Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage

Abstract

Wynne's study, therefore, delivers exactly what it promises in the title: a wonderfully researched and comprehensive analysis of the Victorian gothic stage as seen through the eyes of the Lyceum Theatre's manager, with his red hair, Irish accent, and eyes which a journalist from the Pall Mall Gazette describes as having 'a strange and uncanny look' (cited p. 143). [...]Wynne's book is a study not of one Victorian actor but of three:

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 Tóibín 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.1

Hamlet, 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. 165). Indeed, Wynne examines the relationship between Stoker and Irving primarily in theatrical rather than psychological terms. In his 1906 Personal Reminiscences of the actor, Stoker cast off the theatre reviewer's professional reserve and wrote how he was enthralled by 'the magnetism of [Irving's] genius' and 'burst out into something like a violent fit of hysterics'. He wrote, '[s]oul had looked into soul! From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men' (cited p. 6). Where I would see and say 'homoeroticism', Wynne reads this passage as evidence of how 'Stoker interpreted his relationship with Irving in melodramatic terms'. That close collaborative relationship is explored through her readings of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth, Faust which the two men worked to make more '"eerie"' (p. 52), and Irving's breakthrough performance of Mathias in The Bells, in which he most successfully internalised and psychologised the operations of melodrama. Wynne's study, therefore, delivers exactly what it promises in the title: a wonderfully researched and comprehensive analysis of the Victorian gothic stage as seen through the eyes of the Lyceum Theatre's manager, with his red hair, Irish accent, and eyes which a journalist from the Pall Mall Gazette describes as having 'a strange and uncanny look' (cited p. 143).

In fact, Wynne's book is a study not of one Victorian actor but of three: Henry Irving, the actress Ellen Terry who most frequently shared the stage with him, and the American actress-manager Genevieve Ward, with whom Stoker became fascinated when he first saw her perform in Dublin in 1873 (providing an intriguing parallel with Irving three years later) and whom he continued to advise throughout her career. Wynne is particularly astute on how the offstage personae of the three actors intersect with their onstage performances. Henry Irving, rather like Wilde's Dorian Gray, had a portrait which he consigned to the attic and later repeatedly stabbed with a dagger because he did not like how it represented him. Terry had what Wynne describes as a 'rather notorious' (p. 79) and rackety personal life which she offset by portraying such virtuous, suffering heroines as Shakespeare's Ophelia. With Genevieve Ward, there was a direct line of continuity between the gothic marriage she arranged with the man who sought to escape his marital obligation to her and the parts she played, a situation of which Stoker was aware and which he transposed into his 1909 novel, The Lady of the Shroud. The interplay between moral rectitude and erotic titillation that these actresses performed onstage is carefully linked by Wynne to the fate of Lucy in Dracula, the innocent young woman transformed into a bloody predator. Her fate is decapitation and dismemberment, and this in turn leads Wynne to go beyond an examination of the conventional stage play, and into a fascinating account of the stage practices of magicians as they made women's bodies disappear in whole or in part. This includes a vivid description of the 'vampire trap(door)', which Stoker presses into violent and bloody ends in several of his fictions. Wynne is particularly good at demonstrating how women are central to the erotic and emotional spectacle of Victorian theatre but are placed there and manipulated by the men. Her argument persuasively sees this gendered narrative replicated repeatedly in Stoker's novel.

The huge irony underpinning any discussion of Stoker's relationship with the Victorian gothic theatre is that when Stoker wrote a stage version of Dracula and put on a copyrighted, staged reading at the Lyceum in 1897, Irving is alleged to have described it as 'dreadful'. Wynne dismisses this as fanciful and a simplification of the two men's complex theatrical collaboration. But she also cites Ellen Terry's observation (from up close) that Irving 'failed to appreciate the abilities of others'. Irving may well have been taken aback and none too appreciative of the Irishman who occupied a subordinate role in his theatrical domain moving centre stage with this act of authorship. In the theatrical and fictional gothic worlds which this book so expertly examines and interweaves, myths are particularly difficult to dispel.

Anthony Roche

Footnote

1 Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin English Library, 2012), pp. 41-42.