Introduction: text in ‘Carmilla’

‘Carmilla’ presents its reader with a text that itself contains an abundance of inner texts and things that might be read. Such things have been a staple of study in Shakespeare criticism for some time, at least since the advent of material criticism and book history. Consider the asides, mysteriously dropped letters, plays within plays, prologues, choruses, and/or epilogues asserting the truth of what will be or has already been witnessed. These texts and para-texts have, of course, always been there for us to study. However, works like David M. Bergeron’s collection of essays (1996) that looks at writing in drama, Paul Mentzer’s (2023) witty exploration of the actor’s role in moments of reading on stage or, more directly, Brian W. Schneider’s study (2011) of framing texts, prologues, and epilogues in early modern drama all bring this material to the fore. ‘Carmilla’ (LeFanu) begins with a just such a prologue – an added text before the story proper begins – but one which is itself littered with references to a myriad of textual types, encouraging the reader to understand that expert reading is the key to solving the problem that Carmilla poses. Indeed, careful reading is required just to discern from this apostrophe from whence the story has come: “Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates” (italics added for emphasis). Simply put, the book that we hold is a first-hand retelling of the protagonist Laura’s pursuit by the vampire Carmilla. But this is not what we are first told, instead we hear of scholarly research, “a paper”, an “elaborate note”, “a reference”, “an [e]ssay”, a manuscript (MS). The connection the text makes between manuscript and illumination conjures up images of ornately hand-illustrated medieval biblical or romance texts – from the same period as the gothic castles evoked elsewhere in this story – but, in reality, it simply means that the story is made clear by the hand-written first-person narration. What follows includes a whole lexicon of words for different kinds of documents, or texts that one might encounter in the study of literature: “volume”s, “series”, “collected papers”, a “publish[ed] case”, a “relat[ion]”, a “present[ation], a “précis”, an “extract”, a ”statement”, “arcana”, a “paper”, and “correspondence”, “inform[ing]”, “Narrat[ing]”, “communicat[ing]”, on “pages”, that “pronounce” the story (p. 3). This introduction encourages us not only to read carefully, but also to consider very broadly what might and what can be read; that is, how loosely we might define the idea of text and of the origins of texts and stories. As the story progresses we are presented with the following further kinds of texts that Laura and her protectors must urgently, but most often fail to, decipher if she is to survive the ordeal: “a legend” (p.5), “a familiar picture” (p.5), an “impression” (that could not be “effaced” but perhaps ought not to be “recorded”) (p.6), “ghost stories”, “fairy tales”, and “lore” (p.7), “prayers” (p. 8), “scenes” (p.9), “phantasmagoria” (p.9), a “letter” (p. 11) (which is included, pp.11-12), the “talk of others” (p.14), voices heard in dialogue (p.12), a beautiful scene (p.12), news heard (p.13), a dream (p. 8), screams (p.15), “an ancient stone cross” (p.15), a “whispered” word (p.16) a “benediction” (p.18), notes (p.19), an illusion (p.19), carved oak (p.20), tapestry (p.20), a physician’s “report” (p.22), a portrait (p. 38), a tombstone (p.87), a map, or “plan of the chapel” (p. 89). Further, Laura repeatedly refers to situations in the novella as “scene”s (pp. 9, 15, 17, 29, 88, 91, 92) and observes the “theatrical” behaviour or nature of other characters; notably, Carmilla’s supposed mother (p.16) and the poetic quality of her gouvernantes’ speech (p.13) hinting that attunement to the theatrical will further offer rewards to an attentive reader. This article identifies a set of Shakespearean texts and allusions in ‘Carmilla’ that, once further explored, reveal something more about the threat that Carmilla represents. Specifically, as a suicide who becomes monstrous as a consequence, and as an exotic creature attracted, attracting, and preying on those of the same sex she thus collapses both taboos into one anxiety about the destruction of family (and family lines).

