Staging "The Mysterious Mother"
Staging

Author: Cynthia E. Roman

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2023-11-28

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0300274858

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The first book-length study of Horace Walpole’s scandalous The Mysterious Mother, including critical essays, an abridged script, and a facsimile edition Horace Walpole’s five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), a sensational tale of incest and intrigue, was initially circulated only among the author’s friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. He described his play as a “delicious entertainment for the closet” and claimed that he “did not think it would do for the stage.” Yet the essays in this volume trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole’s protests suggest. Exploring a wide variety of topics—including the play’s crypto-Catholicism, its treatments of incest, guilt, motherhood, orphans, and scientific spectacle, and the complex relations between print and performance—the essays demonstrate the rich relevance of The Mysterious Mother to current critical discussions. The volume includes the proceedings of a mini-conference hosted at Yale University in 2018 on the occasion of a staged reading of the play. Also included are the director’s reflections, an abridged script, a facsimile of Walpole’s own copy of the full-length play, and reproductions of the illustrations he commissioned from Lady Diana Beauclerk.

The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother
The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother

Author: Horace Walpole

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2003-01-02

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9781551113043

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This Broadview edition pairs the first Gothic novel with the first Gothic drama, both by Horace Walpole. Published on Christmas Eve, 1764, on Walpole’s private press at Strawberry Hill, his Gothicized country house, The Castle of Otranto became an instant and immediate classic of the Gothic genre as well as the prototype for Gothic fiction for the next two hundred years. Walpole’s brooding and intense drama, The Mysterious Mother, focuses on the protagonist’s angst over an act of incest with his mother, and includes the appearance of Father Benedict, Gothic literature’s first evil monk. Appendices in this edition include selections from Walpole’s letters, contemporary responses, and writings illustrating the aesthetic and intellectual climate of the period. Also included is Sir Walter Scott’s introduction to the 1811 edition of The Castle of Otranto.

The Mysterious Mother
The Mysterious Mother

Author: Horace Walpole

Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13:

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"The Mysterious Mother" by Horace Walpole is a gripping and controversial play that delves into themes of incest, guilt, and the supernatural. Set in a dark and atmospheric castle, the play follows the tragic story of Countess Matilda, who finds herself caught in a web of deceit and forbidden desire. At the heart of the drama is Matilda's complex relationship with her son, Adelbert, whose return to the castle reignites long-buried emotions and secrets. As their forbidden passion grows, Matilda and Adelbert struggle to reconcile their feelings with the societal taboos that surround them, leading to a series of shocking revelations and devastating consequences. Walpole's masterful storytelling and vivid imagery create a sense of unease and suspense that permeates every scene of the play. Through its exploration of taboo subjects and moral ambiguity, "The Mysterious Mother" challenges audiences to confront their own preconceptions about love, family, and morality.

The Gothic Novel and the Stage
The Gothic Novel and the Stage

Author: Francesca Saggini

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-08-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1317319516

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In this ground-breaking study Saggini explores the relationship between the late eighteenth-century novel and the theatre, arguing that the implicit theatricality of the Gothic novel made it an obvious source from which dramatists could take ideas. Similarly, elements of the theatre provided inspiration to novelists.

Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage
Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Author: John Robbins

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1527581721

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Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage is driven by a central question: why were women playwrights in the Romantic period obsessed with silencing their female characters, pushing them off the stage, and announcing the removal of their own texts to the closet? These playwrights were some of the most well-known and commercially successful writers of their era, but were paradoxically also among its most marginalized figures: they were mocked by largely conservative audiences, suffered intense criticism for placing their works on display before the public eye, and frequently found their plays rejected by theater managers in favor of works by established male playwrights. This book argues that these writers did not simply craft plays that would please the crowd, but that they deftly incorporated the suppressions and subjugations to which they were subject into their works. It demonstrates that within their plays, gaps in discourse and representation contain a productive capacity, denoting spaces of imaginative potential or drawing into focus the conditions by which such silencing and erasure takes place, and argues that the long-standing critical misapprehension of these works stems from precisely these strategies of resistance, which of necessity took non-traditional forms and thus have not been readily recognizable to audiences, then or now.