Judge Goldsworth is the owner of the house that Kinbote rents across the street from John and Sybil Shade. Goldsworth is a notoriously punitive judge, and Kinbote notes that he has left many men locked up and nursing revenge fantasies. It’s also noted that John Shade slightly resembles Judge Goldsworth. Both of these facts become relevant at the novel’s climax when a man shoots and kills Shade on Goldsworth’s porch. Kinbote claims that this was the Zemblan assassin Gradus who was aiming at him but missed, but the truth is that Shade was killed by Jack Grey, a madman who escaped an institution and meant to kill Goldsworth—the man who sentenced him to the institution—but accidentally shot Shade instead, since the men resemble one another. Goldsworth himself never appears in the novel, since he’s on sabbatical in Europe at the time.