SOURCE: Reno, Robert P. “James Boaden's Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis' The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage.” Eighteenth-Century Life 9, no. 1 (October 1984): 95-106.

In the following essay, Reno explains the nearly universal critical objections to the appearance of ghosts onstage in Gothic plays performed in the late eighteenth century.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Gothic novel had become so popular in England that William Lane, then owner of the Minerva Press, was said to have proposed a standing offer of ten pounds for any Gothic manuscript. Dozens of Gothic novels were published through the 1790s, and this new form of writing soon found expression on the stage as well.¹ In spite of this popular success, critical response to Gothic literature remained ambivalent, particularly in regard to the use of the supernatural.² Ghosts, visions, voices, and other unearthly occurrences...