Steerpike Titus, who blamed Steerpike for his sister's death, eventually finds and kills him. Stefan Vinzberg portrayed the character in the opera adaptation, and he was played by Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the BBC miniseries. "The Daily Telegraph" has described Steerpike as one of the greatest villains in English literature. They also proposed that post-war readers were not prepared to fully appreciate the character upon his initial appearance. Steerpike Steerpike is a fictional character in Mervyn Peake's novels "Titus Groan" and "Gormenghast". Steerpike might be called the antagonist of the Gormenghast trilogy, but in truth he is more of
Gloriana (novel) doubt," from other spheres, perhaps separated by layers of ether. Gloriana's Thane of Hermiston has travelled to some of them, and Albion has been visited from other spheres by such as Cagliostro and Adolphus Hiddler, an Austrian who claimed to have conquered his own world. The novel's atmosphere owes something to English writer Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" novels, published in the 1940s and 1950s, and Moorcock dedicated "Gloriana" to the memory of Peake, one of his literary heroes. Similar to the castle-city of Gormenghast, Gloriana's palace is riddled with abandoned chambers, apartments, hallways, passages, balconies, stairways, and caverns—"the walls"—within which live