I’ve got some excellent news for our British readers! This October the Duchy Opera will be presenting a touring production of Heinrich Marschner’s classic German romantic opera, The Vampire. Originally adapted from the short story by John Polidori, The Vampire was first performed in 1828, in Leipzig. Since 2011 is the 150th anniversary of Marschner’s…
Tag: john polidori
Major Works in Vampire Literature Published in 1800s
The most influential and most famous of all vampire novels were published during the 1800s. Highly innovative for the times and groundbreaking, these stories took readers to an entirely new world and continue to this day to be read and loved by many. The stories below gave people something new to fear, something new to…
Vampires are Just Like Us
Earlier I traced the history of vampire metaphor from “The Vampyre” by John Polidori–which more or less created the trope of an undead nightmare stranger–to the later visions of the vampires as an incarnation of sin. This last covered a spectrum of sin as temptation (especially in the Hammer films) to a search for redemption…
Vampires: The Nightmare Strangers
Someone asked why I thought vampires remained so popular and intriguing. My answer: Because the undead make such a fluid metaphor. Consider; when they first entered into the Western literature and art–with John Polidori’s “The Vampyre.” For much of the next century, vampires popped up in art and theatre as well as different stories. “Varney…
Sunlight and Vampires
Burned into the collective memory of our age, it is an image of great power. The vampire looms menacingly, but then the hero reaches up and pulls away the curtains. SUNLIGHT! Like laser beams, the purifying rays of the sun sear the undead creature’s flesh. The foul thing dissolves into the dust it should already…
Vampire Tarot
Tarot cards have been a part of the occult almost since they were created. Originally, the Tarot were playing cards used for games in France and Italy, but even playing cards have been used for divinatory purposes almost since their creation. As the centuries have passed, and anything to do with magic and divination was…
John Polidori and The Vampyre
Polidori was the friend and personal physician of the infamous rogue and poet, Lord Byron. He was also part of the close-knit circle of friends, including Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Byron, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, and also Byron’s woman of the hour. Polidori was Byron’s personal physician, and traveled with him through Europe. Though…
Vampires in Literature
In fiction of course, the epidemy of vampire literature, would be Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. There were sexual undertones, of course, relaying vampirism to be a sort of sexually transmitted disease. Its themes of blood, death, and sex made it’s way to Victorian Europe, rattled because of the spread of tuberculosis and syphilis. But the vampire…