Shakespeare and vampires at the fin de siècle

Cymbeline’s bedchamber as Gothic source

Ostensibly, there is a dissonance between the madmen and vampires of Dracula and the thematics of the Lyceum’s Cymbeline, described by the Daily News as a ‘romance of fairyland’, and, aesthetically, as resembling ‘a nice Bank-Holiday afternoon’ by a scathing Bernard Shaw (1896: 339). However, we can trace where and how audiences might have found catalysts in Cymbeline for Decadent and Gothic images, and also discern how Stoker drew on Terry’s influence. Dracula has ramifications for our understandings of fin-de-siècle Shakespeare, and reveals a new afterlife for Terry’s performance. Moreover, this mapping of influence between Cymbeline and Dracula also offers a new reading of Stoker’s work.

Cymbeline’s major locus of transgressive, fin-de-siècle potential is in the bedchamber scene, Act II, Scene 2. Iachimo has been smuggled into Imogen’s bedchamber. He scrutinises and partially exposes Imogen’s sleeping body, then steals her bracelet, thus amassing descriptive and physical evidence of her supposed betrayal of Posthumus. During rehearsals, Terry predicted the scene’s success, telling the (doubtless thrilled) Shaw that Irving ‘comes out of that box well, I tell you’ (Terry, Correspondence, 1932: 73) and giving Irving particularly detailed written instructions regarding business. Despite the scene’s contingency on Imogen’s vulnerability, the evidence of Terry’s rehearsal copies highlights the distinction between the onstage performance of female passivity and her determinative artistic contribution to rehearsals. Terry was by no means the only female theatrical practitioner active in metropolitan fin-de-siècle theatre whose apparent feminine artlessness and subordination belied their activity as a determinative artistic and commercial force. Madge Kendal, who presented her husband as the dominating force in their partnership, was actually the ‘inspiration’ behind their productions and their forceful, gifted ‘stage manager’ (Vanbrugh, 1925: 42), ‘always deferred to’ by husband and company (Swears, 1937: 143–144) throughout a theatrical partnership that lasted from 1869 to 1908. Similarly, Florence Alexander, the wife of Sir George Alexander (who managed the St James’s Theatre from 1891 to 1918) ‘posed as the charming, pretty, empty-headed butterfly’ while being, as Graham Robertson noted, ‘a strong personality, clear headed, long sighted’ and, according to Cyril Maude, ‘accountable for a great deal of the success of her husband’ (quoted in Duncan, 1964: 216). Kendal, perhaps recognising the parallels between them, called Florence Alexander’s ‘magic touch [ … ] the tenth wonder of the world!’ (quoted in Duncan, 1964: 216). However, nowhere do we have such illuminating, precise documentation as that of Terry’s directorial role in what became an immensely successful moment in Shakespeare performance, and a catalyst in Gothic culture. In the more heavily-annotated rehearsal copy of Cymbeline, and one which clearly passed between Irving and Terry, her marginalia for the bedchamber scene instructs Irving to ‘ Try + remove something from a sleeping person + you’ll find yr heart-beating’ and ‘feel faint + have to sit down’, as this would be ‘good business!’ (Cymbeline 1: 17r; Cymbeline 2: 22). First-night enthusiasm approached hysteria, proving Terry right. The Pall Mall Gazette deemed the prolonged applause an ‘insult to artistic propriety’ when the audience’s ‘yelling and shouting demanded Irving ‘get out of his box again and Miss Terry leave her bed and bow’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 1896a: 1).

Reviewers emphasised the scene’s sexuality, and the performers’ intimacy. As Sprague notes, Irving was frequently described as having visibly ‘turned down [Terry’s] nightdress to discover the “mole cinque-spotted”’ (1944: 61). Whether approvingly or not, most reviewers located much eroticism in Irving’s Iachimo. For the Bristol Mercury, he was not merely ‘the serpent and Judas’, conflating Old and New Testament ciphers of evil, but, crucially, a ‘very Tarquin’ (Bristol Mercury, 1896: 5). By echoing Irving-Iachimo’s noctural evocation of ‘Our Tarquin’, who ‘thus/Did softly press the rushes, ere he waken’d/The chastity he wounded’, the Mercury presented Iachimo as a potential, imminent rapist (Cymbeline II.2.12–14). This is despite the fact that unlike Tarquin Superbus (The Rape of Lucrece), whose motives are wholly sexual, Iachimo acts partly from financial desires: in Cymbeline, Iachimo specifies the value of the wager on Imogen’s chastity, initiates the handshake for the ‘covenant’ and requests legal ‘counsels’ for its ratification (I.5.162–163).

Nevertheless, the Mercury emphasised Irving-Iachimo’s sexual ‘treachery’, describing as ‘absolutely his finest line [ … ] when, speaking of the mark on Imogen’s breast’, Irving ‘hissed out’ the words ‘I kissed it’ with ‘a leer’ (Bristol Mercury, 1896: 5). Only the Graphic felt the sexuality was insufficient, breathlessly demanding even more lust, and lamenting the apparent lack of a ‘professional lady-killer [ … ] steeped in the wickedness of old Rome’ – not enough Tarquin, then (The Graphic, 1896: 398). More typically, however, the Morning Post objected to Irving/Iachimo’s ‘ghoul-like postures [ … ] outspread fingers’ and ‘needlessly protracted and overstrained’ exulting ‘raptures’ over Imogen’s body (Morning Post, 1896a: 2), identifying and linking the supernatural and sexual elements of Irving’s performance. Iachimo was ‘a man of birth and breeding’, not a sexual ‘connoisseur’ or ‘sensualist’: his activities in Imogen’s bedchamber were ‘business’, during which ‘wits not passions’ should control him (Morning Post, 1896a: 2).

