Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage

C. Wynne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137298997
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage re-appraises Stoker's key fictions in relation to his working life. It takes Stoker's work from the margins to centre stage, exploring how Victorian theatre's melodramatic and Gothic productions influenced his writing and thinking.

1

Stoker, Melodrama and the Gothic

[W]hat an interest Dracula has been in this House. We read it aloud and found we were incapable of putting it down. You have certainly made the subject of Vampires yr own. And now may I make a suggestion? Why not dramatize it, & produce it at the Lyceum? Well put on the stage it would, I am sure have an immense success. Sir H Irving as Ct Dracula would inspire awe with the boldest, & I can see a play which would be quite as fearful as Mr Hyde & Dr Jekyll. Which would surpass that excellent old play of the Vampire in wh: Boucicault had to act & which would attract all London. I long to see it done. (Halifax, Letter to Stoker, Stoker Correspondence)

On 23 October 1897, Charles Lindley Wood, Viscount Halifax, wrote to Stoker with suggestions for a dramatization of Dracula. Halifax refers to Thomas Russell Sullivan’s stage adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written in conjunction with the American actor Richard Mansfield. Irving saw Mansfield in the play during the Lyceum’s 1887–88 American tour, and invited Mansfield to produce the play at the Lyceum in the autumn of 1888. It opened on 4 August. When Mansfield played the dual role in Boston, where the play was first performed on 9 May 1887, it was a sensational success, but one, however, that Mansfield was unable to repeat at the Lyceum and for which he blamed Irving. Despite this commercial failure in London, Mansfield’s on-stage transformation from Jekyll into Hyde brought about by the actor’s ‘chameleon-like control over his appearance’ and innovations in lighting technology (Danahy and Chisolm, 2005: 32) both prefigured the transformatory power of Stoker’s vampire and drew the production and the actor into the furore surrounding the identity of Jack the Ripper. A contemporary review notes: ‘Between the Whitechapel murders and the weird performance of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the mental condition of people with highly-strung nerves is becoming very serious’ (Danahy and Chisholm, 2005: xx). By connecting Stoker’s novel with the stage adaptation of Stevenson’s text, Halifax was drawing on the most sensational crimes of the late Victorian period and demonstrating the late century’s fascination with titillating and lurid display. His promise that the novel on stage with Irving in the title role would ‘attract all London’ underlined the actor-manager’s well-established predilection for the weird (an adjective often associated with Irving) and the supernatural. In addition, Halifax’s connection between Stoker’s work and Dion Boucicault’s supernatural plays The Vampire (1852) and The Phantom (1856) further sets the novel within its nineteenth-century dramatic context. Taking its cues from Halifax’s letter, this chapter explores these theatrical connections, placing Stoker’s work within a spectacular continuum incorporating Gothic fiction and the melodramatic stage.

From Gothic plays to nineteenth-century melodrama

Bertrand Evans argues that Gothicists following Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), generally regarded as the first Gothic novel, ‘built up an elaborate machinery of mystery, gloom and terror’ (1947: 10). Walpole’s castle, a site of incarceration for women where illegitimate rule is enforced through tyranny, is razed to the ground when the ghostly and gigantic form of its rightful ruler restores legitimacy. Given its rich machinery and its spectacular potential, a close relationship between Gothic literature and the stage was conceived at the genre’s outset. Although themes now so closely associated with Gothic literature emerge before 1764, Walpole’s amended subtitle to the second edition of his text defines The Castle of Otranto as A Gothic Story, just as the huge supernatural helmet that seems to fall from the sky to crush Conrad, the heir to Otranto, in its opening page signalled the arrival of Gothic spectacle. As Clive Bloom argues in Gothic Histories, Gothic from ‘its inception’ was ‘foremost a psychological, architectural, theatrical and visual statement about man’s relationship to his surroundings’ (2010: 115).

Evans argues that Gothic drama can be fixed with Walpole’s play The Mysterious Mother in 1768 (1947: 16). However, Paul Ranger points out that neither the dramatists of the eighteenth century nor their audiences ‘used the term “gothic drama”’ (1991: 1). Such plays exploited the conventions of Gothic fiction: ‘castles were always ruinous, forests set in deep gloom and the sea-shore lashed by the storm-driven waves’ (1991: 10). It had its hero, heroine and villain and, to relieve the tension, a ‘bevy of humorous domestics or rustics’ (1991: 10). Despite its medieval settings and escapist fantasies Gothic drama was a response to the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, and the ‘constant travels of stage characters were a mirroring of the ingress of the artisan class to urban areas’ in an age when ‘various strata of society were harassed and repressed’ (1991: 146). While Ranger focuses on Britain, his analysis also explains how the Gothic becomes a primary form of literary expression in colonial Ireland.¹ Crucially, Ranger defines Gothic drama as an ‘artistic climate assimilated by practitioners of a range of the creative arts’ (1991: 17) rather than a movement. Like the vampire, it seems, Gothic was ‘a spirit, moving where it would’ (1991: 18). Although he does not develop his point, Ranger suggestively connects Dracula to a dramatic impulse: ‘Stoker, Henry Irving’s secretary, possessed a strong sense of the theatre’ (1991: 147). Stoker was not officially Irving’s secretary, but it was one of the roles that he performed as the actor’s business manager.

