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strange_complexI've known for some time that Bram Stoker secured the stage copyright for Dracula by putting on a reading of it at the Lyceum a week before the book itself was published. The script for this reading was basically constructed out of the dialogue from the novel, cut out from the editorial proofs, pasted onto sheets of paper, and supplemented by stage directions and occasional extra material in Stoker's own handwriting. A few pages from it were displayed as part of the British Library's exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination in 2014, and they also have an article about it here including images of the script.
What I didn't know until only a few months ago was that you can buy an edited version of this script, presented in ordinary print (i.e. not as a facsimile) but using typographic conventions to convey which parts of the text originated as cut-out proofs, which as Stoker's hand-written additions and which (occasionally) as additions by the editor to create a workable text out of something Stoker had obviously rushed in the first place. This was a very exciting discovery, as I had felt frustrated at being unable to read it before. I could tell from what I'd seen at the British Library exhibition that there were a few very minor differences between the text in the proofs and the final published novel, while the hand-written material joining them together was in some places entirely new - and yet from the hand of the same author, and thus potentially providing precious additional insights into Stoker's thinking and the story-world he had created. So I put it on my Christmas list, and as soon as I'd finished my DracSoc holiday homework reading, it was next in the queue on my to-read pile.
It does have to be said that it would clearly have been very bad as an actual play. Stoker wrote it as a novel, and evidently did not have time to convert it properly for stage action. So we end up with long passages where a character sits there on stage, writing in their diary about something they have seen, instead of us actually seeing it happening - as would be done and indeed is done in any proper stage adaptation. For example, when Harker is trapped inside the castle early on in the novel, he sees various things out of the windows, such as Szgany workers whom he tries to communicate with and get to post a letter for him, or the woman whose child Dracula has taken who comes and begs him to give it back. In the novel, it's perfectly natural for him to recount these events in retrospect in his diary - that is the format of the text after all. But in a stage adaptation you expect to see these sorts of things happening in direct action, and it could only have been tedious and painful to have to sit there listening to the character reading out a diary entry about it instead. Supposedly, Henry Irving, on witnessing the reading, opined that it was 'dreadful', and I can't disagree with him.
However, I wasn't reading it for its dramatic potential, but for the insights it could yield into Stoker's creative processes and his own wider conception of the text as we have it in the novel. These are some of the things I felt were worth noting down under that heading:
We begin with Jonathan outside Dracula's castle, having just been abandoned there by a mysterious carriage driver whose face he never saw - i.e. the entirety of his journey there, including his experiences at Bistritz, have been cut, though he recaps a few of the key points in a monologue while he waits for someone to answer his knock at the castle door. That's interesting because a lot of later adaptations have made essentially this same decision, including Hammer's Dracula (1958), which starts with a very similar voice-over recap of the journey while we see Harker walking towards the castle. Dracula's answer when Harker asks if he is Count Dracula is also slightly adjusted. "I am Dracula. And I bid you welcome, Mr Harker, to my house." becomes "I am Dracula, and you are I take it Mr Jonathan Harker, agent of Mr Peter Hawkins." Again, that's basically filling in back-story, telling the theatre audience who this character is and something of why he's there. At the end of the novel, a similar tranche of travel scenes is cut, as the action shifts straight from the band of vampire-hunters agreeing to split up and travel from Galatz via different methods in order to maximise their chances of intercepting Dracula, to all of them reconvening outside the castle for the final denouement.
There's a minor kerfuffle in Dracula scholarship around exactly what Jonathan hears Dracula saying to the Brides outside his bedroom door on the night before the Szgany and Slovaks transport Dracula and his boxes away out of the castle. In most modern editions you will read "Wait! Have patience! To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!" but actually the first edition, published by Constable in 1897 has "Wait! Have patience! To-morrow night, to-morrow night is yours!" The introduction of the idea that 'to-night' is Dracula's came with the first American edition in 1899, and has aroused much interest because it suggests that he will be biting Jonathan that night, with possible homoerotic overtones. This edition confirms that the proofs for the Constable edition had the same reading as appears in the final text: "To-morrow night, to-morrow night is yours!" Nobody really knows who made the change, when, or why, including whether any earlier draft included the 'to-night' version, which was then excised from the Constable edition before the proofs stage but put back again later in the American edition. There is a typescript of the text in existence which clearly pre-dates the proofs, but the first 100 pages of it are missing, which may include this bit, and in any case it has never been made publicly available in full, so I can't check.
