Our series of talks is funded exclusively by donations. The talks are free to access but if you can support the project and do not support it on ko-fi or patreon, please choose the 'pay-what-you-can' option.
If you'd like to support more regularly, you can use the links below
Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/romancingthegothic
Ko-fi - https://ko-fi.com/samhirst
Matthew Lewis, remembered mostly for his 1796 novel The Monk and the controversy surrounding its lurid content, was also a popular playwright. Largely forgotten now, many of his plays were commercially successful but critically derided for some of the same reasons as The Monk - crowd-pleasing, spectacular, but with ludicrous plots and supposedly democratic sympathies. The plays certainly are spectacular, featuring dancing horses, a great deal of song and music, ghosts, flame effects, madness, sensationalised focus on the bodies of slaves, knife-wielding women and dramatic unmasking. Lewis’s difficult family situation, traumatic experiences of war and violence as a teen attaché to The Hague and his status as both a Member of Parliament and slave owner mean his relationship with social power, and threats to this, is complicated. The villains which mark the first and final stages of Lewis’s theatrical career, The Castle Spectre’s(1797) Osmond and the eponymous Timour the Tartar (1811) associate villainy with the usurpation of power and its abuse. In Osmond the disruption of primogeniture leads to disruption of the self through guilt, whereas the character of Timour can be understood as a parody of Napoleon.The middle period of his career focuses on the exploration of heroism. Through three further eponymous characters, Adelmorn, the Outlaw (1801); Rugantino, or the Bravo of Venice (1805) andVenoni, or the Novice of St Mark’s (1809) he promotes the qualities of mercy, benevolence and courage not as a threat to power but as essential to its maintenance.This talk will explore the significance of Lewis’s stance on slavery, parliamentary involvement and family relationships on the depiction of power and threat in these Gothic works alongside the world of the Romantic-era theatre and contemporary discourses of masculinity