Why was this staging so enthusiastically received, and so culturally inspirational? The most conservative explanation rested on Cymbeline’s genre as tragicomic romance. The Standard attributed the sequence’s effectiveness to Iachimo’s ultimate defeat, allowing audiences to ‘constantly rejoic[e] in the comfortable assurance of the happy ending [ … ] in store’ (Standard, 1896: 3). Audience fascination with evil was legitimised through the generic assurance that – in this ‘romance of fairyland’ – it would be temporary (Pall Mall Gazette, 1896b: 1). However, a more specific explanation highlighted Cymbeline’s particular resonances for a specific kind of contemporary culture. As the Daily News noted, Irving’s innovative Iachimo also offered a cultured, ‘subtle and cunning’ fin-de-siècle man of ‘intellectual suppleness’ to those who wanted one (Daily News, 1896b: 8). Enthusiasts included Graham Robertson, who admired ‘a fascinating Italian gentleman, entirely without morals’ but whose ‘exquisite manners and a compelling charm’ ensured success as ‘a liar and a scoundrel’ (1931: 237). The Daily News praised ‘a profound study of… the intellectual pride and reckless unscrupulousness of [ … ] a “chercheur de bonnes fortunes”’ (Daily News, 1896a: 8). Crucially, A.B. Walkley asserted that ‘There is something of M. Huysmans’ Des Esseintes, and something, too, of that author’s Durtal, in Iachimo’, who was ‘one of Max Nordau’s “degenerates”’ (Walkley, 1896: 327–329). In Huysman’s A Rebours (1884), Jean Des Esseintes is the aesthetic, decadent remnant of an atrophied noble dynasty, who cultivates poisonous flowers on his country estate. Des Esseintes, looking back over his debauched sexual past, is devoted to disreputable Symbolist authors such as Verlaine and Mallarmé, and the art of Moreau. A year before Cymbeline, the trial of Oscar Wilde had established that A Rebours was almost certainly the ‘poisonous French novel’ that corrupted the protagonist of Wilde’s 1890 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray (Ellmann, 1987: 316). By 1896, Huysmans had also published two of his four novels featuring Durtal: Là-bas (1891) and En route (1895). The former, frequently translated into English as The Damned, sees the novelist Durtal explore Medievalism and Satanism, culminating in the novel’s depiction of a black mass. En route is a mysticism-laced depiction of fin-de-siècle Catholicism. Most famously, Nordau’s Degeneration (1892; English in 1895) attacked ‘degenerate’ art, neurasthenic fin-de-siècle culture, and its controversial proponents including Wilde and Ibsen. Thus Walkley’s comparisons create a recognisably fin-de-siècle literary correlative for Irving’s performance that could be the bibliography of a critical edition of Dorian Gray, or a primer on 1890s culture.

As Walkley noted, this contemporary degenerate’s Shakespearean and sexual proximity to a beloved actress was stylistically transgressive, blending fin-de-siècle mores with Establishment art. Other productions which appeared to stylistically or hermeneutically ‘modernise’ Shakespeare usually received far more criticism for doing so. Madge and William H. Kendal’s 1885 revival of As You Like It at the fashionable St James’s Theatre was attacked for ‘Piccadillying’ Shakespeare, with W.H. Kendal decried by Fun for making his ‘drawling’ Orlando a ‘swell’ in a ‘masher collar’. Similarly, although Mrs Patrick Campbell’s 1890s Shakespearean heroines found avant-garde fans in Shaw, Walkley, and Edmund Gosse, Kate Terry Gielgud (Ellen Terry’s niece, mother of Sir John Gielgud) spoke for many in deeming Campbell ‘too much the morbid, introspective modern woman’ in her classical roles. Walkley, meanwhile, was prepared to celebrate not merely Irving’s stylistic innovation but even his hermeneutic departure. Whether or not Iachimo’s fin-de-siècle psychology had been ‘fully perceived by Shakespeare’ didn’t matter: it had been ‘fully perceived and rendered by Sir Henry Irving’, which was sufficient to displace the author as the source of knowledge and legitimacy, indicating Walkley’s enthusiasm for the performance even if it were anti-textual. Moreover, it offered Walkley, and by implication his readership, ‘a keen, if rather perverse pleasure’ (Walkley, 1896). This pleasure’s ‘perversity’ centres on the bedroom scene. Iachimo, observing, assaulting, and reporting on the female body, enacted a multifaceted fantasy of sexual access to Imogen/Terry. On one level, Iachimo is himself a fantasist, wishing he ‘might touch!/But kiss, one kiss!’ Imogen (Cymbeline II.2.16–17). He is thus analogous to the sexually-intrigued audience member. Simultaneously, Iachimo does perpetrate an assault, acquiring visible sexual access to Imogen/Terry’s breast, acquiring knowledge hidden from the audience, who cannot ‘see’ the ‘cinque-spotted mole’ even as they witness, from a distance, the dishevelling gesture by which it is apparently bared (Cymbeline II.2.38).

The dislocation between degrees of sexual knowledge possessed by audience and Iachimo would have been further emphasised by the speculation of some regarding Terry and Irving’s real-life personal intimacy. Lyceum costume designer Alice Comyns-Carr [sic] comes closest amongst contemporaries to disclosing an affair, stressing ‘how very much he cared for Nell’ (1926: 209), and describing how Irving appeared ‘déshabillé’ in ‘Nell’s garden’ when her sole guest (p. 111), and recounting how a fire in a Nuremberg inn brought about the suspiciously simultaneous appearance of Terry and Irving, again ‘déshabillé’ (p. 153). But recent biographers typically treat their relationship as ambiguous. Only in 2012 did the anonymous donation to the V&A of two letters clarify the issue. From the romantic but not conclusive language of earlier letters, in which he addresses Terry as ‘darling wife [ … ] true love’ and signs himself her ‘husband’ (Irving, 1882), Irving begs Terry for forgiveness for what seem – from Terry’s annotations – to be repeated infidelities in 1883, 1888, 1892, and 1893 (Irving, 1883, 1893). Although the very intense letters do not explicitly refer to sexual infidelity, there is no suggestion that the women to whom Irving (and Terry in her annotations, including ‘Mrs. H’ and ‘Mrs. O’) refers were professional or artistic collaborators, and thus challenging the other kinds of intimacy Irving and Terry manifestly shared. Even without this frisson, seeing Britain’s two most celebrated performers onstage together in 1896 was necessarily charged with theatrical excitement. As early as 16 September, the Pall Mall Gazette had anticipated that ‘the duologue between [Iachimo] and Imogen and the following scene in Imogen’s bedchamber will be the great scenes of the play’; seeing Frank Cooper’s Posthumus alongside Terry was far less of an event (Pall Mall Gazette, 1896a: 1). This mixture of sexual speculation and celebrity adulation emphasised the potentially illicit relationship between Iachimo and Imogen, at the expense of that between Posthumus and Imogen.

