What Walpole did to Shakespeare's Women : A Comparison between Female Characters in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and William Shakespeare’s Othello

Abstract: In this essay I will compare the views on women in William Shakespeare’s Othello and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, looking mainly at the gendered structures of patriarchal caregivers, freedom of marriage as well as domestic violence. I am doing this in order to point out the possibility of Walpole’s influence on Shakespeare by a literary comparison. Since others previously have claimed that Walpole only is influenced in Elizabethan writing in general, the purpose of this study is to make a comparison of different events in the texts to try to clarify the similarities between them, as well as attempt to correlate the texts to the times in which they were written in order to further prove my point.