In the course of the novella, Carmilla herself turns out to be a text in several senses. First, she is text in the most fundamental sense: there are several variations of her name that, it seems, may alter at the level of the letter but never ultimately in substance (i.e. the letters are always the same though their arrangement varies). Roger Dobson observes the “anagrams” in Carmilla, Millarca, and Mircalla (Dobson, 2014, p.31). Marci[ll]a would complete the set if we thought of it as including the Spanish-pronounced “ll” sound. Second, she is image: her beauty is repeatedly stressed as mesmerizing and she is captured – in a way – in the picture that is returned of her likeness in the portrait of the Countess Mircalla. Third, she is performance: she arrives in a rather staged entrance, and she must maintain the façade that she is a vulnerable young woman until she has devoured the actually-vulnerable women who are her targets. Carmilla thus exists in a way that suggests comparison with a play (particularly an old one), with ancient legible text that comes to life visually (and might be recorded in painting), and in performance. Moreover, the story purports to be a lengthy letter authored by a now dead victim of the titular vampire. That she remains nameless for much of the story suggests that Laura is less important than, or has been subsumed by, the textual monster that she preserves.

The story’s real-world author, of course, has theatre connections that go back generations and that we might imagine lost in the way that these ancient-seeming texts of the prologue suggest. On his father’s side J. Sheridan LeFanu was steeped in literary heritage both gothic and theatrical. His grandmother, Alicia Sheridan LeFanu is the author of the Irish gothic novel Strathallan (1816) (see Morin, 2018, pp.93-97); his great uncle was the famous Richard Brindley Sheridan, and both were playwrights, as their mother had also been. Thomas Sheridan, their father, LeFanu’s great-grandfather, was a prominent actor, and then theatre manager. During his time as actor-manager at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, the great Shakespearean actor, David Garrick, visited and performed the title roles of Richard III (June-July) and, more notably, Hamlet (August) to great acclaim in 1742, returning again to play Richard (December), Macbeth (January), Lear (January), King John, and Hamlet in 1745-6 (April) (Ladd, 2018). These were roles that Sheridan himself had performed and continued to performed throughout the period of his managerial tenure (1743–1758) (Drama at NUI Galway, 2024). In February of 1746 Garrick and Sheridan alternated Othello and Iago. Among Sheridan’s other regular Shakespearean parts in these years were Brutus in Julius Caesar, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Jacques in As You Like It, Philip in King John, Cardinal Wolsey in King Henry VIII, and the title roles in Coriolanus, Henry V, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard III and Hamlet. He also, notably, performed in Dryden’s All for Love: the World Well Lost (1677), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in 1751. He also produced an “Afterpiece” entitled Kate and Petrucchio in 1756. LeFanu’s family heritage then is steeped in Shakespearean tradition. And, perhaps most significantly, as Dryden’s full theatrical adaptation and the shorter “afterpiece” derived from The Taming of a Shrew indicates it is a tradition used to Shakespeare in a variety of forms, rather than as monolithic edifice. And, although this is generations back, and at a remove that might initially suggest loss, this article argues that LeFanu remains connected to Shakespeare in sophisticated ways, retaining details, and fragments, images and essences, scenes and speeches, much like the textual ephemera of prefatory scribbles of the fictional long-lost editorial hand of the preface.

In his other works LeFanu shows that Shakespeare has passed down the generations as the characters who populate his stories seem to reflect that family tradition. For instance, in LeFanu’s most famous other work, Uncle Silas, the titular “apparition, drawn as it were in black and white, venerable, bloodless, fiery-eyed”, as Maud helpfully describes him, introduces his daughter by reference to Shakespeare’s Tempest: “You’ll find her, I believe, good-natured and affectionate; au reste, I fear a very rustic Miranda, and fitted rather for the society of Caliban than of a sick old Prospero.” He thus styles himself as the powerful manipulator of the plot that lies ahead, although it will not quite fall out as he intends, and in the fact that he has kept his daughter from society and in ignorance. He revels cruelly in his daughter’s failure to recognize the significance of the Shakespearean allusion, and tells Maud, malignantly, that Millicent has “studied the role of Miss Hoyden” (LeFanu, 1864, p.147–148). This additional allusion, though obscure, is significant, for Miss Hoyden, of John Vanbrugh’s Restoration comedy, The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger (1696), is the epitome of rustic ignorance. More, the play was adapted by Thomas Sheridan as A Trip to Scarborough (1777). This helpfully connects LeFanu to his theatrical family and to Shakespeare. But here Shakespeare’s benevolent old Prospero has morphed over the ages to a twisted horror of sadistic manipulation and the innocent, but ignorant, Miranda to a grotesque victim of her Uncle’s seemingly-bottomless malice. As we will show, the Shakespeare that emerges in ‘Carmilla’ is particularly apt to the tale at hand; not just a cultural touchstone of descriptive and/or emotive genius, Shakespeare in LeFanu is often horrifying. In ‘Carmilla’ specifically Shakespeare evokes the ‘horrors’ of same-sex attraction and of suicide.