Mina and Lucy's correspondence about Lucy's various suitors becomes a face-to-face conversation between them about Seward, after which Mina leaves and first Quincey and then Arthur come in to propose to Lucy in their own words. Mina informs Lucy at this point that she will be leaving teaching in her school for good at the end of the term because of her forthcoming marriage to Jonathan, which I don't think is ever stated explicitly in the novel. Arthur's words of proposal are also entirely new (though fairly basic and generic), because in the novel Lucy's letters to Mina only cover this one obliquely, saying that she surely needn't tell her about it and it's all a blur anyway. But most interesting is Quincey, who also gets some entirely new dialogue, including the declaration that he "would give my very heart's blood for you" - which of course later he does.
In Whitby, Mrs Westenra speaks directly to Mina, telling her both about Lucy's habit of sleepwalking and her own 'death-warrant' stemming from her heart problems. This brings together scraps of what Mina reports hearing from Mrs Westenra in the novel, but expands them rather, turning it into a fairly substantial conversation between the two women. Lucy also gets an additional line of dialogue regarding Mr Swales' information about the grave beneath their favourite bench in the churchyard. The following is in the novel: "Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and I cannot leave it; and now I find I must go on sitting over the grave of a suicide." But the play version (in what the typography for this edition indicates was originally Stoker's hand) adds an extra line which spells out the significance: "Where they say that every uncanny thing has power." A later stage direction (again indicated to be in Stoker's hand) also shows that he wanted to make it crystal clear that Dracula is hiding out in this grave. As Mina approaches the bench in the middle of the night, having seen Lucy in a sleepwalking trance there with Dracula bending over her, we are told "Dracula sees her and sinks down through tombstone." Presumably Stoker envisaged this being achieved through the use of a literal vampire trap, though I'm not sure any such efforts were gone to for the mere purposes of the copyright reading.
There is also one very minor change in Van Helsing's description of Dracula's powers. In the novel we are told that "If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset." But in the proofs used for this stage play, the same sentence reads "If he be not at the the house to which he is credit, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset." That sort of change indicates pretty close checking and re-thinking at the proofing stage, and I can see why it was done in this case. "The house to which he is credit" is a confusing phrase, likely to leave most readers puzzled by what exactly it means, whereas "The place whither he is bound" is rather clearer. Certainly, this matters later in the novel when it's a major handicap for Dracula in his journey back to his castle and the main reason why he lies helpless in his wooden box while they destroy him at the end - so it does need to be set up clearly from the start.
Then there were things which were always there in the novel, but which I only fully picked up on this time:
For example, I knew Van Helsing had a wife who has lost her wits. He mentions her when he and Lucy's other friends and suitors have given their blood to help save her from Dracula, and he speaks of that act as a form of marital union: "and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church's law, though no wits, all gone - even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist." But I hadn't consciously remembered something else he says a little bit later about Arthur after Lucy has died: "My heart bleed for that poor boy - that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same." Those two little sentence tell us quite a lot about his backstory, and along with other stuff about Seward sucking poison from a gangrenous wound during his studies with Van Helsing provide a lot of material for a potential pre-Dracula fic about him.
I was also struck by this little exchange between Seward and Renfield (here copied from the novel version - the stage version just keeps the dialogue and cuts out the intervening description):
Finally, I'm not sure why I had never noticed before the bizarreness of the following instructions, given by Van Helsing to his companions when they are in Varna: "You, friend Arthur, go to the train and get the tickets and arrange that all be ready for us to go in the morning... Morris Quincey, you see the Vice-Consul, and get his aid with his fellow in Galatz and all he can do to make our way smooth, so that no times be lost when over the Danube." Anyone can buy train tickets, but Arthur is a peer of the British realm and surely therefore much better placed than Quincey to butter up a Vice-Consul and get him to pull strings to ease their progress in Galatz? That seemed so obviously wrong when I read it in the stage version that I fully expected it to be an error which had been caught and corrected at the proofing stage, but nope - that's exactly what happens in the novel.
In short, this may be a terrible stage play, but if you're a big old Dracula geek it is essential reading, mainly for the additional insights into Stoker's work but also because it allows you to see new things in the existing text by reading it in a new format. I am so glad to have had the opportunity at last.
