Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage

Bram Stoker worked in the theatre for most of his adult life, as theatre reviewer in Dublin in the 1870s and as business manager at London's Royal Lyceum Theatre in the final two decades of the 19th century. Despite this, critical attention to the influence of the stage on Stoker's writing has been sparse. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage addresses this lacuna, examining how Stoker's fictions respond to and engage with Victorian theatre's melodramatic climate and, in particular, to supernatural plays, Gothic melodramas and Shakespearean productions that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry performed at the Lyceum. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage locates the writer between stage and page. It reconsiders his literary relationships with key actors, and challenges the biographical assumption that Henry Irving provided the model for the figure of Count Dracula.

Catherine Wynne is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, UK. She is editor of Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays and Fiction (2012), author of The Colonial Conan Doyle (2002) and co-editor (with Sabine Vanacker) of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives (2012).

Introduction: Setting the Scene
1. Stoker, Melodrama and the Gothic
2. Irving's Tempters and Stoker's Vanishing Ladies: Supernatural Production, Mesmeric Influence and Magical Illusion
3. Ellen Terry and the 'Bloofer Lady': Femininity and Fallenness
4. Gothic Weddings and Performing Vampires: Geneviève Ward and The Lady of the Shroud
5. The Lyceum's Macbeth and Stoker's Dracula
Conclusion