Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian gothic stage

Abstract

Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)A book which considers Bram Stoker's immersion in late nineteenth-century theatre both on the Dublin and London stages, and how this may have contributed to his gothic fiction, is long overdue. Catherine Wynne is ideally placed to write such a study. Born and raised in Ireland, where she took a BA and MA in English at University College Dublin, she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Oxford with Irish poet-academic Bernard O'Donoghue. Currently, she is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. Her career, in other words, follows the same Anglo-Irish trajectory as that of Stoker himself, and her study is particularly nuanced with regard to that cultural background. Wynne has previously researched Stoker's theatre reviews, and published in 2012 Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays, and Fiction, all of which provides a rich seed-bed for this current study. She cites Irish novelist Colm Toibin who, on the eve of Stoker's centenary in 2012, suggested that the gothic novelist occupies a space 'in between' Dublin and London and, like Oscar Wilde, that he found his 'space' in the theatre (p. 3).Born in Dublin in 1847 (during the Irish Famine), Bram Stoker attended Trinity College Dublin, and became a civil servant. In his twenties, his nights were spent at the theatre, reviewing plays for the Dublin Evening Mail. In November 1876, Sir Henry Irving, the most celebrated stage actor of the late Victorian period, came to Dublin with his production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The event was to prove transformative in Stoker's life and career. Not only did he see and review Irving's Hamlet, but attended and reviewed separately all three performances. Interestingly, the first two, though extremely positive, also contained some criticisms. Irving was attracted by the second review in particular and asked to meet the author. The outcome was an offer for Stoker to relocate to London and to become the manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre. He did so later that year and as manager, was intimately bound up in the staging of the melodramas that were the lifeblood of Irving's theatre and that were to feed directly into Stoker's imaginative writings.Wynne's book provides a close intertextual reading of Stoker's gothic fiction and the blood-boltered, spectacular melodramas he saw performed on the Lyceum stage. Her book is an invaluable and revealing index of just how often stage plays are explicitly invoked in Stoker's novels. In Dracula, for instance, Jonathan Harker reaches for a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet (the play Irving performed in Dublin) when deciding to write down what he has just seen - the Count climbing lizard-like up the walls of the castle:Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he had Hamlet say: 'My tablets! Quick, my tablets!/'Tis meet that I put it down, etc.' for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.1Hamlet, when he speaks these lines, has just had his own encounter with the supernatural in the shape of his father's ghost. The submitting and hence subduing of a supernatural encounter to the rational act of recording is an obsessive concern throughout Dracula.Given the explicit invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet by Jonathan Harker and hence by Bram Stoker, it might be expected that a study such as Wynne's would explore in more detail the connections that have been made between the mesmeric onstage presence of Henry Irving and the uncanny figure of Count Dracula. The author, however, resolutely sets her face against following this line, declaring early on her opposition to 'the biographical over-reliance on the notion that Irving is the model for the vampire' (p. 3). In her closing pages, she reiterates even more emphatically that her study 'contests the prevailing reading that sees Irving as the model for the vampire' (p. …