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He [Dr. Samuel Johnson] said, "the action of all players in tragedy is bad. It should be a man's study to repress those signs of emotion and passion, as they are called." He was of a directly contrary opinion to that of [Henry] Fielding, in his Tom Jones; who makes Partridge say, of [David] Garrick, "why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did." For, when I asked him, "Would not you, sir, start as Mr. Garrick does, if you saw a ghost?" He answered, "I hope not. If I did, I should frighten the ghost."
-James Boswell1
As readers familiar with The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story know, the novel appeared quietly on the print market on Christmas Eve of 1764, a purported translation of a recently discovered medieval Italian text by "William Marshall," a gentleman antiquarian of the Age of Reason. The edition's preface not only lays out the fictional frame narrative about the text's discovery and translation into English but also describes the emergent gothic aesthetic. "Never is the reader's attention relaxed," Horace Walpole writes, "Terror, the author's principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions."2 He describes an active reading experience, one in which the vigorous mental exertion caused in the reader's mind by the tale's constantly changing representation of the passions-the sudden and unexpected shifts from contrary sentiments, specifically terror and pity-produces delight. A mere four months later, Walpole issued his second edition, in which he praises Shakespeare as a truly original genius and the exemplar of imaginative liberty, as part of a defense of Otranto's design. "The result of all I have said," Walpole concludes in his second preface, "is, to shelter my own daring under the canon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced."3 Critics have recognized for some time that the novel relies on Shakespeare for more than aesthetic freedom, for it contains numerous allusions to and echoes of a range of characters and themes from his plays.4...