What I didn't know until only a few months ago was that you can buy an edited version of this script, presented in ordinary print (i.e. not as a facsimile) but using typographic conventions to convey which parts of the text originated as cut-out proofs, which as Stoker's hand-written additions and which (occasionally) as additions by the editor to create a workable text out of something Stoker had obviously rushed in the first place. This was a very exciting discovery, as I had felt frustrated at being unable to read it before. I could tell from what I'd seen at the British Library exhibition that there were a few very minor differences between the text in the proofs and the final published novel, while the hand-written material joining them together was in some places entirely new - and yet from the hand of the same author, and thus potentially providing precious additional insights into Stoker's thinking and the story-world he had created. So I put it on my Christmas list, and as soon as I'd finished my DracSoc holiday homework reading, it was next in the queue on my to-read pile.
It does have to be said that it would clearly have been very bad as an actual play. Stoker wrote it as a novel, and evidently did not have time to convert it properly for stage action. So we end up with long passages where a character sits there on stage, writing in their diary about something they have seen, instead of us actually seeing it happening - as would be done and indeed is done in any proper stage adaptation. For example, when Harker is trapped inside the castle early on in the novel, he sees various things out of the windows, such as Szgany workers whom he tries to communicate with and get to post a letter for him, or the woman whose child Dracula has taken who comes and begs him to give it back. In the novel, it's perfectly natural for him to recount these events in retrospect in his diary - that is the format of the text after all. But in a stage adaptation you expect to see these sorts of things happening in direct action, and it could only have been tedious and painful to have to sit there listening to the character reading out a diary entry about it instead. Supposedly, Henry Irving, on witnessing the reading, opined that it was 'dreadful', and I can't disagree with him.
However, I wasn't reading it for its dramatic potential, but for the insights it could yield into Stoker's creative processes and his own wider conception of the text as we have it in the novel. These are some of the things I felt were worth noting down under that heading:
We begin with Jonathan outside Dracula's castle, having just been abandoned there by a mysterious carriage driver whose face he never saw - i.e. the entirety of his journey there, including his experiences at Bistritz, have been cut, though he recaps a few of the key points in a monologue while he waits for someone to answer his knock at the castle door. That's interesting because a lot of later adaptations have made essentially this same decision, including Hammer's Dracula (1958), which starts with a very similar voice-over recap of the journey while we see Harker walking towards the castle. Dracula's answer when Harker asks if he is Count Dracula is also slightly adjusted. "I am Dracula. And I bid you welcome, Mr Harker, to my house." becomes "I am Dracula, and you are I take it Mr Jonathan Harker, agent of Mr Peter Hawkins." Again, that's basically filling in back-story, telling the theatre audience who this character is and something of why he's there. At the end of the novel, a similar tranche of travel scenes is cut, as the action shifts straight from the band of vampire-hunters agreeing to split up and travel from Galatz via different methods in order to maximise their chances of intercepting Dracula, to all of them reconvening outside the castle for the final denouement.
There's a minor kerfuffle in Dracula scholarship around exactly what Jonathan hears Dracula saying to the Brides outside his bedroom door on the night before the Szgany and Slovaks transport Dracula and his boxes away out of the castle. In most modern editions you will read "Wait! Have patience! To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!" but actually the first edition, published by Constable in 1897 has "Wait! Have patience! To-morrow night, to-morrow night is yours!" The introduction of the idea that 'to-night' is Dracula's came with the first American edition in 1899, and has aroused much interest because it suggests that he will be biting Jonathan that night, with possible homoerotic overtones. This edition confirms that the proofs for the Constable edition had the same reading as appears in the final text: "To-morrow night, to-morrow night is yours!" Nobody really knows who made the change, when, or why, including whether any earlier draft included the 'to-night' version, which was then excised from the Constable edition before the proofs stage but put back again later in the American edition. There is a typescript of the text in existence which clearly pre-dates the proofs, but the first 100 pages of it are missing, which may include this bit, and in any case it has never been made publicly available in full, so I can't check.
Mina and Lucy's correspondence about Lucy's various suitors becomes a face-to-face conversation between them about Seward, after which Mina leaves and first Quincey and then Arthur come in to propose to Lucy in their own words. Mina informs Lucy at this point that she will be leaving teaching in her school for good at the end of the term because of her forthcoming marriage to Jonathan, which I don't think is ever stated explicitly in the novel. Arthur's words of proposal are also entirely new (though fairly basic and generic), because in the novel Lucy's letters to Mina only cover this one obliquely, saying that she surely needn't tell her about it and it's all a blur anyway. But most interesting is Quincey, who also gets some entirely new dialogue, including the declaration that he "would give my very heart's blood for you" - which of course later he does.
