelogus (Constantine and Valeria) (Baillie), 129 Conway, Henry Seymour, 118 The Cornucopia or Literary and Dramatic Mirror, 131 Countess of Narbonne (character, The Mysterious Mother): desire and rejection expressed by, 30; as disruptive of relationship between family and faith, 72; expenditure of Edmund’s fortune, 39, 42; as father figure, 4, 42–43; as female leader, 78, 83–84; fragmented family, interest in, 29; illustrations of, 43–45, 44, 47n19, 97–98, 98, 335, 337, 338; misreading of, 37–38; as modern figure, 177–78; piety of as “specious theatre,” 91–93; ravings of/loss of sanity, 3, 4, 30, 32–34, 41, 43, 73, 109–10; reason of, 3, 5, 34, 39–42; as reformed Protestant figure, 40; resistance to superstition, 37–38, 41; virtues of, 3, 39–40, 42–43, 83 The Count of Narbonne (Jephson), 93–98, 96, 99, 116–17 The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, 18 Covent Garden, 116–17, 129 Craven, Elizabeth (Margravine of Anspach), 118 credulity, and status, 82 Crisp, Justin, 137, 173, 175, 176–77 Cumberland, Richard, 169 Curran, Stuart, 177

Dashwood, Francis, 69 “The Dear Witches” (Walpole), 9, 95–97, 117 Deffand, Madame du, 63 Defoe, Daniel, 38; Roxana, 42, 46–47n15, 46n14 Description of the Villa at Strawberry Hill (Walpole), 97, 330–32 Dibdin, Charles Isaac Mungo, 131 Dibdin, Thomas, 113, 124, 128–31 Dissolution of the Monasteries, 62, 64–65, 71, 73 Dodsley, James, publisher, 10–11, 94, 115, 121n11 Don Carlos (Otway), 104–6, 107, 111n11 Don Sebastian (Dryden), 104–5 Drake, Nathan, 19 Drama; or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine, 131 Drury, Joseph, 50 Drury Lane, 114, 117–18, 129 Dryden, John, 104–5, 107, 111n7 Dugdale, William, 64   earthquakes, 58, 60n16; London, 1750, 41, 43, 52 Edda; Or The Hermit of Warkworth, A Melo-Dramatic Romance (Founded on the Rev. Dr. Percy’s Celebrated Tale) (Ball), 129 Edmund (character, The Mysterious Mother), 3; desire to claim Countess as a mother, 25–26, 43; exiled and rejected by Countess, 23, 25–26, 32; illustrations of, 97–98, 98, 332, 333, 335, 338; marriage to Adeliza, 4, 23, 34, 83, 91–92; negation in speeches of, 84–85; and thunderstorm scene, 53 Edwy and Elgiva (Burney), 174

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electricity, 5; experiments, 50–51, 51; ­satires of, 51–52. See also lightning Eloisa to Abelard (Pope), 71 English Renaissance, 65 Erskine, Thomas, 56–58 Euripides, 104, 106 Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Franklin), 55   False Appearances (adapted by Conway), 118 familial redefinition, 23–36; disruption of family and faith, 72; horror of betrayal, 33; and incest’s familial redefinition, 24; mystery of familial relations, 24–25; orphaning as form of, 29–30; and supernatural, 31–32. See also incest; orphaning family romance, 71 The Fashionable Friends (Berry), 118 Fatal Discovery, or Love in Ruins (1698), 14 The Fatal Discovery; or, Love in Ruines (anonymous), 107–11, 112n21 Faust (Goethe), 14 Ferguson, James, 52 fiction, Romantic-era, 19, 38, 45 Florian (character, The Mysterious Mother), 3; comment on Countess’s religion, 38; complication of Countess’s character by, 91; illustration of, 27, 331, 333; religious effect of castle on, 40; as repetition of lost parent, 25; and thunderstorm scene, 5, 53–55; view of Countess as ruthless, 39 “Florizel” poem, 13 Frank, Frederick S., 124, 126 Frank, Marcie, 2, 9 Franklin, Benjamin, 55

