The premiere included a seven-page, abridged adaptation of Horace Walpole's seminal gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, by an unknown writer and artist Al Ulmer.
The story creates a Gothic tale in the tradition of The Castle of Otranto, while making partial ties to Russia's history in Latvia.
From the growing madness of Prince Hamlet, to the violent ending to the constant reminders of death, to, even, more subtly, the notions of humankind and its structures and the viewpoints on women, Hamlet evokes many things that would recur in what is widely regarded as the first piece of Gothic literature, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, and in other Gothic works.
This work described the fascination with supernatural fiction in English literature from the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Charles Maturin's 'Melmoth the Wanderer' in 1820 on to modern times.
He translated various literary works into Italian, notably, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, as well as other writings of Milton and Lucan.
(5) Introduced into narrative fiction by the Gothic novel (The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk), melodrama was widespread in literature around the time when Illusions perdues was written.
In addition to this, the sombre and sweeping tone of his Meditations Among The Tombs (for example, "the dreadful pleasure inspired by gazing at fallen monuments and mouldering tombs") has led to his being placed amongst the 18th Century 'Graveyard School' of poets, rendering his work an important influence on Horace Walpole’s 'The Castle of Otranto' of 1764 and consequently, the entire genre of Gothic Literature and the later Romanticism which the genre fuelled.
This "ancient Catholic family" is possibly the Percy family, as Walpole would have known the Duke of Northumberland and his wife Elizabeth Percy, though this is not proven.
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Both Hamlet and Otranto are literary springboards for discussion on the questions of marriage, as the question of Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage and later marriage to Anne Boleyn were still heated topics of controversy.
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