PLANCHE'S VAMPIRE WOULDN'T DIE...

You see here a playbill from 1850, thirty years exactly after the debut of The Vampire; or the Bride of the Isles at the English Opera House. It still rates a large-print title. Planche's memoirs in 1872 state that the play "is a stock piece to this day." By the 1850s it was competing with Dion Boucicault's excellent version of the story, but continued to be a favourite.

Planche' himself had reworked the story twice more: once as the libretto of the opera Der Vampyr and later burlesquing his own production in Giovanni the Vampire!!! or, how shall we get rid of him? (text to the latter unfortunately lost to history).

THE VAMPIRE: ORIGINAL PLAYBILL

Here is the programme bill for the 1820 The Vampire, starring T.P. Cooke.
Notice the elucidation on vampires, necessary since they were not part of English folklore:

This Piece is founded on the various traditions concerning THE VAMPIRES...they cannot be destroyed, as long as they sustain their dreadful Existence, by imbibing the BLOOD of FEMALE VICTIMS...

Also of note, T.P. Cooke was director of melodramatic action of the piece (the scenery and equipment by all accounts overwhelmed the audience), decades before the idea of direction came into stage practice.

And, the bill states that "applause at conclusion of each performance has lasted for several minutes." Contemporary reviews bear this out.

PLAYBILL FOR THE VAMPIRE (1820)

Theatrical critics applauded the scenery and effects of The Vampire. The European Magazine and London Review said they "demand[ed] a particular notice", specifically pointing out the effects of moonlight and sea, presenting a "coup d'oeil ... rarely, if ever seen excelled." This handbill for the 1820 production of The Vampire shows two moments from the Introductory Scene, and even from this black-and-white line drawing, we can imagine the effect of T.P. Cooke's appearance in fire and smoke in the dark Caves of Staffa.

For centuries demons, witches and ghosts had appeared through the stage floor by means of trapdoors. The English Opera House, for The Vampire, invented a new device of two rubber doors held shut with sandbags as counterweight; an actor would press quickly through and the weights snapped the doors immediately shut, giving an effect of the actor having melted through a solid plane. With blue fire and smoke, the actor seemed to materialize out of thin air. The "vampire trap" (or "trappe anglaise", in France)became a standard device for supernatural appearances. The Review tells us Cooke as Lord Ruthven "sinks through the stage in a scene of terrific grandeur." Theatre history was made.

T.P. COOKE AS LORD RUTHVEN

T.P. Cooke as Lord Ruthven in The Vampire by J. R. Planche'. Cooke played this role for 365 performances.

THE ORIGINAL FOR LORD RUTHVEN

The Vampire (published in 1819) took Lord Byron as the model for the vampire Lord Ruthven. Everyone knew this. Byron's ex-lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, had attacked him as "Ruthven, Lord of Glenarvon" in her 1816 roman a clef Glenarvon. Lamb labeled him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know."

One of the most famous and recognizable men of his time, thought by some to be the first modern-style celebrity, Byron's persona was known across Europe. By all accounts he had a mesmeric charm which inspired the strongest devotion in his friends. Born with a clubfoot, he was unable to dance, which might have damaged his attractiveness, but he managed to turn it to social advantage. Standing against the glitter of a drawing room or assembly hall, characteristically dressed in black (which he made a fashionable color for men's evening dress), sneering at the contemporary craze for the Waltz, he personified the lonely Fatal Man he created in his poetry. He was shy with strangers, which read as an interesting reserve of character. He was seldom seen to eat or drink, in a time where gentlemen and ladies enjoyed their meals freely. His meager diet left him pale and languid. It added to his supernatural aura, but was merely a prosaic attempt to fight a tendency to fat(Byron was overweight as a boy, until he entered Cambridge and started his lifelong starvation diet).

Lord Ruthven, the first vampire in the Western tradition, was, like Byron, tall, magnetic, pale, and aloof. He had a "penetrating eye", a keen sense of hierarchy and his own superiority, and a consciousness of his isolation from humanity. The "black romanticism" of Byron and Poidori had a permanent effect. Fireside tales of reanimated peasants forced into brutish existence were replaced with the image of the vampire familiar today from Dracula to Lestat: young, aristocratic, brooding, and attractive.