Critical responses to the production demonstrate how culturally potent Iachimo’s fantasy of sexual access to Imogen was. Notably, the editorial decision the Pall Mall Gazette most regretted was ‘the omission of Cloten’s boast of what he would do to Imogen in Posthumus’s garments’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 1896a: 1): Cloten spells out (unlike the Pall Mall Gazette, despite their enthusiasm) his desire to ‘ravish’ Imogen with Posthumus ‘on the ground’ – that is, rape her beside Posthumus’s corpse (Cymbeline III.5.139–141). Without this verbal fantasy, the bedchamber scene is the nearest thing Cymbeline has to a rape scene, and both exemplifies and catalyses the rest of the scenes in which Imogen suffers or is mistreated: all of which the Victorian press seems to have found deeply satisfying. The Standard, celebrating Imogen’s ‘sublime resignation to the cruellest of evil fates’, noted parallels ‘between Imogen and Desdemona, both equally the victims of a villain’s diabolical plot’ and exemplifying ‘the purest womanhood’ (1896: 3). Imogen, however, was more theatrically effective and enjoyable, since her sufferings are ‘more varied and prolonged’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 1896b: 1).The critics’ fascination with a textual moment of rape imagery, and a particular staging of sexual abuse reflects a wider cultural investment in the spectacle of female suffering and oppression, which Cymbeline uniquely satisfied: the sleeping woman epitomises denied consent.

Crucially, the bedchamber scene’s eroticism is predicated not merely on female suffering, but on female passivity. The sleeping Imogen cannot consent to Iachimo, but she also cannot struggle or fight back, which would, of course, disrupt the aesthetic and vulnerability which her attacker eroticises. The Penny Illustrated’s comments on Terry’s ‘lovely tones and graceful movements… most of all in the bed-chamber scene, in which her refinement and the absolute perfection of her art proved of the most value’, despite apparently praising Terry’s acting, actually highlight a sequence in which, after an abridged opening sequence, Imogen is entirely asleep (Penny Illustrated Paper, 1896: 195). Generally, contemporaries admired the activity and ‘happy haste’ of Terry’s stage presence (Campbell, 1922: 130). Shaw’s favourite ‘point’ in Olivia (1878; frequently revived), the phenomenally successful W.G. Wills adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) in which Terry played the betrayed heroine, was his ‘glimpse’ of the fleeing Terry as she ‘passe[d] the window in her flight’ (Dukore, 1993: 45), while Joseph Knight’s favourite ‘point’ was when she vigorously and with ‘greatness’ repelled her seducer (Hiatt, 1898: 168). Henry James even condemned Terry’s Portia for too much movement, as she ‘played with her fingers’ and was ‘too osculatory’ with Bassanio (Auerbach, 1987: 173). In portraiture, the positions Terry negotiated with artists were designed to look like the pose of a single moment: inhaling a flower’s scent in Watts’s Choosing (c. 1864) and the second before Lady Macbeth crowns herself (Sargent’s Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889). Critics’s sexualised enthusiasm for Terry in Cymbeline’s bedchamber scene shows how profoundly late-Victorian theatre culture eroticised female passivity, applying it even to actresses whose overwhelming popularity rested largely on an active, graceful, dynamic acting style. Perhaps also because of fin-de-siècle preoccupations with mesmerism, neurasthenia, death, and liminal states of consciousness, this catalysing episode in Cymbeline staged Terry as a passive sexual object.

Cymbeline and Dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in early May 1897 (Dalby, 2004: 55), with rehearsals for Cymbeline beginning in late June 1896. However, Irving’s text of Cymbeline, heavily revised for production, had been publicly available since 1890 in The Henry Irving Shakespeare. Stoker’s earliest notes for Dracula date from the 1880s, when he might well have had access to Irving’s text, having been Irving’s business manager at the Lyceum since Irving leased it in 1878. However, the editors of the facsimile of Stoker’s notes for Dracula observe that the extant notes constitute ‘just one stage’ of Dracula’s development, with major missing elements including ‘one or more lost drafts of the novel’ and the introduction of ‘almost half of the novel’s events’. Moreover, it is ‘not possible to determine when most of the Notes were written’ (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, 2008: 9–13), although a ‘first outline’ is dated 14 March 1890, close to Irving’s publication of his Cymbeline. Nearly all of the novel’s most Gothic and sexually explicit moments are unmentioned in, and apparently postdate, the surviving notes, which do not include Lucy’s request for Arthur to kiss her, Lucy’s staking (as opposed to her beheading, which does appear), Mina’s feeding on Dracula, her request for the men to murder her, the reading of the Burial Service, and Dracula’s look of peace after being killed. Also missing are the ‘bloofer lady’ and the direct mention of Terry (Stoker, [1897] 2011: 316).

The Lyceum’s role in Dracula’s genesis has generated much scholarly analysis, particularly tracing the resemblance between Count Dracula and Irving himself, a resemblance now deemed to have ‘mythic status’ (Browning and Kay, 2010: 16). Catherine Wynne’s Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Gothic Stage (2013) briefly mentions the 1896 Cymbeline, feeling that Irving’s staging of the bedchamber scene ‘suggests the vampire novel’ (p. 92) and that Stoker ‘may have been thinking about some of these stage manoeuvres’ (p. 94). She also notes that both Lucy and Mina are visited ‘in bed’ (p. 94), but overall devotes far more time to Terry’s roles of Ophelia (from 1878) and Margaret (in Faust during the 1880s) than to her role of Lucy Westenra (Wynne, 2011: 17–32). However, I am persuaded that Terry’s Imogen – her last major role before Dracula – was of immediate importance. Cymbeline, and in particular Terry’s Imogen, pervade Stoker’s novel. Dracula’s text bears significant traces of Cymbeline, even down to the name of hero Jonathan Harker: the scene painter who created all the scenes key to Iachimo’s wager and the Iachimo/Imogen relationship was Joseph Harker (Irving, 1896: unnumbered page). Terry’s performance in the 1896 Cymbeline equally bore traces of Stoker. Terry’s autograph marginalia in her rehearsal copies of Cymbeline include numerous pieces of advice from him, including ‘“Imogen impulsive” – B.S.’ (Cymbeline 2: 19); despite a possible similarity in the initials, this was almost certainly Stoker, rather than Shaw, whose name Terry would have been used to reading as G.B.S., his signature throughout their correspondence (Terry, 1932).