Garrick, Richard, 116, 168 Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, 56 Genest, John, 108, 112n21 George II, funeral of, 67–68 Georgian plays, modern stagings of, 168–69 Gertrude (character, Hamlet), 92–93 Gildon, Charles, 107 Gillespie, Charlie, 137, 173, 175, 176–77, 178 Gjeilo, Ola, 176 Glasgow Citizens Theatre, Scotland, 124–25 Glorious Revolution of 1688, 65 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 14 Gothic: anti-supernatural version of, 49; architecture, 64–71, 66; castle motif, 5, 40, 48–49; Gothic-Catholic past, 64–67; and Henry III’s reign, 65; historical roots in Catholicism, 62, 64–67; and homoeroticism, 68–69; internalizing and psychologizing, 58–59; as investigation of terror and pity, 17, 50; “mongrel,” 65; Puritan revolution as end of, 65; as response to Catholicism, 62–63; setting, 3, 62–63; shaped by The Mysterious Mother, 48; subjective response, preoccupation with, 40–41; “true” as environment of religious and social freedom, 65; Walpole’s “theory” of, 64 “Gothic Revival,” 67 Grafton, Duchess of, 51–52 Graham, James, 52 Gray, Thomas, 9, 65 Guanche, Carlos, 137, 173, 175, 176, 178   Haggerty, George, 73, 80, 175, 178, 179n4 Hall, Joseph, 14

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Hamilton, Mary, 333–34, 338 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 92–93 Hamm, Robert, 92 Hanson, Ellis, 68 Haslewood, Joseph, 77 Hawley, Judith, 334 “Hellfire Caves,” 69 Heloise, 63 Henderson, John, 10 Henry III, 65 Henry VII, 65 Henry VIII, 64–65 Heptaméron, 14 Hieroglyphic Tales (Walpole), 97 Hippolitus (Euripides), 104, 106 History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama 1800–1850, 131–33 History of the Royal Academy of Paris, 58 homosociality, 68–69, 126 Hopwood, James, 131 Hume, David, 41   illustrations for The Mysterious Mother, 176, 329–40; Beauclerk Closet, 97, 329–40; Beauclerk Tower built to house, 97, 119–20, 332; Benedict and Martin (Act 4, Scene 1), 336, 336–38; Countess, Edmund and Adeliza (Act V, Scene 6), 97–98, 98, 338; Countess, Edmund and Benedict (Act III, Scene 3), 335; Countess and Adeliza (Act IV, Scene 4), 43–45, 44, 47n19, 337; Countess with the Porter (Act II, Scene 3), 331, 334–36, 335; expanded access to, 339; Gothic/ Catholic settings, 62, 63; incest sanitized by, 43, 45; orphans’ procession (Act II, Scene 2), 26, 27, 331, 333; as performance, 338–39; push-pull effect of, 44–45. See also Beauclerk, Diana

incest: as backstory for The Mysterious Mother, 2; and child’s longing for parent, 26; confessions of disapproved, 107; consciously performed as disgusting, 2, 15, 18–20, 93–95, 109–10; desire itself as criminal, 107; as expression of excess, 30; as Freudian “family romance,” 71; misreading of, 37, 45; orphaning and compounding of, 28–30, 35n3; orphaning conflated with, 33; “pardonable” vs. “disgusting,” 94, 105–7; premeditated, shock value of, 14–15, 18, 45n4; repetition of illicit desire, 25–26. See also familial redefinition incest narratives in literature: acceptance of in eighteenth century, 105, 113, 126, 131–33; classical tradition of, 15, 78; Don Carlos story, 94, 104–6, 107, 111n11; The Fatal Discovery; or, Love in Ruines (anonymous), 107–11; no legal ban against performance of, 131; performance of in eighteenth century, 103–4; Phaedra story, 104, 106–7; in Romantic-era fiction, 19; sources for Mysterious Mother, 14, 78, 85n3 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 19 inheritance, question of, 39, 84, 91–93, 178 interiority, 73, 97–98, 338 Isabella (character, The Castle of Otranto), 92, 97 The Italian (Radcliffe), 19   James I, 65 Jephson, Robert, 93–98, 96, 99, 105 Jordan, Mark, 69   Kahn, Louis, 176, 178 Kant, Immanuel, 81

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Kareem, Sarah Tindall, 49 Katterfelto, Gustavus, 52 King Lear (Shakespeare), 84 King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, 65, 66, 68 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) (Kant), 81   language, horror of, 33–34 Latour, Bruno, 55, 60n20 Le Brun, Charles, 97 Lew, Matthew, 19 Lewis, Annie Burr, xiii, 1n1 Lewis, W.S. (Wilmarth Sheldon), xiii, 1n1, 329–30 Lewis Walpole Library: manuscript copies by others at, 10; print of Graham and Katterfelto, 52, 53 Lewis Walpole Library/Yale Center for British Art performance of The Mysterious Mother, 131, 168–73; abridged text by Worrall, 56, 137–67; staging, 174–79 Licensing Act (1737), 128 licensing of performances, 113–14, 128–30 lightning, 5; clergy’s involvement in warnings, 58; as divine retribution, 5, 48; as sublime, 48, 58; thunderstorm in The Mysterious Mother, 50, 53–55, 58. See also electricity lightning rods, 55–58, 57 Lilley, James, 100 Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative (Drake), 19 Little Theatre in the Haymarket, 9, 118 Lives of the Novelists (Scott), 20 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 58 Lock, Georgina, 131, 137, 168, 173, 176, 177, 178

