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Many previous works have demonstrated that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet offers gothic authors, directors, and other artists a hospitable topos for their works. Many monographs and collections on gothic studies no longer open with a definition of the term, so vast has the terrain it covers become. Fear that the term will be stretched so thin as to become meaningless has been voiced by gothic scholars (Hogle). Many recent volumes instead tackle and define a subset of gothic: for example, Asian gothic (Soon 2008, Ancuta 2014), Globalgothic (Byron 2015), postmillennial and happy gothic (Spooner 2017). “Gothic” is a contested term, lacking consensus on whether it is a genre, mode, or style. For this article, I supply two local definitions of “gothic” in the order they will be encountered. First, an architectural style prevalent in medieval western Europe laden with pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses, fervently revived in England in the nineteenth century. Second, a body of literature most often identified as emerging in eighteenth-century Europe and especially resurgent during periods of political and social upheaval. The latter aspect has contributed to seeing gothic as a literature of “trauma and cultural anxiety” (Spooner 2017, 3). Gothic literature is frequently described as engaging and exciting the reader by the inclusion of extreme spaces, from wild, remote landscapes to confining, domestic structures; the, often violent, intrusion of the archaic into modern life; and obscene physical and sexual power belonging to despotic humans or supernatural beings (Bowen 2014). Usually, it involves some mystery around which of these forces is at play. Although authors of gothic literature include all sexes, it has been predominantly associated with female readers, resulting in much catastrophizing thought about its deleterious impact on them (Spooner 2017, 9). This continues well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, this article considers sometimes opposing moral panics around Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga (Spooner 2017; Wasson and Artt 2015; Brody 2014).
Playtext and productions of Romeo and Juliet manifest a predilection for the paraphernalia of death, mourning and burials, as well as the transcendence of death (Olive 2021). The Capulet crypt has been frequently cast as a gothic space in stage and film productions of the play, something well-documented in the review sections of journals and research publications...