Wynne argues that Terry ‘enhanced’ the Lyceum’s ‘Gothic culture’ (Wynne, 2011: 71). Arguably, Cymbeline was a central contribution, with the bedchamber scene becoming a structuring psychological conceit of Dracula. Whether Irving and Stoker had reciprocal interests in each other’s planned ‘manoeuvres’, or whether one artist drew on each other’s, there was clearly a substantial relationship between Irving and Terry’s and Stoker’s ‘stagings’ of the bedchamber scene. More broadly, the huge success of both Cymbeline and Dracula reflects the intensity of contemporary interest in liminal states and transgressive sexuality. The ability of production and text to illuminate each other when placed in proximity also indicates what can be gained when instances in the history of Shakespeare in performance are considered in dialogue with the contemporary culture into which they emerge. The relationship between Cymbeline and Dracula shows 1890s Shakespeare in a reciprocal relationship with the cultural phenomena of the fin de siècle.

Plot and thematics make Cymbeline an inviting source for Dracula. Both are geographically disparate, fantastic texts mingling the mortal and the supernatural. In both, letters provide key plot twists and catalyse travel: delivering news, and summoning wives to husband – wives whose ‘ecstasy’ is experienced as ‘Joy, joy, joy!’ (Stoker, [1897] 2011: 94; Terry, 1932: 191). Both centre on a new marriage between a young couple (the Harkers, and Imogen and Posthumus). Marital sex and fidelity are key themes: the marriages in both texts are of doubtful sexual status, problematising ideas of consummation and fidelity and what constitutes sexual contact. Posthumus and Imogen’s sexual status is uncertain in Cymbeline; the only sexual encounter described within the play (Iachimo’s with Imogen) never actually occurs, and the only time a wife lies beside her ‘husband’, he is in fact her stepbrother’s headless corpse. Posthumus and Imogen themselves are separated for most of the play, from the first to final scene. In Dracula, the Harkers’s sexual relationship is even more ambiguous. Harker is an invalid at his wedding, presumably precluding immediate consummation: Mina attempts to restrain Jonathan from his ‘lawful pleasure’ once she feels ‘unclean’, while Arthur considers himself ‘married’ to Lucy ‘in the sight of God’, a phrase commonly used to assert the legitimacy of various kinds of extra-marital relationship (Cymbeline II.4.161; Stoker, 2011: 264, 162). Lewis Carroll used it to describe Terry’s relationship with Edward William Godwin (Cohen, 1979: II.1014–1015), the designer with whom Terry cohabited from 1868 and 1874, and who fathered her two children. Nevertheless, Arthur and Lucy’s consummation is between separate beds, via blood transfusion and a medical intermediary in the form of Van Helsing; and Lucy has equivalent experiences with three other men, without her consent or knowledge. Cymbeline’s marriage to the Queen may be as celibate as the Harkers’s: like Jonathan Harker, the newly-wed King Cymbeline is an invalid and there is no suggestion of more children. Both Cymbeline and the Queen (a former widow) have consummated marriages with others, producing present (and, in Cymbeline’s case, absent) issue.

Unsurprisingly, given both texts’ anxieties around sexual consummation, Cymbeline and Dracula are both preoccupied with succession. Just as Cymbeline magically restores a full British succession at the end of the play (particularly apposite in 1896, with an ageing queen and Prince of Wales), at the end of Dracula, the birth of the Harkers’s son creates a legitimate ‘heir’, spiritual and physical, to both Jonathan and their ‘little band of men’, embodying the deceased Quincey Morris’s ‘spirit’ and the Harkers’s Christian marriage, rather than the vampiric descendants Lucy would have created, vampirising children as the ‘bloofer lady’ (Stoker, 2011: 351,161). Lucy’s ‘heresy’, earlier in the book, in wishing she could have multiple husbands (Stoker, 2011: 58) is negated by her staking, before she can marry Arthur and create complications including polyandry and vampirism. Arthur is thus free to remarry (as he does) and safely continue the Holmwood line. Equally, martial brothers supplant the Imogen who defied her father. In 1896, Cymbeline’s reviewers found Terry’s Imogen ‘pre-eminently loveable and worthy’, a ‘perfect type of womanhood’ (Era, 1896: 10). In 1897, Stoker’s Mina also functions as the perfect wife and princess of the ‘little band’ of vampire-hunters (Stoker, 2011: 351). After the agency, activity, and technological expertise of her adventures, Mina embodies multiple ‘perfect type[s]’ of women. Like Imogen, she is the perfect wife, either suspending sexual relations with her husband (like Shakespeare’s Imogen) or never having had them (like the Lyceum Imogen, according to Athenaeum) out of ‘pudency’ (Cymbeline II.4.163). Delayed consummation is also key to Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (1891), where Arthur Severn and Norah Joyce are separated for two years. From the Latin pudentia, the double meaning of ‘pudency’ is appropriate: ‘modesty’ in Imogen’s case, ‘shame’ in Mina’s (OED, 2013). Importantly for the ‘little band’ in Dracula, after Mina is described as ‘tainted’ by both Jonathan Harker (Stoker, 2011: 329) and Van Helsing (p. 339), her ‘pudency’ precludes the possibility of ‘tainting’ Harker and his offspring with her (temporarily) contaminated blood and potentially corrupted sexuality before her purification. Only women become sexually ‘tainted’ by Dracula: Jonathan’s closest call with vampirism comes via a trio of vampire women, and Arthur’s via the undead Lucy. In this way, Stoker’s text is remarkably more anxious about female sexuality than Shakespeare’s. The Harkers’s son is born on the anniversary of Quincey Morris’s death (Stoker, 2011: 351), presumably conceived a decorous three months after Mina’s ‘purification’. ‘Quincey’ Harker (p. 351) secures the ‘succession’ of the ‘little band’ just as Imogen’s discovery of her brothers does for Britain. At the novel’s end, Mina becomes an ideal mother, full of ‘sweetness and loving care’ (p. 351). Finally, Mina is the chaste focus of the men’s amour courtois, both accommodating conventional Victorian male virtues of self-sacrifice and courage, and legitimising the men’s emotional commitment to each other, which becomes potentially homoerotic with the intensity of the vampire hunt, through their chaste emotional reorientation towards herself. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses the ‘erotic triangle’, in which women function as the ‘changeable, perhaps symbolic property’ that ‘cements the bonds of men with men’ (1985: 26). Mina, having been ‘brave and gallant’ herself, ensures that ‘some men so loved her, that they did much for her sake’. In fact, the woman (most of) the men originally ‘so loved’ was Lucy, with Mina as her safer replacement, the calmer half of the same identity (Stoker, 2011: 351).

