22 Who is Lord Ruthven? (Vampire)
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This article is from the Vampires FAQ, by BJ Kuehl bj@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu with numerous contributions by others.
22 Who is Lord Ruthven? (Vampire)
Long before Dracula was even a gleam in Bram Stoker's eye, there was
Lord Ruthven, a fictional vampire popularized by John Polidori in a
short story published April 1819 in "The New Monthly Magazine" [England].
The story behind the story goes that Polidori was a guest at Lord Byron's
Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva (Switzerland) in June 1816. During a rainy
spell, Byron suggested that the guests pass the time by writing ghost
stories. One of the stories to come out of this write-a-thon was Mary
Shelley's _Frankenstein_. Byron himself wrote a fragment of a tale about
a vampire he called Augustus Darvell. John Polidori's contribution was
apparently unremarkable.
Three years later, however, after a falling out with Byron, Polidori
published "The Vampyre", which featured the suave yet fiendish Lord
Ruthven. There are many rumors surrounding the writing of "The Vampyre,"
i.e., it was first attributed to Lord Byron then to Polidori, and then
it was rumored that Polidori based the fiendish Lord Ruthven ON Byron.
In actuality, Lord Ruthven had already been created several years prior
by Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Byron's discarded lovers, to portray the
heartless, but non-vampire, lover in her novel _Glenarvon_.
Within a year after "The Vampyre" was published, the vampyre Ruthven
became hugely popular throughout western Europe. By June of 1819, he
was already onstage at the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin (Paris) in
a melodrama called "Le Vampire", written by Charles Nodier.
In August of 1820, James Planche brought Nodier's play to the London
Lyceum under the name "The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles." Although
adapted from Nodier's "Le Vampire", it wasn't quite the same play, as
Planche's version was written to fit the available wardrobe, and so his
play was set in Scotland. (Vampires in kilts...oh la la!) In that same
year, Nodier's friend Cyprien Berard wrote a long sequel to Polidori's
story, which he titled "Lord Ruthven ou Les Vampires." Berard's sequel
has the distinction of being the first vampire novel ever written (till
then, everything had been in the form of short stories, plays or poetry).
In 1823, Alexandre Dumas attended a revival of Nodier's "Le Vampire" and
wrote about the experience in his _Memoirs_. Dumas was so impressed with
the vampire Ruthven that he rewrote Nodier's play and took it back to the
Paris stage in 1851. He also authored a piece about Ruthven-type vampires
that has appeared under the title "The Pale Lady" and may be the first
story to set the vampires in the Carpathian Mountains.
In 1828, Polidori's Ruthven was recast in the first vampire opera, "Der
Vampyr", by Heinrich Marschner. Marschner's brother-in-law (Wilhelm
Wohlbruck) wrote the libretto, and "Der Vampyr" was performed for the
first time in Leipzig (Germany) in March 1829 where it, too, was a great
success. By August, "Der Vampyr" was on the stage at the London Lyceum,
the same theater that, some 70 years later, would be frequented by Bram
Stoker and would become the site of the original dramatization of the
most famous vampire story ever written-- _Dracula_.
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