I am happy to have a guest blog from Arlene deWinter, about a favorite topic…Dracula!
Dracula Was a Man of the Theatre
My name is Arlene deWinter. As the resurrection of Springtime is upon us, the Vampire sleeps a little longer in his grave. Now I feel it is safe to tell you a story of Vampires little considered on our side of the pond.
Dracula was Born in a Trunk
Vlad Tepes may have been a warlord from ancient Wallachia, infamous for his cruelty, but Vlad Dracule was a man of the theater! Though not the first Vampire to tread the boards of the London stage, he is certainly its star. It was he who brought his nefarious race under the spotlight, and his lustre remains undimmed for over a century.
The first literary Vampire was invented by the physician, John Polidori in 1818, during the famous snowbound ghost story contest in Swiss Alps where Mary Shelley created Dracula’s erstwhile rival, Frankenstein. Polidori’s novella was called The Vampyre; A Tale. It’s menacing antagonist, Lord Ruthven, was based on Polidori’s character assessment of the infamous poet, Lord Byron, legendary womanizer, and destroyer of souls…Not long after his book was published, to scandalous success, the 26 year old Polidori killed himself.
The Stage
The Vampyre was staged many times in the 1800’s, with multiple spinoffs, much like the film versions since Bela Lugosi brought Dracula chillingly to the screen. These plays were particularly popular in Paris where they merged with the horrific Grande Guignol, and even inspired the German Opera, Der Vampyr, first presented in Leipzig in 1828.
John Polidori was uncle to the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose beautiful, red haired wife, Elizabeth Siddall, was his model and muse. Ten years after her tragic death from an overdose of luadanum, Rossetti had Elizabeth’s body exhumed to retrieve a volume of poetry that he had buried with her in Highgate Cemetery. The men who dug her up claimed her shining red hair filled the coffin, and that her body was still as young and lovely as she had been in life. Haunted by grief, and remorse for the horrible deed he had done, Rossetti succumbed to chloral addiction and went mad.
Vlad Dracule and Henry Irving
Bram Stoker himself was man of the theatre. Manager to the famous Victorian actor, Henry Irving, Stoker was the driving force behind the commercial success of the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden. Henry Irving was considered its resident genius and, like many geniuses, was a moody tyrant. Bram Stoker was completely under his spell.
Shakespeare was Irving’s specialty, and Stoker was immersed in the blood soaked tragedies, and rich poetry of the Bard of Avon on a nightly basis. His discovery of a portrait of Vlad Tepes caused an explosion in his imagination! It is not too far fetched to see in Tepes’s aquiline features, a reflection of the face of Henry Irving. Irving was known to excel at dark, brooding, villainous characters, his tall, thin frame often clothed in black as he lurked menacingly about the stage.
Dracula was published in 1897 in London. Stoker dispensed with the charming, aristocratic Byronesque Vampyre. Rather, his Dracula was creepy and repulsive in the extreme, based as he was on Stoker’s research into the Balkan folklore about the Undead preserved in their graves by feeding on the living.
Significantly, the book was first reviewed in The Stage on June 17, 1897 where it was referred to as a tour de force. Many of the classic qualities we associate with Vampires were invented by Stoker such as his fear of crucifixes, (strange aversion for an impaler…) the Host, the need to sleep in his country’s soil, even sleeping in his coffin by day, to only come out at night, changing into a bat — all were inventions of Bram Stoker’s fertile imagination. The association of Vampires with wolves, though, is a deep part of the tradition in the wolf haunted forests and mountains of Central Europe.
On its 1897 release, a staged reading of Dracula, or The UnDead, was held at the Lyceum Theatre to secure its copyright. Behind the actors loomed the set of Irving’s current production of MacBeth. Dracula was already being prepared for dramatic performance, but Irving refused to play the part. When the play was produced, it was not according to Stoker’s vision, rather in cheap, pirated, slipshod productions in London’s theatre dives that were an embarrassment to the disappointed Stoker.
