I want to move on to the events of ROTF as soon as possible, but still I'm stuck on that quote from Macbeth. Epigraphs are totally key to this book --all but 1 of the 26 chapters begin with one, with half coming from Shakespeare (and half of these from Macbeth). Not surprisingly, they give us Shakespeare at his most Gothed-out, which is to say his most existential. Or at least what I call existential, where it's all about risky undertakings weighed against heaven's displeasure and the nearness of death and bats. And then there's this ode by Thomas Warton that Radcliffe quotes from, called "The Suicide"? I'm going to have to give it to you entire, because the epigraphs are just sick.

But the Macbeth quote --I love it because it seems to prefigure these lines from Edgar Allan Poe's "Tamerlane" (1827):

"Despair, the fabled vampire-bat
Hath long upon my bosom sat,
And I would rave, but that he flings
A calm from his unearthly wings."

I know you feel that --and you know Poe was feeling Mrs. Radcliffe. Who do you think alerted him to the atmospheric possiblities of a Continental setting? Stephen King, Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo, Melville --all the greats feel Ann Radcliffe. Be reminded of how the whole riddle of homosexuality in Billy Budd is made to turn on a Radcliffe reference, and I will get back to you with more on ROTF as soon as I can.