Ultimately, Stoker’s narratorial treatment of female identity controls and negates individualities of desire, activity, and experience. Mina’s agency, Lucy’s heterodoxy and sexual appeal, both women’s ambiguous sexual relation to Dracula, their partners, and the wider band of men, are (re)directed into socially unthreatening icons which ‘continuate society’: wife, mother, and the safely dead Christian virgin who inspires men to better lives. In particular, Lucy’s death resolves the problem of her engagement to Holmwood, which her inevitable vampirism makes untenable.

To use Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terminology, Lucy and Mina are both especially ‘changeable and symbolic’, given Lucy’s vampirism, Mina’s curse, and their myriad near-miss sexual relationships. Both texts raise the spectre and then avert the possibility of problematic sexual relationships, assuaging late-Victorian anxieties about controlling individual variations and transgressive potential in human sexuality. Van Helsing prevents sexual contact between Lucy and Arthur; Lucy’s preference for Arthur precludes further overtures from Seward and Morris; Mina’s marriage to Jonathan means she can only be a ‘symbol’ to the men, and the Harkers’s marriage becomes sexless due to Mina’s ‘taint’, but ultimately results in a baby boy of whom Quincey Morris is also spiritually and ambiguously a posthumous father. In Cymbeline, Cloten dies before he can rape Imogen, Imogen repels Iachimo’s sexual advances, and Imogen and Posthumus’s half-Sicilian, demi-royal children are unlikely to attain the throne: politically, the couple almost cease to exist. As Fidele, Imogen’s ‘death’ ends the potentially ambiguous attraction the engaging youth holds for her brothers, one of whom vows he would ‘woo hard’ if Fidele ‘were… a woman’ and be his ‘groom’ (III.7.41–42). Subsequently, ‘Fidele’s’ sighting of Posthumus catalyses her rejection of Caius Lucius, with whom her relationship might otherwise have become sexual. The Caius/Fidele relationship approximates that between Orsino and Viola, with fewer impediments given the lack of an Olivia-figure, and Imogen’s belief that she is a widow – a belief which could, especially on the Victorian stage, be seen as a likely prelude to accidental adultery or bigamy. As Sos Eltis (2013) argues, accidental bigamy was a theatrical staple long before it reached the novel, with melodramas such as J.T. Haines’s wildly popular My Poll and My Partner Joe (1835) and Thomas Egerton Wilks’s Halvei the Unknown and Woman’s Love (both 1841) preceding bigamy plot sensation novels such as Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).

Terry as Gothic source: Bram Stoker’s women

Mina and Lucy’s complementary identities strengthen the arguments both for Imogen’s influence on Stoker’s women, and for Terry herself as a source for both characters. Both Edmund Gordon Craig (Terry’s son) and Shaw rely on dichotomous narratives for describing Terry. Craig’s 1932 Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self explicitly polarises the ‘secret self’ as ‘little Nelly’ vs. the actress ‘E.T.’. Mina and Lucy signal another narrative of ‘splitting’. As a beloved, active, intelligent, business-like but ultimately subordinate woman, Mina’s position in the ‘little band of men’ can be seen as analogous to Terry’s at Irving’s Lyceum. Tellingly, in the 1897 copyright reading for Stoker’s dramatisation of Dracula, Mina was played by Terry’s daughter, Edith Craig (Stuart, 1994: 197).

But Lucy’s resemblance to Terry, and Terry-as-Imogen, is far greater. Like Imogen’s suffering, Lucy’s vampirism, decline, death, and re-killing fulfil contemporary cultural investment in witnessing female suffering. Like Imogen, Lucy’s suffering is effective because ‘varied and prolonged’; Lucy also unwittingly signals her function as sufferer by comparing herself to Desdemona – like herself and Imogen, the ‘victim of a villain’s diabolical plot’ (Standard, 1896: 3) while having ‘a stream poured in her ear’ by well-travelled Quincey Morris (Stoker, [1897] 2011: 56). Both Imogen and Lucy return from the dead: Lucy as the ‘Undead’, and Imogen both as the restored Fidele and as herself after supposedly being murdered by Pisanio. Lucy’s deathbed partially evokes Desdemona’s, who revives to exonerate Othello, just as Imogen’s Act V reappearance pardons both Posthumus and Iachimo. Similarly, Lucy asks Van Helsing to protect Arthur, while oscillating repeatedly (and paradoxically) between a living-but-dying mortal, and an already dead-but-Undead immortal (p. 150).

