The Gothic craze which Walpole is credited with inaugurating is often said to represent a break away from the orderliness and rationalism of earlier eighteenth-century literature (which is classified as ‘classical’ because of its love of order, as opposed to ‘romantic’ literature which embraces disorder and freedom), and The Castle of Otranto, thanks to its supernatural elements and emphasis on the breaking-up of order (represented by the edifice of the castle), certainly shows a move away from classicism towards a less orderly vision of the world. It purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. But we can find precursors to the Gothic story in early ghost stories from as far back as the Middle Ages, and plays like Shakespeare’s Hamlet are shot through with what we’d now call ‘the Gothic’ and we can even point to earlier novels or novellas, such as William Baldwin’s early narrative Beware the Cat (written back in the 1550s), as precursors to the ‘Gothic’ novel as we conceive it, even if it resembles later masterpieces of the genre such as Jekyll and Hyde or The Beetle rather than early eighteenth-century Gothic novels like Walpole’s. The Castle of Otranto Horace Walpole Novel English 23/10/18 Synopsis The Castle of Otranto tells the story of Prince Manfred and his family, which includes his wife Hippolita and his children Conrad and Matilda.

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