Mariano José de Larra’s scathing review of Dumas’s Antony often is cited as evidence of his disapproval of the aesthetic excesses characteristic of Romantic productions.1 Comparatively few critics have remarked on Larra’s special disregard for the conventions of Romantic works we tend to classify as “Gothic”—texts and performances that expressly seek responses such as fear or horror.2 For example, he disdained Ducange’s El verdugo de Amsterdam particularly because (as he wrote in a review) that play makes audiences “llorar como haría llorar a cualquiera una paliza” (395), without appeal to an audience’s deeper moral and intellectual capacities. Though he was a friend of the theatrical impresario Juan de Grimaldi, Larra saw much popular literature and entertainment as betraying the (enlightened, progressive, patriotic) writer’s obligation to develop readers’ and viewers’ critical faculties.3 Yet (as he so often pointed out in his articles), Larra himself labored under a weekly obligation to attract readers’ attention, and it was not easy to appeal to a people who saw things “de tan distinta manera” (“El castellano viejo” 119) and whose preoccupations—with appearance, display, social standing—were illusory at best
