SOURCE: Thorp, Willard. “The Stage Adventures of Some Gothic Novels.” PMLA 43, no. 2 (June 1928): 476-86.

In the following essay, Thorp discusses strategies employed by Gothic playwrights to minimize the effects of the horrors they were staging.

The characteristic drama of the first years of the nineteenth century was, as everyone knows, absurdly romantic and sentimental. Incited by the extravagant Kotzebue and charmed into emulation by the new mélodrame from France, the first specimen of which reached England in 1802, the English playwrights supplied the stage with a variety of plots involving robber barons, victims of the Inquisition, captive maidens and sentimental villains. Frequently they seasoned these delicacies with supernatural horrors and garnished them with vaulted halls, sepulchral chambers, and dungeons.

Much in this episode of dramatic history can be designated by the word “Gothic”, and when one bears in mind that by 1800 the Gothic novels were in high favor...