The rise of melodrama as a genre is almost coterminous with Gothic drama, and melodrama consumed the Gothic as it gained precedence on the nineteenth-century stage. The first use of the term melodrama in English emerged in 1802 with Thomas Holcraft’s A Tale of Mystery, the term deriving from the French mélodrame with Guilbert de Pixérécourt, responsible for the form and from whom Holcraft adapted his play. Melodrama in its original formation was a story combined with music, dance and pantomimic or acrobatic feats, or, as Frank Rahill describes: ‘a form of dramatic composition in prose partaking of the nature of tragedy, comedy, pantomime, and spectacle’ (1967: xiv). Pixérécourt had borrowed from the English Gothic school and indeed throughout the nineteenth century a rich culture of exchange was established between English and French drama. Evans observes how ‘Pixérécourt adapted English materials under a French label; Holcroft and other English playwrights took over the label and attached it to plays of a kind which had existed more than thirty years, and which, carried piecemeal to France, had evolved the mélodrame to “the complete formula”’ (1947: 164). James L. Smith describes how Gothic melodrama features

gloomy haunted castles ruled by gloomy haunted tyrants much given to locking up abusive young men in gloomy haunted dungeons below the moat. Luckily there is a secret passage to the ruined cloister of some neighbouring convent, with suits of armour, animated portraits or skeletons bearing flaming daggers encrusted with blood to point the way. (1973: 39)

Add to this description an endangered heroine and the definition effectively describes Matthew Lewis’s popular Gothic drama The Castle Spectre (1798).

Melodrama (Gothic or its other varieties) was extremely popular with nineteenth-century audiences. Its excessive or exaggerated plots set good against evil or adverse forces. ‘Triumph, despair and protest are the basic emotions of melodrama, and the art of working each to its highest pitch occasions the catharsis of the form’ (Smith, 1973: 9). Although the melodramas Stoker reviewed at the Theatre Royal and Irving performed at the Lyceum were enjoyed by the middle classes and the literary and social elites, it is evident in Stoker’s unpublished theatrical correspondence that audiences came from all social classes, and in London, for instance, a wide range of theatres serviced its diverse population. Melodrama ‘evolved with an uneducated audience in mind, thus offering an ideal aesthetic template through which to reach those often excluded from serious literature’ (John, 2009: 2). Melodrama also spoke to a nineteenth century in which technological innovation could generate theatrical spectacle, which satisfied audiences clamouring for visceral entertainment, that understood adversity, and valued its vanquishing on stage and in fiction. Melodrama thereby staged the nineteenth-century zeitgeist. David Mayer argues, ‘melodrama tries to respond with emotional, rather than intellectual, answers to a world where explanations of why there is pain and chaos and discord are flawed or deeply and logically inconsistent […] [It] provides an emotionally intelligent picture of the world to deracinated western cultures, severed by science and technology from former religious and spiritual “truths”’ (2004: 148). As Chapter 2 demonstrates, new technologies serviced Gothic spectacle, with this fusion and collision of the archaic and the modern comprehensively played out in Dracula.

Despite being a frequently derided genre, melodrama has gained critical attention and reappraisal since the 1960s with key works on the genre by Frank Rahill, Eric Bentley and Michael R. Booth and others. In 1976 Peter Brooks’s seminal work on melodrama considered it as a mode rather than a genre and by deploying psychoanalytical criticism examined the melodramatic mode in the fiction of Henry James and Balzac. Brooks locates melodrama’s origins in the French Revolution:

This is the epistemological moment which it illustrates and to which it contributes: the moment that symbolically, and really, marks the liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch), the shattering of the myth of Christendom, the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society, and the invalidation of the literary forms – tragedy, comedy of manners – that depended on such a society. Melodrama does not simply represent a ‘fall’ from tragedy, but a response to the loss of the tragic vision. It comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern. (1995: 15)

Melodrama for Brooks becomes the ‘principal mode for uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era’ (1995: 15). Jacky Bratton argues that melodramatic texts were read as ‘multidimensional’ and that diverse audiences were able to use melodramatic narratives to engage with the ‘loss of sacred certainties, and deliberately and repeatedly […] reassemble a moral structure from the debris of a desacralised signification’ (1994: 48). Brooks posits that melodrama shares the characteristics of the Gothic novel in its preoccupation with ‘nightmare states, with claustration and the thwarted escape, with innocence buried alive and unable to voice its claim to recognition. Particularly it shares the preoccupation with evil as a real, irreducible force in the world, constantly menacing outburst’ (1995: 20). He contends that melodrama is less interested in the ‘numinous’ than the Gothic novel and it demonstrates that the ‘signs of ethical forces can be discovered and can be made legible’ (1995: 20). Melodrama, like the Gothic novel, however, transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. At the Lyceum Irving staged several melodramas that drew on the Revolution.² As Gothic infiltrated the realist novel before its late-century renaissance, melodrama sensationalized the realist text and articulated itself through the Gothic.