Both Imogen and Lucy experience death and rebirth within texts saturated with liminal states of being: sleep, mesmerism, life-in-death, the afterlife, reanimation, and transitions between the above. Production and text appeared in a decade obsessed with such states, the occult, and spiritualism: this last shared by actress Constance Benson, who had trained under Irving (Benson, 1926). Cymbeline’s queen confesses her crimes (via Cornelius) after death; Posthumus (whose name connotes another kind of afterlife) is visited by his dead parents and brothers (personated by live actors), and is also seen alive after his own ‘death’ (which is actually Cloten’s). Imogen’s dead brothers Guiderius and Arviragus appear onstage as the live Polydore and Cadwal; Imogen herself is placed in a death-like state (similar to coma or mesmerism), ‘dies’, and is buried as Fidele, an identity which also ‘dies’ when she rejects Caius Lucius and rejoins her family. Even this reunion includes a final cycle through death and resurrection, as Posthumus’s attack on the ‘page’ who ‘plays’ him provokes Pisanio’s anguished cry that he ‘ne’er killed Imogen til now’ (Cymbeline V.5.227–231). Writing on Shakespeare’s heroines in 1887, the actress Helena Faucit believed that Imogen was dying by the play’s end, the ‘blow [ … ] inflicted by that cruel letter’ having hit ‘the heart with a too fatal force’, leaving ‘a hurt too deep for mortal leech-craft’ (1887: 278–279). Faucit even imagined Imogen’s afterlife, her ‘lovely soul’ actively ‘inspiring’ her menfolk to ‘worthy lives’ and celestial reunion (pp. 278–279). Bram Dijkstra calls this kind of Victorian death ‘a woman’s ultimate sacrifice of her being to the males she had been born to serve’, with Imogen as an ideal vehicle for what he terms ‘the consumptive sublime’ (1986: 29). Ultimately, Cymbeline is a play where the dead refuse to stay dead. As in Dracula, the only way to ensure death is by beheading, the ultimate fate of the Undead Lucy and Cloten.

Stoker’s presentation of Lucy clearly evokes his portrayal of Terry in Personal Reminiscences, which emphasises the charm and popular lovability so essential to her success as Imogen. Both Lucy and Terry are endlessly enthralling, and (initially, in Lucy’s case) ‘embodied sunshine’ (Stoker, 1906: II.194). Stoker’s claim of Ellen Terry that she ‘fascinated every one who ever met her – men, women, and children, it was all the same’ is markedly true of Lucy (Stoker, 1906: II.192). Although Mina subsequently inspires the ‘little band’ to become her ‘devoted servants’ (as Stoker says ‘all’ in the Lyceum served Terry), admiration for Stoker’s Terry is much more like that for Lucy. Like Terry, Lucy is ‘a source of joy to all; of envy to none [ … ] add[ing] always to the sum of human happiness’ before her illness (Stoker, 1906: II.193; Stoker, 2011: 351). Whitby’s geriatrics ‘[fall] in love with [Lucy] on the spot’ (Stoker, 2011: 63), Van Helsing declares that ‘she charm [sic] me’ (p. 106), and the three men who propose to Lucy in one day subsequently retain Stoker’s feeling for Terry: ‘reverence and regard and love for her enchanting personality’ (Stoker, 1906: II.206). The newspaper correspondent in Dracula describes children’s personation of the ‘bloofer lady’ by claiming ‘even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly attractive as some of these grubby-faced little children pretend to be’ (Stoker, 2011: 165–166). As well as bringing Terry to mind as we read Stoker’s narrative, Stoker associates the ‘bloofer lady’ with the height of Terry’s charm; although age and medium prevented Terry directly entering into the ‘popular role’ of Lucy, we are implicitly told that to be like Lucy (as the children are desperate to be in their ‘al Fresco performances’, and may shortly become, if vampirised), it is necessary to be like Ellen Terry (pp. 165–166).

Terry’s correspondence was of course unavailable to (most) readers at the time, but its subsequent scholarly collation and republication lets us read as well as see her in Stoker’s narrative. The linguistic features of Lucy’s correspondence strongly recall Terry’s letters. Although still more restrained than Terry’s single, double, and occasionally triple underlining (which most editors, before Cockin, uniformly italicised), Lucy’s letters are full of emphases. Lucy complains to Mina that ‘you tax me very unfairly [ … ] I wrote to you twice [ … ] your last letter was only for second’, claiming Seward would ‘just do for’ her, and exclaiming ‘I do so want to [ … ] hear from you at once’, before demanding secrecy from ‘everyone’ (Stoker, 2011: 54–55). Lucy shares Terry’s effusive style, sending Mina ‘Oceans of love and millions of kisses’, and lexical variability (Stoker, 2011: 101). Exclamation (‘Just fancy!’ is repeated twice) and idiomatic sayings proliferate. These include French (Seward is ‘an excellent parti’), contemporary British slang, as when Lucy meets Seward at ‘the last Pop’ and finds ‘dress’ a ‘bore. That is slang again but never mind’ (Stoker, 2011: 54–55), or, indirectly, Morris’s ‘American slang’ which Lucy enthusiastically reports (p. 57). There are also indirect literary allusions: Lucy’s remark regarding Morris, that other women would ‘worship the very ground he trod on’ (Stoker, 2011: 59) closely echoes the first recorded use of that phrase in English literature, Lady Lowbrough’s description of her husband, who ‘worships the very ground I tread on’ in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Brontë, [1848] 2012: 451). Conversely, although references to ‘hard nuts’ date back to the eighteenth century, Lucy’s self-declaration as ‘a tough nut to crack’ (Stoker, 2011: 54) appears to be new, although now in familiar use (OED, 2013). Completing her letters’ eclectic style, Lucy employs varying epistolary closes and signatures, shifting from the flowery ‘ever your loving Lucy’ to the dramatic ‘Goodbye’, and from ‘Lucy’ to ‘L’ (Stoker, 2011: 54–59). This immediately recalls Terry, whose signatures to Shaw during 1896 alone included ‘ET’ (Terry, 1932: 31), ‘Nellen Terry’ (p. 53), ‘Nell (or Nellen) not Ellen!’ (p. 58), ‘Nellen T.’ (p. 66) and the full ‘Ellen Terry’ (p. 68).