London earthquakes, 1750, 41, 43, 52 Lort, Michael, 14 Lowndes, Thomas, 10 Luther, Martin, 14 Lycon (character, Phaedra and Hippolitus), 106   Macbeth (Shakespeare), 9, 84, 95 Magna Carta, 65 Mandell, Laura, 82 Manfred (Byron), 124 Manfred (character, The Castle of Otranto), 92 Mann, Horace, 10, 13; letter to Walpole, 51; Walpole’s letters to, 41, 71, 114–15, 329, 330 Marguerite of Navarre, 14 Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (Byron), 19, 129–30 Marsden, Jean I., 2 Marshall, William (The Castle of Otranto), 92 Martin (character, The Mysterious Mother), 3, 31–32; illustration of, 336, 336–38; thunderstorm dispute with Florian, 5, 54; view of Countess as heretic, 39 Mason, William, 14–18, 16, 94, 110–11, 115–16 The Massacre (Inchbald), 19 Medea, 107 medievalism, 64, 68, 74n17 “Medmenham Monks,” 69 “melodrama,” 128 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 81 The Mind is a Collection (Silver), 97 The Miniature Picture (Craven), 118 misreading, 37 Miss Margaret Taylor (Hopwood), 131

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Miss Taylor of the Surry [sic] Theatre (after Drummond), 131, 132 Modern British Drama (Ballantyne), 19–20 modernity, 177–78 monasticism, and monosexual culture, 68–69 The Monk (Lewis), 19 Montagu, George, 9, 68, 113–15, 131, 174; reading at home of, 126–27 Monthly Review, 113 Moody, Jane, 117 morphemes, 79 motherhood: affective, 37–38, 39, 42, 44–45; as dispensable, 43; economic, 4, 42; Enlightenment norms, 38; as “natural” impulse, 43–45; religious feeling linked with, 4, 37–39; spectrum of, 37–38; stewardship role, 42 Mulhallen, Jacqueline, 114 The Mysterious Husband (Cumberland), 169 The Mysterious Mother (Walpole): 2018 staged reading of, 1–2, 174–79; Advertisement to the 1791 Dublin edition, 107–8; afterlife of, 19–20; alterations suggested by Mason, 14–18, 16, 17, 110, 115–16; anti-­supernatural version of the Gothic in, 49; as archetypal myth, 14; Beauclerk Tower built to house drawings, 97, 119–20, 332; belief systems in, 4–5; “Chorus of Orphans,” 24, 26–28, 27, 31, 53, 176, 332, 333; as closet drama during Walpole’s lifetime, 13–14; closet performances of, 114–15; Cobb mansion, Adderbury reading, 126–27; confusion of language in, 33–35; Dodsley edition, 10–11, 94, 115; Dub-

lin edition, 12–13, 94, 107–8, 121n11; editions, 6; ending concealed from audience, 2–3, 24, 30, 32, 38–39, 93–95, 98, 98–100, 130; Epilogue, 18, 73, 113; expanded access to, 1, 6, 339; facsimile of Walpole’s copy of 1768 edition, 183–328; friars’ plot to destroy Countess, 3–4; Hamlet’s influence on, 92–93; imaginings of what is not present in, 78–79, 81; incest as backstory for, 2; inheritance in, 39, 84, 91–92, 178; intellectual and religious controversies in, 4–5; intrigue created by Walpole, 11–12, 20, 48, 330; jealousy suggested as alternate plot for, 15–18; lack of physical detail in, 80, 81; learning by heart, 114, 115; Lewis Walpole Library/Yale Center for British Art production, 131, 168–79; manuscript annotations, ca. 1780, 10; manuscript copies, 9, 114–15, 121n11; monstrous birth as subject matter, 100; moral judgement evacuated in, 92; Narbonne Castle three-act version, 124–33, 125, 132; negation in, 72, 77–87; opposing sensory conditions and affective states in, 78–79; piracy, 10–12, 16, 94, 114, 121n11; plot of, 3–4, 91–92, 107–8; political matters in, 78; positive descriptors scarce in, 78–80, 82; Postscript, 2–3, 38, 41, 92, 103, 119; prefaces, 10–11, 49–50, 94, 103; pre-Reformation era setting, 72–73, 78, 177–78; printing history, 100; prologue, 13; publication history, 10–13, 16; push/ pull effect in, 44–45; reception of, 13–19, 113; setting, 5, 62, 71–73, 178; shock value of, 2–3, 5; sources for,

