Critical Survey

This article focuses on the reimagining of Victorian London central to two recent, high-profile television adaptations, NBC / Sky Living’s Dracula (2013–14) and Showtime / Sky Atlantic’s Penny Dreadful (2014–). Paying attention to the series themselves and paratextual forms such as posters and title sequences, the article argues that both productions are more interested in responding to the popular Victorian Gothic image of the city than in carefully reconstructing a straightforward facsimile of nineteenth-century London. It shows, in fact, that this adaptation of the Victorian cityscape is presented in heightened, performative terms. Dracula and Penny Dreadful’s self-conscious approach to their Victorian London settings is related, on a textual level, to the playfully anarchic response of these adaptations to their literary sources and characters. More generally, it reflects recent contextual developments affecting the practice of adapting nineteenth-century texts.

In Penny Dreadful, John Logan creates a ‘confluent’ and urban diegetic world which is characterized by the merging of dualities. While seamlessly bringing together characters from such classical works of Victorian Gothic fiction as Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula, and through the references by these characters to the Romantics such as Shelley and Blake, the series also provides a retrospective vision of the dark aspects of the urbanization of Victorian London. With reference to London’s representation in Penny Dreadful, this article explores the shaky ground of the metropolis that creates a duality in almost every other element of the show, including the representation of the city and its social realities, the identities of the characters, and the adaptation and ‘confluence’ of Victorian literary works in a single world that is paradoxically characterized by stark contrasts and dualities.

Season 1 of the television series Penny Dreadful showcases a Victorian London where monsters are reimagined as part of mainstream society. Much of season 1’s plot centres around an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, complete with a story arc involving a group of men attempting to save Mina Murray from a vampire master. At the end of Dracula, they are able to save Mina from Dracula’s influence and she is restored to a state of purity; however, in Penny Dreadful, Mina and the female characters remain unsaved. This article focuses on Penny Dreadful and the failed restoration of the gender order of Dracula’s society. It specifically emphasizes deeper gender issues present in the show’s adaptation of Victorian London, arguing that by allowing the main characters to be urban monsters, the show provides a non-human lens through which to examine societal constructs of gender in relation to selfhood.

Dracula (NBC / Sky Living, 2013–14) and Penny Dreadful (Showtime / Sky Atlantic, 2014–) are two reimaginings of classic nineteenth-century novels that can help us better understand how adaptations function in a media landscape dominated by a logic of repetition and convergence, where sequels, reboots, and remakes have become the norm. While Dracula adapts Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, with the eponymous character arriving in London posing as an American entrepreneur in order to defeat an evil secret society, Penny Dreadful offers viewers a mélange of classic nineteenth-century Gothic novels in the style of Moore and O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–). What distinguishes the two series is the way in which they employ instances of simultaneous adaptation and appropriation in their character building, to the extent that Dracula or Penny Dreadful’s Ethan Chandler can more easily be read as mergers of iconic characters, images, and types.

This article analyses William Shakespeare’s Macbeth in relation to its main spaces – the heath, Macbeth’s three castles, Macduff’s fortress, and the battleground where Macbeth perishes – in order to shed light on the play’s use of spatial politics by outlining the function and significance of the concept of the palimpsest, while concurrently reading the play within a context that conflates Michel de Certeau’s and Henri Lefebvre’s theories of space. It contends that although castles are supposed to be the bedrocks and shelters for the individuals that inhabit them, hence fixed and static, those in the text are ambiguous and changeable while concurrently they refigure and reinscribe one another. Finally, the article will demonstrate that the playwright invites the audience to ponder on the issues of social responsibility and political power by choosing a spatially palimpsestic framework for his play.

Love suicide was a situation lavishly employed by playwrights in early modern England. We generally regard as tragic heroes the dramatic star-crossed lovers who kill themselves onstage and we see their death as the sensationally pathetic climax of the play. On the other hand, in Elizabethan and early Stuart society, suicide, or, as it was called, ‘self-slaughter’ or ‘self-murder’, was considered both as a crime and as one of the most dreadful sins a Christian could possibly commit. I would suggest that the tension between these two conflicting views on suicide had a relevant emotional impact on the audiences to whom these plays were originally addressed. In order to prove this, I wish to analyse in particular domestic plays which stage the range of responses elicited within a community that has to cope with the suicide of one of its members.

This article focuses on early modern England to explore the relation between the definition and prosecution of crime through lawmaking and law enforcement on the one hand, and the cultural representation of crime and surveillance on the other. While at the time the control of crime was extremely faulty, culture was part of the apparatus of psychopolicing that was implemented to prevent and contain transgression. Two main areas of crime will be discussed. The first embraces witchcraft, Catholicism, and atheism. Controlling beliefs was a major concern in early modern England since religious divisions eroded the monological discourse of the divine on which mundane authority also rested. The second area includes high treason, petty treason, and vagrancy. All these notions of crime were functional to the preservation of the social order, reflecting the self-validating strategy of sovereign power, which presented its relation with society as mirroring that between God and creation.