There are four identifiably-Shakespearean allusions in ‘Carmilla’ in forms that mirror the eponymous vampire’s relationship with text and that reflect a broader conception of text as sometimes purely textual, sometimes primarily visual, and often blended into the hybrid of text and image that is performance. This essay explores what these, quotations, allusions, and references might mean in the context of the novella. Theoretically this question might be thought of in terms of intertextuality, which has been applied to early modern literature very fruitfully by Sarah Carter (2021), but here is applied to a nineteenth-century text that asks similarly what the identification of these early modern intertexts reveals about the nature of ‘Carmilla’. What we find is that the adaptable, malleable, corruptible text of Shakespeare can be revivified in several different ways but that most often when it does recur (at least in ‘Carmilla’) it comes back to express several of the traditional anxieties of, prejudices against, and horrors of Shakespearean tragedy, specifically here same sex attraction, interracial romance, sexual liberty and suicide.

The Merchant of Venice: anxiety about cultural identity and foreignness

Laura and her father’s schloss resemble a “dual nation”; he is an English man living in Styria, who moved there to be with his – now dead – Styrian wife (Haefele-Thomas, 2012, p.98). After her death he is thus left to raise his daughter in a foreign land far from his cultural motherland. In response, we see him struggle in the novella to maintain his Englishness and to preserve something of his own culture for his daughter. In the context, it seems, of a description of Laura’s education she reveals that her father has expressed his desire to preserve their language and culture (in the company of several other languages spoken by their servants) through his recitation of memorized Shakespeare (pp. 12–14), and by drinking tea. No mention is made of religion, but we might be tempted to think of Shakespeare, on some level, as representative not only of Englishness, but also of English Christianity (esp. Protestantism). Indeed, LaPorte examines Bardolatry in the Victorian period revealing a quasi-religious enthusiasm for “divine” Shakespeare in the age. But the allusion is almost as complex as the idea of ‘English’ tea, simple and pleasant enough at a first mouthful but full of colonial implications as it begins to sink in and the contexts that we reveal here offer a morally complicated set of associations with Shakespeare (LaPorte, 2007).

The quotation is an oft- (perhaps over-) cited opening passage from The Merchant of Venice: “‘In truth I know not why I am so sad:/It wearies me; you say it wearies you;/But how I got it – came by it.’” The lines are rattled off apparently without much thought, or accuracy, or purpose, except (Laura guesses) “by way of keeping up our English” (p.14).Footnote 1 The preservation of language and/or cultural heritage is something that ought to have been striking for an Irishman writing in the language of his conqueror (Smart, 2013), and Jarlath Killeen has illustrated that the text shows a rather sophisticated and complicated sense of what it might mean to be Irish Protestant and/or Anglo-Irish in the period (Killeen, 2013). If he means it to express his own ennui or sadness as a widower it certainly speaks to losses (although Antonio’s are initially financial) and may go some way to explaining his slowness in reacting to his daughter’s crisis. Moreover, to Laura’s father this seems to be a memorized textual fragment, pure and simple – if such a thing can ever be asserted of Shakespearean text – excerpted from context and of value for language’s sake more than anything else. However, Laura’s father’s purpose, in supplying the quotation, need not be assumed to be the only purpose or function of the quotation in LeFanu’s tale. It matters little that it is delivered verbally or on paper (as Carmilla makes clear, text may live and be preserved in many forms). For the lines also convey a sense of contagion that will prove apt to Laura’s mysterious condition in ‘Carmilla’. In Shakespeare, Antonio’s melancholy is “caught” (3) rather than “got” and there is a puzzle over how it is “born” (4), perhaps in the sense both of lineage as well as the burden of suffering from it. And Antonio’s vague melancholy will very soon transform into Shylock’s more threatening pursuit of his flesh in payment for debts, while Laura’s mysterious disease and affection develop imperceptibly from the first (love-)bite that she received in infancy (Fox, 2013, p.112). Both Antonio and Laura’s father seem to express a current sense of loss that holds within it an anxiety about future, more significant, ones. And in expressing it in terms of contagion from proximity to the foreign, both texts hint at the cultural others, in Shylock and Carmilla, who go on to pose physical threats to their protagonists. Laura’s father, however, is wrong to fear the linguistic babel of Laura’s carers rather than their subsequent guest. We proceed to show how Carmilla is both native to Styria and culturally other, bringing her closer to the figure of Shylock than might initially be obvious.