In their various enthusiasms for Lucy, the suitors in Dracula anticipate the Terry fans Stoker immortalises in Personal Reminiscences as ‘evidences of [Terry’s] fascination’, including the American ‘Attourney-General’ [sic] who exclaims ‘What a creature! What a Queen! She smote me with the sword of her beauty, and I arose her Knight!’ (Stoker, 1906: II.192–193), in language that might have embarrassed even Quincey Morris. This extends to Mina, who finds Lucy, ‘sensitive’ and ‘sweeter and lovelier than ever’ (Stoker, 2011: 84, 61), and who also displays lover-like devotion, comparing her own responses to those of Lucy’s fiancé. This is notable both when praising Lucy’s ‘puckered [ … ] expression which Arthur says he loves; and, indeed, I don’t wonder that he does’ (Stoker, 2011: 93) and, noting that Lucy, sleeping, looks ‘oh so sweet’, wondering what ‘Mr Holmwood [ … ] would say if he saw her asleep’, revealing her sleeping potential as an object of romantic and sexual potential (p. 85).

The sleeping woman and fin-de-siècle desire

This central action of watching women sleep (or being asleep and watched) most closely links Imogen and Lucy. In both texts, the sleeping woman is a central erotic object. In Dracula, the association of sleep and death means that the sleeping woman occupies a related position of ‘alterity’ to the eroticised female corpse (Bronfen, 1992: xi); somnophilia has been identified as a preparatory paraphilia to necrophilia (Hickey, 2010: 149), with both constituting ‘paraphilic predation by stealth’ (Money, 1986: 55).

However, as Iachimo, Mina, and other characters in Dracula indicate, the eroticism of observing a sleeping woman is more complex. Rather than simply being ‘visited in bed’ once (Wynne, 2013: 94), Cymbeline’s Imogen is seen in bed, asleep, or unconscious by almost every character in the play, excluding the Queen and Cloten; Helen and Iachimo see Imogen in her bed in II.2; Belarius, Arviragus, and Guidierus see her ‘dead’ (unconscious) in IV.2. In the same scene, Caius Lucius (who arrives with Captains and a Soothsayer) assumes she is ‘dead or sleeping’ on Cloten (IV.2.367). In V.5, the characters who see Imogen fall unconscious when Posthumus strikes her (and Pisano cries that he ‘ne’er killed Imogen til now’) include her father, husband, and brothers, Pisanio, Belarius, Caius Lucius, and Cornelius. In Dracula, the images proliferate and the boundaries between states of sleep, unconsciousness, and death become more porous. Victorian culture fetishised the sleep-death boundary, from post-mortem photography depicting corpses posed as sleepers and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of sleeping children who appear dead, notably in ‘Sister Spirits’ (1865) and the pieta-like ‘Madonna and Child’ (1866), to the 1882 photograph depicting Sarah Bernhardt reclined in a coffin: an image which the artist and writer Graham Robertson recalled mistaking for the ‘tragic secret’ of a real dead girl’s ‘pathetic loveliness’ (Robertson, 1931: 107). In Dracula, Lucy is thought ‘dying when she slept/And sleeping when she died’ (Thomas Hood, ‘The Death-Bed’, 1831, quoted in Stoker, 2011: 57), while the scientific knowledge that she died ‘in trance [ … ] and in trance she is Undead’ form the novel’s psychological crisis (Stoker, 2011: 137). Both Lucy and Imogen are decked with flowers; both ‘wake’ in gravesites which cannot contain them. Dracula’s characters continually stress Lucy’s ‘radiantly beautiful’ appearance in sleep and death (Stoker, 2011: 186); all Mina, Seward, and Arthur’s praise of her serves as nineteenth-century glosses on Iachimo’s exclamation of ‘How bravely thou becom’st thy bed, fresh lily’ (Cymbeline II.2.15).

Somnophilic assault on women can be motivated by the belief that the sleeping pose is implicitly inviting, and that the sleeping woman desires sexual contact; at the very least, as Leonard Barkan notes, the ‘beautiful woman sleeping, with a notable promise of nudity’ can be ‘watched with impunity’ within the voyeuristic protocols of high Western culture (1993: 150). The unconsciously erotic female subject could also be seen as culturally culpable.

Dijkstra discusses how some Victorian interpretations of the Biblical Salome as sexually naïve – as in Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877), unaware of the sexual impact of her danced depiction of ‘passionate desire’ (1923: 114–115) and as in Massenet’s opera Hérodiade (1881) – embody the trope of the ‘virgin whore’ (1986: 384). The ‘virgin whore’ is able to ‘destroy the male’s soul’ by exciting his sexual desire, but remaining ‘chaste in body’ (Dijkstra, 1986: 384). Her ‘self sufficiency’ forces the man to ‘wait in impotent longing for her compliance’; her refusal supposedly incites her own destruction, and ‘perversely “forces” him to rape her’ (p. 385). There is something of Cloten’s logic in this reasoning; similarly, Imogen’s unwitting eroticism threatens to destroy Iachimo’s sexual self-control, just as Lucy’s dangerous beauty encourages Arthur to kiss her and risk vampirism. In Imogen’s case, the impression of the sleeping woman as ‘inviting’ is heightened by her status as a married woman who has already exerted sexual choice in marrying Posthumus (making her refusal of Iachimo more pointed).

