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The Vampire on Stage: A Study in Adaptations

1987; Western Michigan University; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.1987.0014

1936-1637

Ronald E. McFarland,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

The Vampire on Stage: A Study in Adaptations Ronald E. McFarland As described in Augustin Calmet's Traité sur les apparitions des anges . . . et vampires de Hongrie, published in Paris in 1751 and translated into English in 1759, the vampire was simply a bloodthirsty monster, an animated dead person who sucked the blood of the living (often relatives) and thus destroyed them. The vampire's literary debut in England, a passing reference in Book VTII of Robert Southey's Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801), added nothing to that portrayal except perhaps that the vampire could as well be female as male. An eight-page note appended by Southey and drawing heavily on Calmet suggests that the vampire was not familiar to the literary scene in spite of the accumulation of Gothic specters in the form of Walpolian castle haunters and Burgeresque ghostly bridegrooms. The "character" of the vampire, as we know it today through Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and its many stage and film versions, owes its definition indirectly to Lord Byron, more directly to his personal physician, John Polidori, and significantly to early nineteenth-century melodrama, the influence of which has been infrequently recognized. In fact, the stage adaptations of Polidori's tale, then thought to be Byron's, establish the paradigmatic characters, atmosphere, and plot of the vampire story. When Byron first read Thalaba is uncertain. He mentions the title character in a letter dated 13 July 1807, and he met Southey in 1813, the year of his appointment to the laureateship . In a review published in the summer of 1819, Byron describes Thalaba, along with a couple other poems by Southey, RONALD MC FARLAND, who teaches seventeenth-century and modern poetry at the University of Idaho, has published widely in such journals as SEL and Critique. 19 20Comparative Drama as "gibberish, written in all metres and in no language."* Byron's well known portrait of the vampire in The Giaour fragment, dating from 1813, had already been written, and he may well have owed his familiarity with the species to Southey's annotations of Thalaba. Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., has denied the vampiric nature of the Byronic hero as described by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony. But certainly Praz correctly accounts for the nature of the vampire's bitter fate, as it emerges in the 1820's (he refers here to Melmoth) : "a hero fatal to himself and to those around him; his love is accursed; he drags to destruction the woman to whom he becomes attached."2 Whether this passage fits Byron himself, in reality or in the contemporary imagination, or whether it is an apt description of such aspects of the Byronic hero as are apparent in a character like Lermontov 's Pechorin, is not at issue here. When John Polidori's story appeared in 1819, however, the "Byronic" vampire protagonist still would fit only part of Praz's description. The necessary embellishments were to be added by those who reworked the story for the stage. The story of Byron's relationship with the young AngloItalian physician during his self-imposed exile to the Continent in 1816 has been ably recounted by James Twitchell and, more briefly, by E. F. Bleiler, the editor of Polidori's story.3 The fragment that Byron produced after the night he met with Polidori, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Clair Claremont suggests very little of what Polidori was to write, though Polidori may have received a more thorough plot outline from Byron than the fragment implies. Mary Shelley's ghost story, Frankenstein (1818), has justly overshadowed Polidori's effort, yet his amateurish tale aroused considerable attention in its day, probably because, due to a publisher's error that may have been intentional , it was printed as the work of the notorious Byron. Polidori left Byron in the spring of 1817 and returned to England. The Vampyre appeared first as a "short novel" in the New Monthly Magazine in April of 1819, and Byron was furious despite an apologetic explanation from Polidori in the May issue. Two London book editions appeared very swiftly, followed by a French and a German translation, all in 1819 and all attributing authorship to...