Two striking facets of Carmilla’s character have drawn critical attention to her as “other”. First, her sexuality which LeFanu explores through the central relationship of the female characters, Laura and Carmilla. Viewed from this perspective Carmilla’s vampirism might be read as a metaphor for female homoerotic seduction (Haefele-Thomas, 2012, p.101). But closely bound to that is the secondary distinctiveness of Carmilla’s postcolonial identity, in which her vampirism also enables her to “cross cultural and literary borders and place to inhabit various postcolonial positions” (Smart, 2013, p.5). As Fox puts it, LeFanu uses female homoeroticism to “reimagine the relationship between the different political factions of nineteenth-century Ireland”, whilst he explores Anglo-Irish political and cultural anxieties through the male characters in the story (Fox, 2013, p.112). Carmilla’s otherness poses a threat to Laura’s innocence and Englishness (Brock, 1996, p.122). Further, Carmilla is also racialized in the various descriptions of her dark features: “fine dark eyes” (p. 25), her “dark brown” hair (p. 27) – in distinction from Laura’s more-stereotypically English “golden hair” and “large blue eyes” (p. 24). Although Carmilla is native to Styria, she is in Backus’s phrase “masquerading” as an outsider to Laura’s English household (Backus, 1999, p.131). She is distinct from the other non-English characters living in the schloss. Laura’s governesses, for instance, speak languages other than English, but they are not otherized, Haefele-Thomas observes, in the way that Carmilla is (Haefele-Thomas, 2012, p.99). Laura’s father, it might be argued, so keen on preserving their Englishness, suffers from what Smart terms “reverse colonization” anxiety (Smart, 2013, p.6).

As Smart points out, Laura’s orphan status is an integral part of this pattern: “since the orphan is essentially a social cipher seeking a missing identity, this yearning provides the energy and pressure that drives the vampire tale and through which is developed the attraction/repulsion reaction of the characters” (Smart, 2013, p.14). In short, the relationship at the centre of the novel presents us with a layered set of social anxieties: Laura’s father and the other male characters of the story might seem to represent anxieties about political and social order, while Laura’s experience presents us with anxieties centred on gender and sexual identity, both of which are under threat from the deviant intrusion of a racially, culturally, and sexually other threat in the form of the vampire, Carmilla.

Like the novella, Laura and Carmilla’s relationship has a prologue. Before they meet as older teenage girls, they share an earlier encounter when Laura is just six. She is asleep when Carmilla shows up, already looking as she will when they later meet,

I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself under the bed (p. 5).

Though Laura is beyond the age at which it would be appropriate, the scene is suggestive of breastfeeding, introducing the conflation in the nature of the relationship between the two women (Brock, 1996, p.122). In the absence of her mother, Laura’s home is supplied with several mother-surrogates, but none can provide that elemental maternal nourishment and comfort of breastfeeding. Carmilla seems on some diabolical mirror level to, all-too-literally, fill that breast feeding role; not by feeding from her breast, but by feeding on Laura’s. Laura thus exists as a vulnerable English innocent under threat from a racial, religious, and sexual other. Carmilla is foreign, non-Protestant, and lesbian and the novella seems to present us with an anxiety that she (and those others like her) can or will infect or convert Laura to any of Carmilla’s undesirable persuasions. This is only possible as a consequence of the fragility of Laura’s frayed bonds to motherland, race, religion, society, and (adumbrating Freudian conceptions of sexual beginning) sexuality. That is, Laura’s missing mother(-land) makes her vulnerable to physical, sensual and moral corruption.

