Title: The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo
Format: Short story
Author: Uriah Derek D’Arcy (Pseudonym; there are various theories as to the author’s real name, but no actual consensus, and no proof)
Nationality: American
Written: 1819
Published: 1819
Impact: 8
This one ticked a lot of firsts: the first American vampire story, the first with a black vampire, one of the first (if not the first) anti-slavery short stories (vampire, horror or other) and the first comic vampire story. That’s a lot of achievements, so you’d have to assume it made a big impact, though given it was written in a time when slavery was still legal in America, maybe not so much over there at least.
Synopsis: Almost presaging the later
Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, and in particular
The Vampire Lestat, the story opens with the protagonist, Anthony Gibbons, recounting his family history, which includes a voyage from Guinea on a French slave ship to the island of Santo Domingo. Everyone dies but one boy, whose new owner, Mr. Personne, tries to drown in the sea, but his body comes back in and he is still alive. Personne then tries to burn him but the boy overpowers him and throws him on the fire, leaving him badly scarred. Recovering in bed, Personne calls out for his wife and baby, but is told by the grieving woman that their child is dead, all that remains of him his skin, nails and hair. Overcome by sorrow and horror, Personne dies.
His wife, Euphemia, marries twice more, and on the death of her second (third, really) husband she meets a strange Moor Prince who is in company with a European boy named Zembo. They fall in love and she marries the prince. At midnight on their wedding night the prince takes Euphemia to the grave of her child, and exhumes the body. He fills a golden goblet with the boy’s blood and forces her to drink it. He warns her she can’t tell anyone about what happened here. She swoons, and when she wakes she is in her husband’s grave; she has become a vampire.
The prince and the boy, Zembo, then dig up all three of her husbands and bring them back to life, forcing the two she married after Personne to fight a duel. Thereafter they are both staked, and the prince assures Euphemia they cannot be brought back to life. He then reveals that he is the boy Personne tried to kill, forgives him and presents Zembo as being their own son, whom he had kidnapped and raised. He then instructs them to travel to Europe.
On the way they pass a cave where a meeting of vampires is taking place, the undead believing they should, as the oldest creatures on earth, rise up and free themselves but just then they are attacked by soldiers and everyone is killed, other than Personne and Euphemia, and Zembo, who then emerges with the cure, allowing both husband and wife to return to a state of mortality. The prince, betrayed by Zembo, who had ratted on the vampires to the army, dies in the fight and the narrator is revealed to be of his line, cursed with being partially vampire.
As is usual here, I haven’t read the story and probably won’t, but I fail to see any comedy in it. Mind you, as I just said, I haven’t read it, and maybe you need to. It’s certainly interesting as being the first black vampire we ever encounter and the first vampire story written by an American, though it features characters from Guinea, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. There are clearly echoes of Byron/Polidori’s stories here, in the extraction of an oath to keep a secret, and I think possibly the first time a stake is suggested as the best - only - way of killing a vampire, though here a somewhat vague (in the synopsis, at least) reference is made to a “cure”, something I believe never envisioned again. Once you’re a vampire, the current lore goes, you stay a vampire, although in some cases the destruction of your sire - he who made you into a vampire - can release you. Then again, that may release you into death.
To some extent, you can see Bram Stoker jumping on this idea too, when Mina, clearly destined for vampirehood, is saved by the death of Count Dracula, while in Anne Rice’s books, the death of his mentor in the fire does not have any effect on the existence of Lestat. I’m not fully onboard with the idea of this being an anti-slavery story either, but again I suppose I can’t make that judgement without having read it. However it does look back to the eighteenth century poem
Leonore (which we took as one of our very first example of vampire literature) with the visitation at a grave, a location which would become inextricably linked with vampires and the undead.
It also seems that this is, or may be, the first vampire story with a moral to be taught. The prince teaches Personne the value of forgiveness and forbearance as he returns his son to the slave owner, having taken care of him for years, and absolves him of the sin of having twice tried to kill him. Not sure what that says in an anti-slavery context: maybe that the slaves are more human as they are willing to forgive their erstwhile masters? It’s interesting to me that the slave owner is called Personne, French for nobody.
Title: Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires
Format: Short story
Author: Cyprien Bérard (although for some reason attributed to Charles Nodier)
Nationality: French
Written: 1820
Published: 1820
Impact: ?
Synopsis: I don’t know, as there’s no entry on it that I can see, and even if I could find it, I can’t read French, so all I can tell you is that it was an unauthorised sequel to
The Vampyre.
From here, we start to see the first vampires on stage, as the figure is brought out of the pages of the book and to the theatre for the first time, crossing, as it were, from one world into another.
Title: Le Vampire
Format: Stage Play
Author: Charles Nodier
Nationality: French
Written: 1820
Premiered: 1820
Based on: The Vampyre by John Polidori
Impact: Unknown, but as it seems to have been one of the first vampire plays, I imagine it was quite high.
Again, being French and with no accompanying article, I can’t tell you much about this, other than for some reason Nodier switched the setting to Scotland, but in the same year
The Vampyre was again adapted for the stage, this time by an Englishman with a curiously French-sounding name, and without the bother of changing the title.
