Goethe, the great German poet and polymath, would declare The Vampyre to be Byron’s masterpiece.īut, of course, the much reprinted and repurposed tale The Vampyre was not written by Byron. A dramatic adaptation would reach the London stage in 1820, the first of some thirty-five different versions to be staged throughout Europe and America over the course of the nineteenth century. In the same year, it began to circulate on the Continent in an English edition printed in Paris followed by translations into French and German. Almost simultaneously it appeared in book form, with six different London editions dated to 1819. Two hundred years ago, in April 1819, the New Monthly Magazine in London would first publish “The Vampyre: a tale by Lord Byron,” what many now consider the inaugural text of modern vampire fiction. Ruthven was named after Clarence de Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon, the protagonist of Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816), an unflattering portrait of Byron with whom she had had an affair. One of Ruthven’s victims, Ianthe, takes her name from the opening lines addressed “To Ianthe” in the seventh edition of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I-II (1814). In his naming of The Vampyre’s characters, Polidori clearly linked his story to Byron.
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