Robertson Davies notes, ‘Melodrama was not the only theatrical mode during the nineteenth century, but it was the dominant one […] most plays, including classical tragedies, partook of the melodramatic quality’ (1983: 25). Davies draws an important distinction, for instance, between the Hamlet of John Philip Kemble in 1783 and the ‘tempestuous Shylock of Edmund Kean in 1814’, describing it as the ‘difference between Neo-Classicism and Romanticism; of Kemble it was said that he was “the statue on the pedestal that cannot come down without shaming its worshippers”; we know that Coleridge said that watching Kean was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. Kemble might lift you to new heights of splendour, but Kean could make your flesh creep’ (1983: 25). Irving, a melodramatic performer, also made his audience’s ‘flesh creep’ in his Gothic melodramas and Shakespearean productions. At the other end of the social scale, a costermonger interviewed by Henry Mayhew acknowledged: ‘Of Hamlet we can make neither head nor side; and nine out of ten of us ... would like it to be confined to the ghost scenes, and the funeral, and the killing off at the last. Macbeth would be better liked, if it was only the witches and the fighting’ (Stuart, 1994: 72). Indeed, Elaine Hadley remarks, ‘for theatrical historians the nineteenth century has always been supposed the nadir of the English drama, the decades when Richard III was performed on horseback, when tanks of water replaced the stage, and when dogs had sometimes more lines to deliver than great tragedians’ (1995: 2).

Hadley’s work importantly reappraises the role of melodrama in nineteenth-century culture by arguing that

melodrama’s familial narratives of dispersal and reunion, its emphatically visual renderings of bodily torture and criminal conduct, its atmospheric menace and providential plotting, its expression of highly charged emotion, and its tendency to personify absolutes like good and evil were represented in a wide variety of social settings, not just on the stage. (1995: 3)

Hadley explores how the ‘“melodramatic” seems to have served as a behavioural and expressive model for several generations of English people’ (1995: 3) and that the melodramatic mode appeared in a variety of public forms such as politics and journalism.

On-stage melodrama engaged in scenes of oppression and daring escapes and ultimately overcoming adversity through culminating in reconciliatory narratives that often involved the reconstitution of families. For Hadley, melodramatic tactics emerge at sites of social conflict by both sides in the debate. One of her key examples is Oliver Twist in which Dickens deploys melodramatic tactics, providing images of incarceration and victimization and eliciting sympathy from the reader to the protagonist’s plight as a response to changes in the Poor Law, which were represented as attacks on paternalism and family values. By focusing on melodrama as a mode, Hadley’s reappraisal of the melodramatic, although finally asserting its conservative values despite subversive tendencies, importantly examines its deployment at, and engagement with, periods of social change and stress.

Although often rooted in social actualities and material conditions, melodrama functions on the level of fantasy. It functions in an escapist mode, by offering a ‘compensatory fantasy in which the longings and desires denied by the pressures and deprivations of social actuality could be vicariously released’ (Prendergast, 1978: 7). As such, melodrama enacts a ‘fantasy of wish-fulfillment within a plane that is an idealized version of the real world’ (1978: 7). However, in an analysis that can be deployed to an understanding of how Stoker’s fiction operates within a melodramatic matrix, Christopher Prendergast suggests that while melodrama’s overt function seems to be in producing an ‘uncomplicated moral reading of the universe and of locating the subject in a secure world of moral representations’, melodrama’s appeal does not just rest on the idea of the fantasy of ethical triumph and justice, but rather a complexity arises in the

ambiguous manner in which the melodramatic imagination handles the relationship between ‘order’ and ‘disorder’, in the way it allows the mind to shift ambivalently to and fro between the longing for order and the excitements of disorder, to slip back and forth from the soothing caress of moral safety to the seductive attractions of danger and violence. (1978: 8–9)

The appeal of melodrama often lies, as it does in the Gothic novel, with the villain, as evil not only arouses ‘fear and revulsion’ but ‘fascination and vicarious complicity’. Indeed, ‘evil and disorder […] strike a chord in our own fantasies of cruelty and destruction’ (1978: 9). Prendergast locates this impulse in Ann Radcliffe’s work, which provides, he argues, ‘a curious mixture of dread and delight, fear and attraction’ (1978: 9) that re-emerges in the crime and violence of Victorian melodrama. His point is suggestive. Dracula’s Jonathan Harker assumes the part of the persecuted Radcliffean heroine Emily St Aubert from The Mysteries of Udolpho in his voyage to and entrapment in a Gothic castle, as Stoker embraces the traditional Gothic architectural conventions and menacing tyrants in European settings and brings them, in Jonathan Harker’s words, ‘up-to-date with a vengeance’ (Stoker, 1997: 40). This is achieved through the figure of the vampire, who straddles the past and the contemporary late nineteenth century, a figure who also had a long-standing history on the British stage, particularly at the Lyceum, long before Irving assumed the theatre’s management and Stoker became his assistant.

Vampire melodramas

Stoker’s revival of the vampire theme at the end of ...