Name: El castillo de Otranto
Rating: 3.04368932038835 (103 reviews)

Horace Walpole (Earl of Oxford)

El castillo de Otranto

Horace Walpole

a gothic story

The Castle of Otranto

Tim Pendry

The Oxford World's Classics Edition of this 1764 Gothick classic (indeed the founder of the form) has been edited to the very high standards of the rest of the series. There is not a lot to be said about it here that has not been said by other commentators on Walpole and the Gothick. There is certainly a theatrical element to the novel. Much of the second half reads as if it were a play for the stage and I do not think it would be difficult to adapt it as a melodrama before its time. The story is hysterical, certainly unbelievable beyond any reasonable suspension of disbelief, even comical in the way that we find comedy in the melodramas that owe so much to its sensibility. There is also intentional comedy, conveyed through the servant class. Walpole was deliberate in this, intending to participate in the Voltairean debate about the superiority of Racine or Shakespeare by taking the line of national pride in Shakespearian use of light relief to make tragedy all the more so. For all our modern inability not to see the tale as overwrought, Walpole was being highly innovative in his day. No sensible person can expect to understand anything subsequently written in the gothic genre (or perhaps theatrical melodrama) without coming to terms with it. It is deservedly a classic, not because it is readable (it suffers from being well over two and a half centuries old and requires close attention) but because it represents a creative turning point in culture, a point when some formal rules might be thrown into the air and a new form be created.

M. Sosotris

An influential work, but more a curiosity than a book that really has much of an impact.

I appreciated the Hamlet-esque vibes: the vengeful ghost, the castle full of secrets, the layers of secrets, mistaken identity, and accidental murder, and scandal, and I think this would make for a genuinely fun play, or even a musical. The cast of characters is fun and full of drama.

But reading the book is a bit of a chore. Due to its age, the formatting is quite archaic, with no quotation marks or paragraph breaks when new characters start talking, so you just get vast blocks of text with whole conversations between multiple characters happening, and you are clinging to the dialogue tags like a sailor lost at sea holding onto fragments of the ship’s hull.

I need someone to adapt this for a visual medium so more people could enjoy it, because I seriously thing this story would work better as a play or a movie.

When Conrad, son of Prince Manfred of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances on his wedding day, his father, fearing his line is at an end, declares that he will divorce his wife and marry his late son's intended bride. Soon, however, this planned union brings about a series of supernatural events, tragic misunderstandings and cold-blooded murder. Presented as the translation of a medieval Italian text from the time of the crusades, The Castle of Otranto was the first and most influential novel of the eighteenth-century Gothic revival, and introduced several of what became its most recognizable tropes.

Aida Mateescu ⚰︎☽​𓆩𓆪

Millie

the father of gothic literature is also tagged on here as horror, but the real dread came from not knowing if the next page would be more mind-numbing than the last.

Neveen Badr

** spoiler alert **
           Laughter 
Passion 
Weeping
Melancholy 
Knighthood

Church
A grave 
Ghost
A young woman is distressed 
Death of almost everyone 

This novel is perfect!

El castillo de Otranto

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