Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles

The first English vampire play, and the work that gave the world Lord Ruthven. Written in 1820, nearly eighty years before Dracula, James Planché's gothic thriller defines the aristocratic bloodsucker that would become a genre archetype: charming, murderous, hiding in plain sight as nobility. When Lady Margaret begins having prophetic visions of her own death at the hands of a vampiric fiend, she dismisses them as madness. Then she meets her betrothed, the mysterious Lord Ruthven, and realizes her nightmares have followed her into waking life. He wants her hand in marriage and her blood in his veins. What unfolds is a tense gothic showdown between a woman who sees her doom coming and the creature who means to deliver it. Planché adapted Lord Byron'sFragment of a Novel into a work that invented the sophisticated vampire we now recognize from countless adaptations. This is where the modern vampire myth begins.