Nightmare Abbey - Allusions and References in Nightmare Abbey

Allusions and References in Nightmare Abbey

It is often said that Peacock's novels are not widely read today on account of the plethora of topical and other allusions with which they are loaded. Peacock himself elucidated a number of these in his own footnotes. The following is a comprehensive list of the works of art and literature to which Peacock alludes or which he quotes or paraphrases in Nightmare Abbey.

• Samuel Butler
  • Hudibras
  • Upon the Weakness and Misery of Man
• Ben Jonson
  • Every Man in His Humour
• François Rabelais
  • Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Christabel
  • Kubla Khan
  • Biographia Literaria
  • The Friend
  • The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• William Shakespeare
  • Hamlet
  • Macbeth
  • Richard III
  • Richard II
  • Henry IV, Part 2
  • Henry V
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream
  • The Tempest
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • Queen Mab
  • Proposals for an Association of Those Philanthropists who convinced of the inadequacy of the moral and political state of Ireland to produce benefits which are nevertheless attainable are willing to unite to accomplish its regeneration
• Henry Carey
  • Tragedy of Chrononhotonthologos
• Robert Forsyth
  • Principles of Moral Science
• C. F. A. Grosse
  • Der Genius (translated into English by P. Will as Horrid Mysteries)
• William Godwin
  • An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness
  • Mandeville
• Alexander Pope
  • The Dunciad
• William Drummond of Logiealmond
  • Academical Questions
• Lord Byron
  • Manfred
  • Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
• Voltaire
  • Candide
• Gioachino Rossini
  • The Barber of Seville
• Giovanni Paisiello
  • Nina, o sia La pazza per amore
• Samuel Johnson
  • A Dictionary of the English Language
• Robert Southey
  • Roderick, The Last of the Goths
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth
  • Lyrical Ballads
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey
  • Omniana
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  • Don Giovanni
• Dante Alighieri
  • The Divine Comedy (translated into English in 1814 by Henry Francis Cary)
• Horace
  • Ars Poetica
• Pierre Denys de Montfort
  • Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques
• John Milton
  • Comus
• Pliny the Elder
  • Naturalis Historia
• Henry Joseph Du Laurens
  • Le Compère Matthieu
• Edmund Spenser
  • The Faerie Queene
• Euclid
  • The Elements
• Edmund Burke
  • A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
• Plautus
  • Amphitryon
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Stella
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther
• Mary Wollstonecraft
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• William Wordsworth
  • Goody Blake and Harry Gill (in Lyrical Ballads)
• Virgil
  • Aeneid
• Pausanias
  • Description of Greece
• Anonymous
  • Ecclesiastes
  • The Royal Kalendar (a Who's Who of the British gentry, published annually from 1767 to 1893 and popularly known as The Red Book)
  • The Norfolk Tragedy, a ballad on the story of Babes in the Wood, published in 1595 by Thomas Millington