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The Mysterious Mother (continued) 14, 78, 85n3; “specious theatre” of, 91–93, 100; stageability, questions of, 2, 5, 13; Strawberry Hill Press printing, 1, 10, 100, 114, 116, 183–238; Surrey Theatre performance, 113; textual life and afterlife of, 9–10; thunderstorm, meaning of, 5, 31–32; thunderstorm scene, 53–55, 58; unauthorized edition of, 10; Walpole’s efforts to control, 2, 10, 94, 99–100, 124, 330, 333. See also illustrations for The Mysterious Mother; names of individual characters   Narbonne Castle: Or, The Mysterious Mother (Walpole), 124–33, 125, 132 Natural History of Religion (Hume), 41 Nature will Prevail (Walpole), 9, 95, 118 negation, 5, 72, 77–87, 86n8; affixal, 79, 82; bound morphemes, 79; ­constructive use of, 82–83; deprivation and lack, 81; in eighteenth-­century works, 82; feats of reversal in Shakespeare, 84; nonaffixal, 79, 82; prefixal adjectives of, 80 Nicoll, Allardyce, 131–33 Nollet, Abbé, 55   Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 14, 15, 19, 20, 50, 104; gothicized, 71; Oedipus as “political culprit,” 77 Old England, 9, 97 Oldfield, Anne, 106 O’Malley, Patrick, 69 orphan: existential homelessness of, 24, 35n2; manufactured, 25; as mystery, 30–31; symbolic claim of,

26–28; symbolic orphaning, 23; as symbolic structure, 24 orphan, figure of, 4, 23–36; as central to unlocking horror, 33; “Chorus of Orphans,” 24, 26–28, 27, 31, 53, 176, 332, 333; duplicated throughout play, 24–26; as hope for positive ­relationships, 27, 28; as plot catalyst, 29; as symbolic marker of crime, 27 orphaning: and activity of interpretation, 24, 30–33; as act of betrayal, 23, 30, 33, 35; central position of in play, 24, 33; and compounding of incest, 28–30, 35n3; confused language of, 33–35; as disempowering lack of knowledge, 33; as everyday structure, 30; as form of familial redefinition, 29–30 The Orphan (Otway), 105, 111n10, 113 Osborn, George, 126, 174 Otway, Thomas, 104–6, 111n10, 113   performance: Beauclerk’s illustrations as, 338–39; eighteenth-century schedules, 169; of incest narratives, 103–4; of publication, 93, 98–100; of Walpole’s authorship, 95; Walpole’s writing as theatrical, 93. See also Surrey Theatre performances of The Mysterious Mother (1821); theater Perpendicular buildings, 65 Peter the Porter (character, The Mysterious Mother), 39, 79, 334–35, 335 Petronius, 65 Phaedra and Hippolitus (Smith), 104, 106–7, 112n15 Phèdre (Racine), 106 Phillips, Chelsea, 137, 175

I n d e x   355

Philosophical Transactions, 56 Pic Nic Society, 118 Pinkerton, John, 18–19 Pope, Alexander, 71 pre-Enlightened thought, 52, 55, 58 Pritchard, Hannah, 127 psychoanalysis, 72 Public Advertiser, 12 Pugin, Northmore, 67 Puritan revolution/English Civil War, as end of Gothic, 65   Queer Gothic (Haggerty), 175   Racine, Jean, 104, 106 Radcliffe, Ann, 19, 50 readings of The Mysterious Mother (Walpole): September 20, 1784, 18 reason, 39–41, 81–82 Reeve, Clara, 50 “reforms,” sixteenth-century, 64–65 religion: dichotomies of, 39–40; earthquakes and lightning, clergy’s response to, 41, 58; as focus for guilt, 38–39; institutional power of, 178–79; maternal behavior linked with, 4, 37–39; natural order, 40–41; spectrum of difference, 37–38 Rescuing Horace Walpole (Lewis), 329 Reynold, Joshua, 67 Richard III (Shakespeare), 87n21, 168–69 Richardson, Samuel, 38 Richmond House theatricals, 117 Roman, Cynthia E., 1, 168, 174 Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (Defoe), 42, 46–47n15, 46n14 Royal Academy, 120 Royal Coburg (Old Vic), 129 Ruskin, John, 67

