Horace Walpole is pivotal to the early Gothic Revival as the author of what has long been hailed as the first Gothic novel, and as the creator of the most influential of all early Gothic Revival houses. This essay explores his intuitively imaginative response to Gothic, and how his love of the decorative profusion and allusive richness that it could offer was played out in his novel The Castle of Otranto (1765) and his play The Mysterious Mother (1768) – as well as in in his ‘castle’ at Strawberry Hill. That house, with its subtle management of scale, colour and light, and in the suggestive riches of the collection it contained, created a heady mixture of fantasy and atmosphere, displaying an historically informed but archaeologically unrestrained imagination. These are qualities that it shared with Walpole’s Gothic fictions. There is hardly a feature of Gothic romance that does not appear in Otranto, and its gloomy castle, predatory patriarch and pursued virgin, along with the guilt-tormented Countess and evil friars of The Mysterious Mother, like the Gothic battlements and evocative interiors of Strawberry Hill, engendered a lasting and pervasive progeny.

This chapter argues that as Shakespeare was canonised as Britain’s national poet from 1660 through to the end of the eighteenth century, so editors and critics increasingly presented him as bourgeois and respectable, minimising the plays’ barbarous violence, ghosts and witches – their ‘Gothic’ elements. Between 1764 and 1768, Horace Walpole wrote The Castle of Otranto (a novel/romance hybrid), Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (a revisionist history) and The Mysterious Mother (a Shakespearean blank-verse tragedy), three different genres that variously appropriate and rework Shakespeare. Confronting the national poet, the argument holds, enabled him to work through his fears of illegitimacy, the sense that he had no claim to being the trueborn son of the powerful Sir Robert Walpole and the implied adultery of his beloved mother. His reading of Hamlet’s anger and loathing of his mother Gertrude’s behaviour unconsciously facilitated Horace Walpole’s invention of ‘Gothic Story’, which he located within the walls of an ancient castle haunted by the family secrets generated by the laws of patriarchy.