Summary
Preface to the First Edition
Walpole, writing in the guise of William Marshal, a gentleman, states that this manuscript was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in northern England. It was printed in 1529 in Naples, and its language and style are Italian. The events probably happened between 1095 and 1243.
The author’s motives can only be conjectured upon, but it was probably for entertainment. There are things like oracles and supernatural events, but those would have made sense during the author’s time, for “belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages” (6). Everything the author writes about is necessary and not superfluous; the reader’s attention never relaxes and the catastrophe is always present.
Marshal notes that the domestics in the story might seem a little serious, but they are quite realistically rendered. It is not uncommon for a translator to look at his work favorably, but Marshal acknowledges that he is aware of the work’s defects. He wishes there was a better moral than the sins of the father being visited upon later generations, but is confident that the piety and moral lessons present will “exempt this work from the censure to which romances are but too liable” (7) and believes English readers will like it very much.
Overall, Marshal thinks the basis of the story is probably truthful. The scenes no doubt occured a real castle since the author seems to be very particular about what he is describing.
Preface to the Second Edition
Because the volume was so well received, Walpole is compelled to come clean that he did not find the manuscript but wrote rather it himself. His intent was to let the public impartially judge his work. He also wanted to meld the ancient and modern kinds of romance: in the former, everything is imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is present and is copied with success.
Walpole thinks it was possible to reconcile the ancient and modern and have his characters act according to laws of probability—to act like real men and women. As for the domestics, whose simple behavior strikes some as discordant, they act the way they do because Walpole firmly believes that they do not have the same dignified, grave, and important affections and behavior as princes and heroes. Shakespeare was his model here, for the nobleness of his characters is “artificially exalted” (10) by the rudeness of the lesser sorts.
He evokes Voltaire, a genius but not as genius as Shakespeare. Voltaire said in his preface to his work Merope that some dramas may have either just seriousness or just levity, but that if someone asked him which was best he’d reply that whichever one is best-handled is best. Walpole claims that Voltaire ought not to speak for the English, as Walpole would not claim to speak for the Parisians. It would be absurd, for example, if Rosencrantz were given more stage time than Hamlet and the gravedigger.
Ultimately, then, Walpole writes that he seeks cover under Shakespeare, “the brightest genius this country…has produced” (13). He is proud, no matter how feeble or derivative his efforts, to have imitated Shakespeare rather than creating his own rules. At the very least, the public seems to have liked it.
Analysis
The Caste of Otranto was not just one of the earliest Gothic novels—if not, indeed, the very first to truly be called such: it was actually among the first wave of literary works experimenting with this newfangled way of constructing stories in prose. Poetry was king of all the literary world when Horace Walpole wrote his ghost story; a couple of centuries needed to pass for the novel finally was considered to be as worthy as poetry. As a result, many of the first novelists felt the compulsion to kick off their lowly regarded tales with the inclusion of a preface. Authors engaged the preface as a sort of roundabout way to create a sense for the reader that the events described in the novel were just within the realm of possibility. Novels were distinguished from lofty poetry not only by virtue of being recorded in prose, but also by being populated with average characters (average is a relative term of course; the characters in most of the earliest English novels were hardly average, but were a lot closer to the typical reader than the gods and royalty that populated nearly every poem and play). With such a stark divergence, novelists often turned to prefatory material for purposes more related to modern-day marketing than to any actual literary necessity.
Take, for instance, the first preface to The Castle of Otranto that Walpole inserts before the story begins. Here is an example of a preface with a very specific marketing goal in mind: to suggest to the reader that the story he was about to read had actually been created some time during the Middle Ages. Why try to convince readers they were reading a tale set in the Dark Ages that was created during the Dark Ages? To lend it a greater sense of realism.
With this preface, Walpole aims to suggest that his story filled with clearly unrealistic supernatural elements is actually an example of realism because it portrays characters living during an age where people believed that all of those supernatural aspects of the story were absolutely real. The preface lays out the promise to readers that they will be reading a story written during a time when people really would have acted exactly in the way that the characters in the story acted. Essentially, the addition of the preface transforms the story that Walpole created of people responding to unrealistic events in unrealistic ways into a story of people responding realistically to events they would have believed to be real. And lest one think that this differentiation is so subtle as to make no difference at all, and that Walpole’s readership must have been highly suggestible to even consider that the preface might lend some sense of realism to his supernatural tale, consider modern movie audiences: moviegoers who, thanks to the brilliant viral marketing campaign, went to the theater to watch The Blair Witch Project thinking it actually was authentic video footage of real-life events.
The two prefaces to The Castle of Otranto are almost as fascinating as the story itself. Walpole included the first preface with the publication of the manuscript in 1764, claiming to be “William Marshal, Gent.” Marshal was the putative translator of an Italian manuscript found in the library of an ancient Neapolitan family. While it was discovered in 1529, it was estimated to be written anywhere from 1095-1243. Of course, none of that was actually true: in his second preface, Walpole, known as an aristocrat and intellectual by his countrymen, admitted he was the true author. There was no Marshal and no translation from the Italian; indeed, the work was pure fiction, all springing from the head of Walpole himself. He had told his friend William Mason that he feared the “wildness of the tale” would be off-putting, and that he was “diffident of its merit.”
Walpole actually did not quite make up Marshal’s name, for a letter from his friend William Cole mentioned a William Marshal, an engraver. Second, “Onuphrio Muralto” is a half-translation of the name Horace Walpole. Everything that the fictional Marshal tells his reader is significant in setting the context, mood, and meaning of the text. It is implied that the manuscript was a printed one, which makes sense given the fashion for antiquarianism in the 18th century (Walpole himself was an assiduous and enthusiastic antiquarian). Locating the text in a remote area in Italy emphasizes the strangeness of the drama; it also, as critic Nick Groom notes, “draws on Aristotelian climate theory” that “suggests that Mediterranean politics are passionate and murderous.”
In the first preface Walpole also directs his readers to the idea of the theater by having Marshal say that the writer should have applied his talents to that institution. This is no accident, Groom notes, for “Walpole directs his readers to attend to the drama and the theatricality of the text—dialogue is rapid and naturalistic, stage directions appear in brackets, and props and special effects abound. Ironically, the novel’s five-act structure almost adheres to the dramatic unities.”
In the second preface Walpole comes clean and lays out his reasons for the legerdemain. He explains that he was seeking to unite the two romances of ancient and modern, which to him meant utilizing the imaginative qualities of the former and to bring in the elements of nature that characterized the latter. His “mere men and women” (9) would react in the most natural ways possible to the fantastical things they experienced. As for the domestics, Walpole admits that their behavior is ridiculous and lacking any elegance and grace, but he says that this is done in order to emphasize the gravity and nobility of the “princes and heroes” (10). His model is Shakespeare, who melded comedy and tragedy, ignoring dramatic unities; his Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III were of particular influence on Walpole. In this preface Walpole evokes the writings of Voltaire on Shakespeare in order to defend his choice of this ancient-modern amalgamation. Voltaire thought Shakespeare was occasionally a poetic genius but lacked the artfulness of French dramatists in the 17th century. Walpole sniffs at this characterization, and says that he would not seek to know more about Parisians than Voltaire did. Shakespeare gets at the heart of what it means to be English, and it is Walpole’s intention to emulate the “brightest genius this country, at least, has produced” (13).