Dracula Becomes a Movie Star
Though he failed on the stage due to theatrical politics and B level productions, Dracula would be raised from impending obscurity by the new art of Cinema. The 1922 German Expressionist film, Nosferatu, would seal his future as a movie star. Despite a few alterations, and name changes, the script of Nosferatu sticks very close to the spirit of the novel, so close in fact that Stoker’s widow, Florence, was outraged at what she considered a violation of copyright, and sued the film’s producers, the Prana Film Company, and director, Friedrich Wilhelm Murneau. After a three year battle, the tenacious widow Stoker won, and demanded all prints of the film be destroyed. Woe to the future of Dracula, and his fans, had her wishes been carried out to the letter!
Dracula refused to bow out gracefully.
After the success of Nosferatu, many more productions of Dracula were staged in London and Dublin with varying success. But, by then, Dracula had found a more responsive audience in the movies. In the 1930’s Bela Lugosi, an actor from the same part of the world as Vlad Tepes, would make him a Film Superstar. Perhaps it is Lugosi’s portrayal, a blend of the Byronic, sexy, cultured aristocrat, with the supernatural powers bequeathed to him by Stoker, that made Count Dracula truly immortal.
Thank you to David for having me as a guest on your wonderful blog. I hope my little insights have contributed to your audience’s pleasure by adding to your inspiring series on Vampires.
I am a professional Clairvoyant, Healer, Writer and Artiste. More of my articles, in a similar vein to David’s, can be found on my blog at www.Winterspells.com : Life on the Magical Path, Legacy of the Witchblood. My other website www.whiteswan-tarot.com describes my services as a psychic, and shows my own hand painted Tarot of the Holy Grail.
Good Evening…
Arlene deWinter
The classic vampire slept in a coffin and the historic vampire’s body remained in its grave while its ghost traveled about seeking sustenance. What about all this blood sucking stuff? A vampire spirit would not need blood, but it did drain the energy from the living. The stake in the heart? That action was a symbolic attempt at staking a vampire’s spirit down into its body to keep it there. Sunlight destroyed both the fictional vampire and the historic vampire. Sunlight’s powerful radiation would disrupt the subtle energies necessary for a vampire spirit to manifest its ethereal body. As for immortality…spirits don’t age. 
Vampires exist. Of course this reality is based on how we define “vampire”. The vampire of fiction, a walking, blood-sucking sexy corpse, is not real. However the vampire of folklore actually did exist, if only in people’s beliefs. People actually believed in them enough to act on that belief. In past centuries villagers would go through the trouble to dig up a grave, sometimes entire graveyards, exhuming the buried in search of corpses that did not decay properly. When such a corpse was found, it was killed a second time to make sure it was dead. It could be staked to keep it “down”, or it would be cremated by fire. The goal was to make sure the dead stayed dead. It was believed that the dead could truly be undead.
The source of this superstition seems to have emerged from people’s lack of understanding concerning the process of decay. There are factors that can slow down decomposition. Temperature, soil conditions, lack of oxygen in a grave and so forth. In the past people were not familiar with such things and if they encountered a grave where a corpse had not decayed but looked “fresh”, they logically assumed it was somehow still “alive” in some fashion and called it a vampire. The best look at the source of this folklore would be Paul Barber’s book “Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality”. He explores the causes behind the vampire folklore. It is the definitive word on the topic and highly recommended for anyone interested in the topic.
What else has gone away? Remember when vampires couldn’t see their reflection in the mirror? That is gone. Now crosses don’t repel much (being a more secular society). Some vampires can still sort of fly, but even that has gone by the wayside (now they just move fast!). Today the classic vampire is immortal, needs blood symbolizing sexuality, is inhumanly strong and fast…a current view of modern wish fulfillment. A far cry from the first, more truthful version of the vampire of popular culture…Nosferatu. Nosferatu is a silent black and white German Expressionist movie about Count Orlok, which was an unauthorized take on Bram Stroker’s Dracula. 
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