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It is unusual to be able to date the start of a literary field of study, let alone locate the origin of a literary form. Yet, in the case of the Gothic drama, it is possible to do both. Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto (1764) is said to be the first Gothic novel, also wrote the first Gothic drama, The Mysterious Mother (1768). While surely one can find elements of the Gothic in earlier plays and precursor texts for Walpole 's drama, this play first brings together in a comprehensive way the tactics and themes that will mark the Gothic in the theater. Again, while the Gothic did not have a major presence in the theater until the 1790s, with another major spurt of Gothic plays occurring in the post-Waterloo years, playwrights, perhaps most famously Byron, continued to look back to Walpole's example. Byron wrote in the preface to Marino Fallero, Doge of Venice, that Walpole was "the father of the first romance, and the last tragedy of our language, and surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he who he may" (xx).
We can also date very precisely the arrival of the study of Gothic drama as a scholarly endeavor. While there were obviously contemporary views and reviews of Gothic drama, and while there were glances at the dramatic version of the Gothic more often studied in the novel, it was not until 1947 with the publication of Bertrand Evans's landmark Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley that the field was laid out, a canon of texts identified, and key issues set forth. It would take another forty years and more before a large body of work would be created around the Gothic drama, but Evans's work still gives impetus and shape to the study of Gothic plays.
We were reminded of the importance of Evans's book by another founder of the field of Gothic studies, Frederick S. Frank. Frank did the essential bibliographic work needed to define any field of study within the Gothic. In The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel ( 1 987) , Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide (2002) , and in his three versions of Guides to...