In Whitby, Mrs Westenra speaks directly to Mina, telling her both about Lucy's habit of sleepwalking and her own 'death-warrant' stemming from her heart problems. This brings together scraps of what Mina reports hearing from Mrs Westenra in the novel, but expands them rather, turning it into a fairly substantial conversation between the two women. Lucy also gets an additional line of dialogue regarding Mr Swales' information about the grave beneath their favourite bench in the churchyard. The following is in the novel: "Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and I cannot leave it; and now I find I must go on sitting over the grave of a suicide." But the play version (in what the typography for this edition indicates was originally Stoker's hand) adds an extra line which spells out the significance: "Where they say that every uncanny thing has power." A later stage direction (again indicated to be in Stoker's hand) also shows that he wanted to make it crystal clear that Dracula is hiding out in this grave. As Mina approaches the bench in the middle of the night, having seen Lucy in a sleepwalking trance there with Dracula bending over her, we are told "Dracula sees her and sinks down through tombstone." Presumably Stoker envisaged this being achieved through the use of a literal vampire trap, though I'm not sure any such efforts were gone to for the mere purposes of the copyright reading.
There is also one very minor change in Van Helsing's description of Dracula's powers. In the novel we are told that "If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset." But in the proofs used for this stage play, the same sentence reads "If he be not at the the house to which he is credit, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset." That sort of change indicates pretty close checking and re-thinking at the proofing stage, and I can see why it was done in this case. "The house to which he is credit" is a confusing phrase, likely to leave most readers puzzled by what exactly it means, whereas "The place whither he is bound" is rather clearer. Certainly, this matters later in the novel when it's a major handicap for Dracula in his journey back to his castle and the main reason why he lies helpless in his wooden box while they destroy him at the end - so it does need to be set up clearly from the start.
Then there were things which were always there in the novel, but which I only fully picked up on this time:
For example, I knew Van Helsing had a wife who has lost her wits. He mentions her when he and Lucy's other friends and suitors have given their blood to help save her from Dracula, and he speaks of that act as a form of marital union: "and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church's law, though no wits, all gone - even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist." But I hadn't consciously remembered something else he says a little bit later about Arthur after Lucy has died: "My heart bleed for that poor boy - that dear boy, so of the age of mine own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes the same." Those two little sentence tell us quite a lot about his backstory, and along with other stuff about Seward sucking poison from a gangrenous wound during his studies with Van Helsing provide a lot of material for a potential pre-Dracula fic about him.
I was also struck by this little exchange between Seward and Renfield (here copied from the novel version - the stage version just keeps the dialogue and cuts out the intervening description):
"But," I asked, "how are we to get the life without getting the soul also?" This seemed to puzzle him, so I followed it up:-Coming fresh from a recent reading of M.R. James' story Lost Hearts by Robert Lloyd Parry, this reminded me of the following lines from Mr Abney's notes:
"A nice time you'll have some time when you're flying out there, with the souls of thousands of flies and spiders and birds and cats buzzing and twittering and miaowing all round you. You've got their lives, you know, and you must put up with their souls!" Something seemed to affect his imagination, for he put his fingers to his ears and shut his eyes, screwing them up tightly just as a small boy does when his face is being soaped.
Some annoyance may be experienced from the psychic portion of the subjects, which popular language dignifies with the name of ghosts. But the man of philosophic temperament - to whom alone the experiment is appropriate - will be little prone to attach importance to the feeble efforts of these beings to wreak their vengeance on him.Lost Hearts was first published in 1895, so James has the prior claim on the idea there if the similarity isn't just a coincidence.
Finally, I'm not sure why I had never noticed before the bizarreness of the following instructions, given by Van Helsing to his companions when they are in Varna: "You, friend Arthur, go to the train and get the tickets and arrange that all be ready for us to go in the morning... Morris Quincey, you see the Vice-Consul, and get his aid with his fellow in Galatz and all he can do to make our way smooth, so that no times be lost when over the Danube." Anyone can buy train tickets, but Arthur is a peer of the British realm and surely therefore much better placed than Quincey to butter up a Vice-Consul and get him to pull strings to ease their progress in Galatz? That seemed so obviously wrong when I read it in the stage version that I fully expected it to be an error which had been caught and corrected at the proofing stage, but nope - that's exactly what happens in the novel.
In short, this may be a terrible stage play, but if you're a big old Dracula geek it is essential reading, mainly for the additional insights into Stoker's work but also because it allows you to see new things in the existing text by reading it in a new format. I am so glad to have had the opportunity at last.
