Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk (1796), was never one to shy away from sensationalism. When the Covent Garden Theatre staged his monodrama The Captive on 22 March 1803, however, even Lewis agreed that he had gone too far. Despite the fact that theatre manager Thomas Harris was willing to stage it again, Lewis withdrew the piece. His letters describe the problem: “when it was about half over a Man fell into convulsions in the Boxes; Presently after a Woman fainted away in the Pit; and when the curtain dropped, two or three more of the spectators went into hysterics..."

The Blessed Bay of Eleusis and the destination of the Sacred Way, Iera Odos (© Rarignac). Bordeaux, l’Aube, La Fête de l’Ascension, 2012 The Gothic and the Classic: The Road to Eleusis Arlanda, undoubtedly an admirably efficient airport, was overly full of unboarded passengers the day I set out from Stockholm to Eleusis via Milan.  Corralled by retractable belt barriers into an intestinally-inspired queue, I found myself squeezed into a knotted lump of technology-burdened passengers consisting of myself, ‘The Bad Seeds’, their companions, tour manager, and Nick Cave.  Amidst voyaging Swedes and assorted business persons, our little bolus of the indigestible seemed conspicuously tribal.  As we stood there awaiting processing, paperwork in hand, technology piled at our feet, I explained my mission to the manager.  With his concord, I sought out Cave’s: I wanted to interview them on the subject of Gothicity.  The carefully-groomed, authoritarian Mr. Cave was pleasant enough but refused to make any on-camera pronouncements on the subject of ‘Gothic’ or ‘goths’, seeming to view it, no doubt rightly, as a radioactive topic that could only get him into trouble.  Once he had declared Gothicity an out of bounds subject, none of his vassals would broach it, including those that already had.  Cave wished me success with the project and I contented myself with sharing travellers’ bonhomie.  So much for the business of the Gothic.  Arriving at Milan where Cave was to play, we wished ourselves mutual good luck and good-byes. Fellow traveller on my Gothic quest.

Wildhorn’s Jekyll and Hyde last month, Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies last week - I’ve been experiencing the contemporary Gothic musical lately.   Whilst thinking about the ways in which music may be presented as Gothic, I started wondering how they did it in eighteenth-century theatre.  As I was going to the British Library anyway, I decided to see what I could find out from their archives about the music of Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre.  This seemed the most obvious work to start investigating, for whilst reading the play I had noticed the prominence given to the name of the composer, Michael Kelly.  I also had a dim memory of reading in Paul Ranger’s Terror and Pity reign in every Breast, a description of the play as a drama “of a mingled nature, Operatic, Comical and Tragical” (from the St James Chronicle). Lewis’s ventures into drama were often closely associated with noteworthy music and at least three of plays were specifically presented as melo-dramas (song-dramas).  Incidents in The Monk had been turned into a “grand ballet pantomime” (music by Charles Farley) performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden.   (He even wrote music himself:  in 1808 a collection of his ballads was issued, “the Words and Music by M. G.  Lewis”. ) Unfortunately I could find no record of a performing score for The Castle Spectre amongst the holdings of the BL (or the Theatre Museum) but I did turn up something which promised to be interesting.   It was a kind of eighteenth-century equivalent of the CD of the show: some sheet music, its title page festooned with flou

Dominik Moll's film adaptation of Lewis's The Monk is apparently now in post-production, but little information has been released