Abstract
Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving began with a simple statement of the event which was to prove the most momentous of his life: ‘The first time I ever saw Henry Irving was at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1867’ (PR I: 1). Stoker was then aged 20. After that first encounter, when Stoker realised that there were no regular theatre reviews appearing in the Dublin press, he offered his own services for free, and was thereafter associated with the theatre for the rest of his life. Nine years after first seeing Irving on stage, he was finally introduced to the great man, and the two bonded for life over an odd episode in which Stoker was apparently reduced to hysterics by Irving’s recital of ‘The Ballad of Eugene Aram’, a long narrative poem which focuses on the guilty conscience of a murderer: as Stoker himself put it, ‘In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul!’ (PR I: 33). Jeffrey Richards suggests that ‘It is perhaps significant that Stoker’s father died aged 77 in 1876, the year he had his momentous encounter with Irving’,1 and that Stoker was thus perhaps subconsciously seeking a replacement father-figure. Whether this was so or not, he had found in Irving a man who from now on would be at the emotional centre of his life.
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Notes
Jeffrey Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, in Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Christopher Parker (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 143–71
On Stoker’s career as a clerk, see W. N. Osborough, ‘The Dublin Castle Career (1866–78) of Bram Stoker’, Gothic Studies 1.2 (1999), pp. 222–40.
Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 178.
Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 153.
Richard Marsh, The Beetle, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), introduction, p. 11.
Stephanie Moss, ‘Bram Stoker and the London Stage’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), pp. 124–32
This anecdote is often retold, but see, for instance, Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 80.
John Allen Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula’, PMLA 103.2 (1988), pp. 139–49
Alan Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 27 ff.
Philip Holden, ‘Castle, Coffin, Stomach: Dracula and the Banality of the Occult’, Victorian Literature and Culture 21.2 (2001), pp. 469–85
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), IV.v. 156–7.
Michael Valdez Moses, ‘The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood’, Journal X 2.1 (1997), p. 76.
Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 154.
Lisa Hopkins, Giants of the Past (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004).
Charles Hiatt, Ellen Terry and her Impersonations: An Appreciation (London: George Bell & Sons, 1908), p. 10.
Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 70.
Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 88
Alan P. Johnson, ‘“Dual Life”: The Status of Women in Stoker’s Dracula’, Tennessee Studies in Literature 27 (1984), pp. 20–39
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983), p. 95.
William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1972), III.iv.21.
Hiatt, Ellen Terry and her Impersonations, pp. 176–7. See also Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), pp. 134–5.
Bram Stoker, Dracula: or the Undead. A play in prologue and five acts, ed. Sylvia Starshine (Nottingham: Pumpkin Books, 1997), p. xxxiv.
Geoffrey Kendal with Clare Colvin, The Shakespeare Wallah [1986] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 48–9.
Jonathan Bignell, ‘A Taste of the Gothic: Film and Television Versions of Dracula’, in The Classic Novel from Page to Screen, ed. Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 114–30
Kenneth Jurkiewicz, ‘Francis Coppola’s Secret Gardens: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Auteur as Decadent Visionary’, in Visions of the Fantastic, ed. Allienne R. Becker (London: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 167–72
Kim Newman, ‘Coppola’s Dracula’, in The Mammoth Book of Dracula, ed. Stephen Jones (London: Robinson, 1997), pp. 109–55
See Lisa Hopkins, Screening the Gothic (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005).
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© 2007 Lisa Hopkins
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Hopkins, L. (2007). At the Theatre. In: Bram Stoker. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626416_3
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