DR. POLIDORI - INSPIRER OF "THE VAMPIRE" PLAY

John Polidori (1795-1821) died young, as did so many of his fellow writers of the Romantic Movement (for example, Byron, Keats, and Shelley). Though his degree was in medicine (he was Byron's private physician for a while), he gave English literature one of its most enduring icons -- the vampire. Vampires and revenants had existed in superstition for centuries, but they were part of Eastern European belief. Polidori, inspired by a short piece of fiction by Byron, wrote a story, later dramatized by James Robinson Planche in 1820, which gave us the iconic Western vampire formed after the Gothic type: pallid, imperious, isolated, and charismatic. He was a social and hierarchical creature, far removed from the brutish blood-drinker of folklore. This was the first appearance of the character in English literature, and has influenced literary variations to the present day.

Polidori was the son of a Italian emigre'; his sister Frances married Gabriel Rossetti, and so he was uncle to the artistic siblings William, Dante, and Christine.
He qualified as a doctor at the very young age of 19, after attending Edinburgh University, and served Lord Byron for a while as his personal physician. In 1816 he accompanied Lord Byron to Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Byron's houseguests Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Shelley, as well as Polidori, competed with Byron in a ghost-story contest (the novel Frankenstein owes its existence to this contest). Byron contributed a short vampire tale, which Polidori turned into a longer piece of fiction after he and Byron had parted on extremely bad terms. It mysteriously turned up in an anonymous packet at the offices of The New Monthly Magazine. No name was attached, but Byron was believed by many to be the author. Both Byron and Polidori protested this belief, but whoever the author, the audience knew that Lord Ruthven, the aristocratic revenant, was meant to be Byron himself and this ensured its popular success.

Polidori's ambition was to succeed as an imaginative writer in the Romantic style; he wrote one novel, Ernestus Berchtold, and a sacred poem, "The Fall of the Angels." In 1821, disappointed and depressed, he committed suicide at his father's house, at the age of 26. He is remembered at his boyhood school, Ampleforth College, by the Polidori Lecture, given each year on some aspect of the Romantic Movement.

THE VAMPIRE's Scottish setting

The Bride of the Isles (as Planche's The Vampire was subtitled) was originally meant as a drama of the Greek isles. Lord Byron drew on Eastern Europe's tradition of revenants for his Lord Ruthven (see earlier post for literary pedigree). Charles Nodier's drama shifted the scene to Scotland, as Planche recollected in 1872, "with the usual recklessness of French dramatists...in Scotland, where the superstition never existed." Planche tried to convince producer Samuel Arnold to place the action in eastern Europe, but Mr Arnold knew Scottish music and dress were in vogue -- and he already had a wardrobe full of Scottish costumes.

The play opens in the dramatic setting of The Caves of Staffa (see above 19th-century illustration). The opening act's stage scenery was one reason theatregoers were drawn to the play in crowds. Staffa, a small island off the coast of Mull, is graced with basaltic caves, the basalt formed into regular rows of glassy dark pillars, resembling a man-made cathedral. The famous Fingal's Cave is entered here, the mouth measuring forty-two feet wide and fifty-six feet high. The cavern itself is two hundred and twenty-seven feet long. This and other caves were popular tourist attractions, inspiring Wordsworth and Keats to poetry, and Mendelsohn to his "Scottish Symphony" and "Hebrides" Overture

Planche's The Vampire (1820)

New Old Theater's next project is a staged reading of The Vampire, written by J.R. Planche and first performed in 1820. This play was written in the High Gothic tradition, with thunderstorms, castles, moonlit nights, a beautiful emperiled virgin, and a Byronic protagonist, Lord Ruthven (the th is silent). The play's pedigree, in fact, leads back directly to Lord Byron himself: Planche adapted a French play Le Vampire by Charles Nodier, which was taken from Dr. John Polidori's story. Polidori was Lord Byron's doctor and a member of the fateful ghost story contest at Lake Geneva in 1816, hosted by Lord Byron, where he heard Mary Shelley's germ of Frankenstein, and Byron's Vampire tale, later embroidered by Polidori and published as his own. The story was sited in Greece (hence the subtitle, The Bride of the Isles), but the English theater owner had an abundance of Scottish costumes, due to the popularity of the Waverley novels, and no Greek ones, so the Vampire became a haunter of the Highlands (see above illustration, taken from the production itself by George Cruikshank).

N.O.T. will be performing at Riversdale House in Riversdale, Maryland, on Friday, 24 October, 2008; the original songs will be performed as part of the play. Click here to buy tickets. Also Saturday, October 25th at the Time and Tide Theater at the Fell’s Point Visitor Center, 1724 Thames Street, Baltimore (Click here, and Thursday, October 30th at The Flag House and Star Spangled Banner Museum, 844 East Pratt Street, Baltimore (email info@flaghouse.org.