SOURCE: "The Vampire Theme: Dumas Pere and the English Stage," in Revue des Langues Vivantes, Vol. XXXIX, No. 4, 1973, pp. 312-24.

In the following essay, originally presented as a paper in 1972, Aldridge discusses the sources of Dumas's little-known drama Le Vampire (1851).

One of the least known of all the works of Alexandre Dumas, père, is his drama Le Vampire, 1851. It is so obscure that it has not even been honored by a separate printing, but is merely available in the collected edition of the author's dramatic works.¹ The play is important, however, in the biography of Dumas and in the history of comparative literature in the nineteenth century. It not only figures in the development of the vampire theme, but also reveals literary relations between France and England in a precise source-influence perspective. Dumas derived the central character and atmosphere of his drama from a famous English shocker...