Title: The Vampyre, or Bride of the Isles
Format: Stage Play
Author: James Planché
Nationality: English
Written: 1820
Premiered: 1820
Based on: Polidori’s
The Vampyre
Impact: 7
Following the success of Nodier’s play, Samuel James Arnold, manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, approached Planché with a request to rewrite and adapt the play for an English audience. One thing Planché took real umbrage at was the historical inaccuracy of Nodier’s play; he growled that changing the setting to Scotland made no sense (it doesn’t) as there was never any belief in Scotland in vampires. Hell, it would be a brave vampire indeed who would stray onto the streets of Aberdeen on a Saturday night! Despite his protestations however, and desire to change the location, Arnold would have none of it. Scotch dresses and dances, he told Planché, were popular, and besides, he had them in stock! So the play went ahead as originally set, and was in fact a huge hit.
Between this and Nodier’s original then, these two plays represent the very first time in history that a vampire strode the stage, and must have gone a long way towards familiarising the general public with the idea of vampires (though they might have been a little dismayed, had they later read the stories, to find that the Undead generally do not sing or dance!) and set the groundwork for something of a “vampiremania” as Gothic literature took over in the nineteenth century. Later, Planché got his own way, rewriting the play as an opera and setting it in Hungary. Whether it was as successful as the play I don’t know.
I’d have to read
The Vampyre (which I may, at some point) but it seems to me that the play departs radically from the story, adding in extra characters, changing the nature of Ruthven and even bringing in, for the first time, the idea of sunrise being deadly to vampires, as the father of the bride-to-be (the one, I assume, in the title referred to as being of the isles) fights Ruthven till sunrise, when the vampire is killed by, um, lightning. Nevertheless, prior to the publication of
Dracula, this seems to be the first instance of the use of the sun as a weapon and a thing for vampires to fear.
An important innovation created by the playwright was the vampire trap, a trap door in the floor of the stage which would allow the vampire to appear to vanish, using pressure put on it by the actor playing him, weakening the two flaps of rubber which made up the trap door and causing him to then drop from the stage, out of the sight of the audience. It was also supposed to facilitate his appearance on stage, I guess by his pushing on the flaps from below the stage, though it doesn’t make clear if he had to climb up or if there was some sort of mechanism that raised him to the stage.
Title: Der Vampir oder die Totenbraut
Format: Stage Play
Author: Heinrich Witter
Nationality: German
Written: 1821
Premiered: 1821
Based on: Polidori’s
The Vampyre
Impact: ?
All I can tell you about this is that it was, presumably, the first German adaptation of Polidori’s story and also that it led to the next one, which as far as I can see was the first vampire opera*.
Title: Der Vampyr
Format: Opera
Author: Heinrich Marschner
Nationality: German
Written: 1821
Premiered: 1828
Based on: Der Vampir oder die Totenbraut
Impact: ?
There’s a lot of interesting points about this. First of all, despite being written by a German it keeps the action in Scotland, leaving Blanche to be the only one to push the location to eastern Europe a year later. It reintroduces Aubrey (who seems to be missing from the English and possibly the French versions), has a character called Davenaut, which does not sound a million miles away from Darvell, the original presumed vampire in Byron’s tale, and its principal female character is called Janthe, changing just one letter from the name of the doomed woman in Polidori’s own version of the tale. So kind of paying homage to both writers, in a way.
Taking inspiration from Blanche’s play, Marschner has Ruthven hide with Janthe in a cave and be discovered there by the search party looking for her, and stabbed by her intended. Here, as Ruthven lies dying, we see a twist on what the myth will become, in that Marschner has Ruthven ask Aubrey to drag him out into the moonlight, which will revive him. Ruthven’s demand for an oath from Aubrey that he not speak of what he has seen is now expanded into a threat that, should he break his oath before twenty-four hours have elapsed, he too will become a vampire. These seem to be major changes.
Also a change is the inclusion of a witches’ Sabbat, which, while not necessarily linked to vampires, would, in the minds of the audience, fit in. Both are seen as evil, products of the devil, an affront to God, and of course, a Sabbat gives plenty of scope for singing and dancing. Stoker may also have taken inspiration slightly from the opera when one of the characters is warned to keep watch over the woman he is to marry, but she is already in the thrall of the vampire.
Perhaps the biggest change - understandable, as these are plays and operas, and the audience probably wanted to go home happy - is the ending in these stage productions. Unlike in the book, Lord Ruthven does not triumph, but is bested in different ways, most of them having to do with the weather (sun, lightning etc) which it is hard to read as anything other than the intervention of God. This, of course, would set the template for the ending of many vampire stories, as in general, evil should not be allowed to win, particularly in Victorian times, where these sort of works were generally looked upon as lower-class and crude. There had to be some sort of resolution, to save the story from being trashy.
For those who particularly want it, here’s what appears to be act II of the thing:
*Okay I was wrong, not even close. These three predate the German opera, this one by nearly sixteen years!
Title: I Vampiri
Format: Opera
Author: Silvestro di Palma
Nationality: Italian
Written: 1812
Premiered: 1812
Based on: The Vampyre, presumably
Impact: ?
Title:
Le Vampire
Format: Opera
Author: Martin-Joseph Mengal
Nationality: Belgian
Written: 1826
Premiered: 1826
Impact: ?
Title: Der Vampyr
Format: Opera
Author: Peter-Josef von Lindpaintner
Nationality: German
Written: 1828
Premiered: 1828
Based on: The Vampyre (though erroneously credited to Lord Byron)
Impact: 7
Although this follows very closely the story of the identically-named opera by Marschner (released the same year) it does differ in two ways. One, it is set in France, and two, for some reason the vampire is not called Ruthven but von Lindpaintner transposes the name of the tragic hero of Polidori’s story and we end up with Count Aubry as the vampire lord. Somewhat of passing interest, to me anyway with my nose for tiny details, is the appearance of a character called Damartin, which again I feel is close enough to Darvell.