An Arthur Holmwood aroused by the sight of sleeping Lucy Westenra would have been in good company in 1897. The sleeping woman, nude or dressed, is a perennial artistic subject, but there was a particular profusion of sleeping women painted in bed at the fin de siècle, reflecting what Dijkstra calls ‘the fetish of sleep’ (Dijkstra, 1986: 25).¹ Like the Cymbeline and Dracula scenes, the domestic setting intensifies the voyeuristic violation committed by the viewer. In the cases of Imogen and the women painted, the bed’s potential as a marital bed offers the viewer the thrill of adultery, heightened by the threat and uncertainty of discovery: where is the husband whose place the viewer imaginatively usurps? As well as the unconscious Lucy being ‘radiantly beautiful’, it is crucial to Stoker that she is watched, closely reiterating the Lyceum staging (Stoker, 2011: 186). Many elements of theatrical staging recur in Dracula. Mina twice observes the sleeping Lucy from a distance, framed first by the spotlight-like ‘moon’ that ‘struck so brilliantly’ (Stoker, 2011: 87), and subsequently by the proscenium arch-like frame of a window, in which Lucy is seen with her ‘head lying up against the windowsill’ (p. 90). Lucy’s sleep is highly aestheticised; not only does she ‘always wak[e] prettily’, but she is always arranged so that Mina can see her clearly, whether ‘half-reclining with her head over the back of the seat’, or ‘distinctly’ framed by the window – graceful, picturesque poses recalling the Lyceum’s aestheticised style (p. 90). Mina, Seward, Van Helsing, and Arthur all watch Lucy sleep, but Stoker also uses Mina to highlight a second watcher: Dracula. This grouping of Mina, Dracula, and Lucy strongly recalls that of the theatrical spectator, Iachimo (played by Irving, inspiration for Dracula) and Imogen; Dracula appears as ‘something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure’ with ‘white face and red, gleaming eyes’. Preying on Lucy again in the window, he is a ‘good-sized bird’ (pp. 87–90). Journalists’ descriptions of Irving’s Iachimo as a ‘Judas’, ‘serpent’, and ‘ghoul’ indicate his performance’s potential for inspiring degenerate, animalistic images. Subsidiary aspects of the Lyceum performance also recur, including the dishevelled ‘collar of [Lucy’s] night-dress’ (Stoker, 2011: 87) which, worn by Imogen, was ‘turned down’ by Iachimo (Sprague, 1944: 61).

Stoker’s obsession with the liminal states explored in Cymbeline is also evident in Dracula’s juxtaposition of animated and non-animated bodies: Mrs Westenra and Lucy are found ‘on the bed’, with the living daughter paradoxically ‘more drawn’ even than her ‘white’ mother (Stoker, 2011: 137). After Lucy’s death, her other self, Mina, is alive in her marital bed, ‘white-clad’ and drinking from Dracula’s ‘bare chest’ while her husband lies in a ‘stupor’ from which he initially wakes only to ‘partial consciousness’ (Stoker, 2011: 262–263). Mina describes herself subsequently as having attempted to ‘wake Jonathan, but [ … ] he slept so soundly’ before discovering Dracula’s presence. Again, Mina’s nightdress is important; not merely ‘turned down’ (Sprague, 1944: 61) or ‘dishevelled’, it is bloodstained, leaving Mina in ‘helpless attitude and disarray’ (Stoker, 2011: 263). Dracula’s assault mingles Iachimo and Cloten’s fantasies: Dracula violates Mina in her marital bed, with her husband metaphorically ‘on the ground’, unable to intervene. Mina subsequently believes herself Jonathan’s ‘worst enemy’ and ‘unclean’ (Stoker, 2011: 266). This evokes Lucrece (with whom Iachimo identifies Imogen, alongside his self-fashioning as Tarquin), whose belief that she has committed a ‘cureless crime’ (Shakespeare, [1594] 2007: l.772), has ‘wronged’ her husband (l.819), and possesses ‘foul-defiled blood’. Jonathan, by refusing to believe this of Mina, rewrites Posthumus’s response to Iachimo’s claims (l.1029). The evocation of Lucrece intensifies with Mina’s subsequent report of Dracula’s threat to ‘dash [Jonathan’s] brains out’ (Stoker, 2011: 269), recalling Tarquin’s threat of defaming Lucrece’s husband Collatine (ll.519–520). Moreover, while the juxtaposition of Dracula and Mina (itself restaging the previous Dracula/Lucy encounters we witness and imagine) intensifies the Iachimo/Imogen bedchamber scene by making the husband present in the marital bed which Iachimo imaginatively and Dracula symbolically violates, the juxtaposition of bodies has a source in Cymbeline, where the truly dead, decapitated Cloten is the ‘headless man’ beside the ambiguous body of ‘Fidele’ who, although the living Imogen, has just experienced funerary rites and burial (Cymbeline IV.2.308). Mina takes ‘a sleeping draught’ which fails to work (Stoker, 2011: 266); before ‘death’ and burial as Fidele, Imogen swallows the trance-inducing potion Cornelius substituted for the queen’s poison (Cymbeline IV.2). Since Imogen believes the drug to be medicine, Imogen (like Mina) also regards her drug’s effect as a failure.

Analysing Cymbeline as a potential source for Dracula offers a new reading of Dracula as a prolonged meditation on, even obsession with, the female body in states of impaired consciousness. Lucy’s real significance is as sleeping, unconscious, and dead. While these states deny her agency (her ‘sleep-walking’, although an ‘old habit’, becomes the forced response to mesmerism), they are certainly the states in which she is surrounded by activity (Stoker, 2011: 70). From an Imogen who is desired, fantasised about, and assaulted by Iachimo, mourned and buried by her brothers, abandoned, struck down, and reclaimed by her husband, Stoker creates a heroine who experiences a multiplicity of all these encounters: admired, desired, decorated (with the garlic-flowers), transfused, stripped, washed, dried, nursed, and grieved by her ‘little band’; violated by Dracula; and ultimately buried, uncovered, hated, attacked, kissed, and beheaded again after death. Evoking the Lyceum Cymbeline’s eroticised liminal states, Stoker restages the Irving/Terry bedchamber scene in one further crucial way. Arguably, if Iachimo becomes Dracula, then each of Lucy’s suitors also becomes Iachimo. Just as Iachimo’s observation of and assault on Imogen is itself a fantasy of the sexual intercourse he desires, the various blood transfusions, observations, and physical and therapeutic acts which the men who desire Lucy perpetrate on her transpose the marital consummation they all desire, but fail to achieve. In turn, critical fascination with Iachimo’s ‘protracted raptures’ of desire, and Imogen’s sexual vulnerability, reveal the space that Iachimo’s fantasy created for journalists’ own sexual pleasure. This pleasure derived from the spectacle of a culturally beloved, revered actress prostrate beneath simulated sexual violation: a voyeurism and violation conveniently legitimised by the respectability of a Shakespearean text.