BBC Radio 4 „In our time“: „Polidori’s The Vampyre“

„Melvyn Bragg and guests dis­cuss the influ­en­tial novel­la of John Poli­dori (1795–1821) pub­lished in 1819 and attrib­uted first to Lord Byron (1788–1824) who had start­ed a ver­sion of it in 1816 at the Vil­la Dio­dati in the Year With­out A Sum­mer. There Byron, his per­son­al physi­cian Poli­dori, Mary and Per­cy Shel­ley and Claire Clair­mont had whiled away the weeks of mis­er­able weath­er by telling ghost sto­ries, famous­ly giv­ing rise to Mary Shelley’s ‚Franken­stein‘. Emerg­ing soon after, ‚The Vampyre‘ thrilled read­ers with its aris­to­crat­ic Lord Ruthven who glut­ted his thirst with the blood of his vic­tims, his sta­tus an abrupt change from the sto­ries of peas­ant vam­pires of east­ern and cen­tral Europe that had spread in the 18th Cen­tu­ry with the expan­sion of the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an empire. The con­nec­tion with Lord Byron gave the novel­la a boost, and soon ‚The Vampyre‘ spawned West End plays, pen­ny dread­fuls such as ‚Var­ney the Vam­pire‘, Bram Stoker’s ‚Drac­u­la‘, F.W Murnau’s film ‚Nos­fer­atu A Sym­pho­ny of Hor­ror‘, and count­less oth­ers.“ (BBC)

Sie kön­nen die Sendung, die am 7.4.2022 in der Rei­he „In our time“ lief, über die Seite der BBC nach­hören oder als Audio­datei herun­ter­laden.