Abstract
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.
[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)
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Notes
In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, Terry Eagleton discusses the lack of a realist tradition in nineteenth-century Irish fiction. The social conditions were too disruptive and disrupted to produce an adequately realist text as the ‘genre depends on settlement and stability, gathering individual lives into an integrated whole’ (1995: 147).
See, for instance, Richelieu, The Dead Heart, Robespierre and Madame Sans Gêne. For a reading of these productions, see Richards (2005: 353–417).
For a full discussion of vampire melodramas, see Frayling (1991: 131–44). See Luke Gibbons for a political discussion of the ‘facility with which depictions of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands […] lent themselves to some of the earliest forays into the Gothic’ (2004: 20).
For further discussion of these associations, see Rarignac (2012: 50–4).
The opening of Planché’s play also recalls ‘Dracula’s Guest’, published as a short story in 1914, and functioning as a preface to Dracula. Here the narrator, an unnamed Jonathan Harker, visits an abandoned German village associated with vampires on Walpurgis Night. Taking refuge from the storm in the tomb of a suicide, the Countess of Styria – Stoker’s tribute to J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire Carmilla (1872) – he sees a vision of the corpse arising from its tomb, until he feels himself clasped and pulled away by a strange force and then shielded by a wolf which lies on his body. Soldiers come to rescue him. Later when he queries how his rescue has come about he is presented with a letter from Dracula promising to reward Harker’s hosts if his safety is ensured. Like Margaret at the tomb of Cromal, supernatural intervention ensures his safety, but unlike the vampire play, his safety is only temporary. In Dracula Harker is rescued again by Dracula, this time from the clutches of the vampire women.
For an examination of other Irish plays performed in Dublin during Stoker’s tenure as reviewer, see Wynne (2012, vol. 1: xxi–xxiii).
Deirdre McFeely’s Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage (2012) examines the contemporary reception of Boucicault’s Irish plays in Dublin, London and New York.
For a discussion of how the novel was thematically similar to other plays that Stoker saw at the Theatre Royal and the broader political context, see Wynne (2012, vol. 1: xix–xxiv).
For a fuller discussion of this, see Wynne (2012, vol. 1: xxii–xxiii and vol. 2: 85–7).
See [Greville Cole] Theatre Programmes, 1849–1906, National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
Adaptations of sensation novels which appeared on the Dublin stage in the 1870s included: Collins’s The Woman in White (April 1872) and The New Magdalen (December 1874); and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (October 1874). One of J. L. Toole’s regular pieces was an adaptation of Oliver Twist (November 1873). Jennie Lee cross-dressed to perform in Jo, the crossingsweeper of Bleak House. The role made her famous on the international stage. For reviews of the various adaptations performed in Dublin in the 1870s, see Wynne (2012, vol. 1: passim).
Stoker first saw Irving on stage in Dublin with Louisa Herbert’s company. Herbert was a beautiful actress who modelled for the Pre-Raphaelites. See Wynne (2012, vol. 2: 1, 5 n.).
For an account of the murder, see Rowell (1987).
It is clear that Stoker was thinking about the difficulties involved in adapting novels for the stage for some time. In a review of 30 April 1872 of Collins’s stage adaptation of The Woman in White he ponders: ‘In dramatising a novel there are many advantages, but many difficulties. The same knowledge which the audience is supposed to have of the characters and the plot of the novel tends to make them hypercritical, and to look for the reproduction of every minute incident. They seem to forget often that many things can be told and many descriptions perfected in words which could not possibly be represented upon the stage. Mystery is tolerable in a novel, but fatal on the stage; and whereas in the latter it is perfectly good art to show fully the development of a plot, it is wrong to conceal any of its working to an audience. Mr. Wilkie Collins, in dramatising The Woman in White, saw all these difficulties and grappled with them in a masterly manner’ (Wynne, 2012, vol. 1: 29).
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© 2013 Catherine Wynne
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Wynne, C. (2013). Stoker, Melodrama and the Gothic. In: Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137298997_2
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