The Castle of Otranto
On the morning of his son's wedding a Neapolitan prince finds the boy crushed in the courtyard beneath an enormous helmet, and sets about marrying the bride himself to secure a line he holds by an old fraud. Portraits step out of their frames, a hermit's prophecy circulates, and a servant girl runs the vaults under the castle by lamplight. Walpole passed the first edition off as a translation from a medieval manuscript; it invented the Gothic wholesale, down to the machinery Radcliffe, Lewis and Mary Shelley would inherit.
Open The Castle of Otranto in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Lineage
- influenced by ↑ Hamlet
- ↓ Nightmare Abbey
- ↓ Frankenstein
- ↓ Dracula
- ↓ Vathek
- ↓ The Mysteries of Udolpho
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 46% · 11 shared
- 43% · 11 shared
- 43% · 10 shared
- 42% · 8 shared
- 41% · 10 shared
- 41% · 9 shared