This post was co-authored by LeEtta Schmidt, Director of Integrated Research & Impact Services, and Lesley Brooks, Coordinator Library Operations
Dion Boucicault (1820-1890) was a prolific and innovative playwright, actor, producer, manager, and director of the 19th-century, English-speaking stage. The Dion Boucicault Theatre Collection, housed in USF Special Collections, primarily contains manuscripts and printed plays. The collection consists of approximately 781 items, including printed and manuscript play scripts, sides, stage directions, letters, and musical scores. The collection also includes set design sketches, prompt books, photographs and select musical segments.
This year, the collection gained a newly digitized play, just in time for Halloween. The Vampire, a supernatural melodrama explores two encounters with a mysterious phantom, blending elements of the supernatural with dramatic tension. A digitized version of this manuscript has been added to USF Libraries’ and exhibit on this inventive and prolific playwright. USF Special Collections has the only existing manuscript version of The Vampire written in Boucicault’s own hand.
A quick browser search for Boucicault’s The Vampire brings up results for a later play: The Phantom. Wikipedia even says The Phantom is an adaptation of another playwright, Pierre Carmouche’s, Le Vampire. Matthew Knight, Irish Studies Librarian and Curator at Hesburgh Library Notre Dame, tells a different story on our digital Boucicault exhibit, “Dion Boucicault Theatre Collection exhibit”.
Boucicault’s The Phantom is very much an adaptation of Boucicault’s own The Vampire. The Vampire, true to the way Boucicault was prone to work:
“relied heavily upon other sources …, particularly Le Vampire by Alexandre Dumas père, which had recently premiered in Paris in December 1851. Boucicault also drew upon John Polidori’s 1819 short story The Vampyre (moonlight’s rejuvenating power on a mortally wounded vampire, the blood oath); Charles Robert Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer and James Malcolm Rymer’s 1845-47 penny dreadful Varney the Vampyre (the vampire’s garb, evocative portraits, a focus on Oliver Cromwell); and James Robinson Planché’s 1820 play The Vampire: or the Bride of the Isles (the vampire’s psychic power over his victims).” –Matthew Knight
The Vampire had a one month run in the Princess Theatre in London in the summer of 1852. It received generally poor reviews. By the time Boucicault stepped off a ship in the U.S. the play had been streamlined to two acts with dialogue changes and simplified effects and direction. This new version of the play is what later became The Phantom in 1856 (also available in USF Libraries’ digital collections).
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Want to learn more about this playwright?
- Dion Boucicault Theatre Collection (1843-1888)
- Dion Boucicault Theatre Collection exhibit
- Dion Boucicault, Irish immigrants, and USF Libraries Special Collections
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Want more Halloween or spooky-inspired reads?