Sabor, Peter, 94 Saenz, Gilberto, 137, 173, 176 satire, 37 A Scene in a Nunnery Garden, 70 Scott, Walter, 19–20, 50 Sebastian, Don (King of Portugal), 104 Sémiramis (Voltaire), 104 setting, 5, 62–63; pre-Reformation era, 72–73, 78, 177–78 Shakespeare, William, 95, 168–69; influence on Walpole, 9, 84; negation in, 84, 87n21 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 20, 124, 174, 177 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 118 Short Notes on the Life of Horatio Walpole (Walpole), 9, 95 Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (Collier), 127 Silver, Sean, 97–98, 100, 333 Smith, Edmund, 104, 106–7, 112n15 Sophocles, 14, 19, 20, 104 Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Coleridge, 20 Spelman, Henry, 64 St. James’s Chronicle, 11–12, 56 Strawberry Hill, 68–71; Beauclerk Tower, 97, 119–20; as “monastery,” 69–71; monuments at, 64; “Paraclete” (entrance hall), 71; as Wunderkammer, 97 Strawberry Hill Press, 1, 10, 100, 114, 116; facsimile of Walpole’s copy of 1768 edition, 183–328 Straznicky, Marta, 114 subjectivity, 40, 50, 65, 67–69, 73 sublime, lightning as, 48, 58 supernatural: “explained,” 50; and familial redefinition, 31–32; lightning as, 5, 48–61

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superstition, 5, 16, 45, 103; Countess’s resistance to, 37–41, 43, 81–82; and electrical experiments, 52; satire of, 37; Walpole’s views of, 48–50, 52 Surrey Theatre performances of The Mysterious Mother (1821), 113, 124, 125; as abridged and musicalized version, 128–30; lack of printed edition, 127–28; licensing concerns, 128–30; reviews of, 131; as “Serious Melodramatic Romance,” 128 Table Talk (Coleridge), 103 Tartar (frigate), 56–58 Taylor, Margaret, 131 terror and pity, concern with, 15, 17, 20, 38, 50, 93 theater: amateur theatricals, 113, 117–23; burletta genre, 128; and class status, 116–20; closet drama as alternative, 114; French, 107, 119, 120; licensed performances, 113–14, 128–30; melodrama, 128; minor theaters, 117; participatory nature of private, 117; patent theaters, 113–14, 116–17, 129; private theatricals, 117–18; Walpole’s view of, 116–20. See also closet drama; performance; Surrey Theatre performances of The Mysterious Mother (1821) Theodore (character, The Castle of Otranto), 92 Theseus (Phaedra and Hippolitus), 106 “Thoughts on Tragedy” (Walpole), 9, 93–94 “Thunder Houses,” 56, 57 Tottenham Street Theatre, 118 Tottie, Gunnel, 79 Townshend, Dale, 137, 173 Trent, Alice, 175, 175

“Ubi Caritas” (Gjeilo), 176 uniquity/singularity, 100, 110–11   Voltaire, 104 Vyne (Hampshire), 68   Walker, Joseph Cooper, 12 Walpole, Horace: allusion to posthumous performance, 9–10, 115; architectural detail in travelogues of, 80; as “bitter foe to priests,” 71–72, 171; class status of, 116–20, 333–34; collections of, 68, 97, 100, 117, 329; control of The Mysterious Mother, 2, 10, 33, 94, 99–100, 124, 330; focus on sexuality of, 77–78; private reading of The Mysterious Mother, 114; as “Protestant Goth,” 62; theater, view of, 116–20; theater attendance by, 169; Works: Anecdotes on Painting, 64–67; Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors, 118–19; Collection of Prologues and Epilogues and other Pieces relative to the Stage . . . from the Year 1780, 117; “The Dear Witches,” 9, 95–97, 117; Description of Mr. Walpole’s Villa, 97, 330–32; Hieroglyphic Tales, 97; Narbonne Castle: Or, The Mysterious Mother, 124–33, 125, 132; Nature will Prevail, 9, 95, 118; Short Notes on the Life of Horatio Walpole, 9, 95; “Thoughts on Comedy,” 9; “Thoughts on Tragedy,” 9, 93–94. See also The Castle of Otranto (Walpole); The Mysterious Mother (Walpole) Walpole, Robert, 9 Walpoliana (Pinkerton), 18 Warham, Archbishop, tomb of, 65 Waterloo Bridge, 129 Welby, Augustus, 67

I n d e x   357

West, Shearer, 95 Westminster Abbey, 67–68 Whig Party, 65 Wilson, Benjamin, 56 Woodfall, Henry Sampson, 12 Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 9, 13, 93 The World, 13

Worrall, David, 113, 117; abridged text by, 1, 5, 6, 56, 137–67   Yale Center for British Art, 176, 178 Yonge, Miss, 95, 96   Zapolya; A Christmas Tale (Coleridge), 129