'The original of the portrait’ : Irish Gothic and the painted image

Horace Walpole, author of what is usually regarded as the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, acknowledges his debt to Shakespeare, claiming to ‘shelter my own daring under the canon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced’. The Castle of Otranto certainly draws on Hamlet. Prince Manfred is an illegitimate ruler who harbours quasi-incestuous designs in his ambition to retain sovereignty. However, haunting in The Castle of Otranto is not linked to King Hamlet’s iconic ghost, or to the parapets of a castle, but to art: to the statue of Alfonso the Good (whose gigantic helmet has miraculously crushed Manfred’s son, Conrad), and to a portrait of Manfred’s uncle. The image in the portrait, having witnessed Manfred’s unholy desire to marry his dead son’s betrothed, Isabella, shows signs of its uncanny disapprobation when it ‘began to move’.