SOURCE: Ranger, Paul. “The Gothic Spirit.” In ‘Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast’: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820, pp. 1-18. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1991.

In the following essay, Ranger details the various motifs, settings, stock characters, narrative devices, and themes of the Gothic drama.

Neither eighteenth-century playwrights, nor members of their audiences, used the term ‘a gothic drama’. It was a label applied by literary critics only with hindsight to certain types of play. Instead, words suggesting the form rather than the content described the work. Thus the St James's Chronicle referred to The Castle Spectre (Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1797) as ‘a drama of a mingled nature, Operatic, Comical and Tragical’ and at greater length the Morning Chronicle defined George Colman the Younger's play, Feudal Times (1799), as ‘an exhibition of music and dialogue, pantomime and dancing, painting and machinery, antique dresses and armour...