Her father is distracted from Laura’s care by a melancholy so vague that it can only be expressed by reference to Shakespeare. But underlying his melancholy must be an anxiety, or a set of anxieties (about race, religion and sexual liberty), conscious or otherwise, that the opening lines of The Merchant of Venice must recall, for anyone who knows it, and that might lie behind their recall in the first place. A significant plot-line of the play involves the forbidden love between Jessica (daughter to the Jew, Shylock) and the Venetian Christian, Lorenzo. They elope together from under Shylock’s nose. Neither in LeFanu’s tale nor in Shakespeare’s play is there a mother to watch over the household because, like Laura’s mother, Jessica’s has died some years ago. Interestingly, it has also been argued that Leah (Jessica’s mother) was a Christian (Craig, 2018). This maintains a parallel with Laura’s mother who, we will discover, is Styrian and of the same bloodline as the Karnsteins (and, hence, our vampire antagonist Carmilla). If we think about vampirism as representing religions (as, for instance, Barber does) then Leah’s religious otherness (being Christian to a Jewish husband) and Laura’s mother’s foreignness (being Styrian to an English husband), align with Carmilla’s exotic otherness (as a Styrian vampire) to represent the same sort of nationalistic and religious threat that Lorenzo poses to Shylock (Barber, 1988). In the instance of both family stories an other might steal by means including seduction the daughters out from the protection of their fathers and usurp their male authority (Signoretti, 1996, p.607). While Laura’s father seems negligent (perhaps of religious matters also), Shylock misses what is going on because, literally at the heart of the story of The Merchant of Venice, he wants, and is busy pursuing through the courts, a “pound of flesh” (3.3.33, 4.2.98, 226, 301, 302, 319) from Antonio as compensation for an unpayable debt. The legal trick by which Antonio is released from his bond is that Shylock’s contract allows him the “flesh” but says nothing about the “blood”. He is therefore instructed to remove the heart without spilling a drop or to forfeit his claim. As Portia – disguised as Balthasar – explains it to Shylock, he may cut out his “pound of flesh”, but “if thou dost shed/One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods/Are by the laws of Venice confiscate/Unto the state of Venice” (302-6). Carmilla, by contrast, takes the blood in a quasi-surgical extraction via “needles” (p.5), seemingly without inflicting a wound while, figuratively, stealing Laura’s heart away. Laura’s father’s quotation of this seemingly arbitrary passage from The Merchant of Venice thus, in fact, warns us of the dangers of religious and foreign outsiders on several levels. If we are not cautious, an other might steal our daughters away from us, if we do not guard against it; or put another way foreigners and religious others in their inhumanity or lesser humanity might cut out our hearts, and perhaps worse still, if we read the latter more figuratively, the other might infect our bloodlines and turn us into them by intermarriage, thereby breaking our hearts. This is the essence of the fear of reverse colonization and is, in The Merchant of Venice, embodied by Lorenzo. In LeFanu’s novella, the threat is made flesh in the form of the vampire Carmilla, who is perhaps worse in that her love represents a perpetual living death rather than any future generation. Laura’s father on the other hand becomes both Antonio and Shylock, in danger of losing both his fortune and his daughter.

This is a warning that none at Laura’s castle heeds. Laura and Carmilla meet (again) as teenagers when a carriage arrives outside Laura’s schloss, in a way that seems staged “At this moment the unwonted sound of carriage wheels and many hoofs upon the road, arrested our attention” (p. 8). Carmilla is accompanied by a woman who claims to be her mother, although the story never confirms it, and the practical reality of it seems doubtful. She seems rather to facilitate placing her “child”, her “darling” (p.16), in the care of families with teenage girls. This pseudo mother figure is augmented also in Carmilla’s entourage by a striking female servant figure, Matska:

A hideous black woman, with a sort of colored turban on her head, and who was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding and grinning derisively towards the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large white eyeballs, and her teeth set as if in fury (p. 12).

The racial and cultural markers in these characters – Carmilla and Matska – emphasize their un-Englishness, and Carmilla becomes Matska when Laura describes her face darkening (Heller, 1996, p.84). As Dobson has observed, the same (or a very similar “horribly livid” (p.32)) figure had been used earlier by LeFanu in “The Child that Went with the Fairies” (1870) also in a coach accompanying a Fairy princess (Dobson, 2014, p.32-33). In Carmilla the family unit is completed by several dark, “hang-dog look[-ing]” fellows (p. 21), who seem like mirrors to, or opposites of, the several female servants in Laura’s father’s employ. When Carmilla is thus invited to stay there is potentially a suggestion of the merging of these two vastly different households or family units in the same way that a marriage between lovers from different communities, or religions, or racial backgrounds (like “star-crossed lovers” perhaps) might suggest a merging of bloodlines. In the context of Laura’s father’s anxiety about cultural preservation, and of the implications that he views mixed people as weaker and more susceptible to external danger, one would expect Carmilla’s arrival to seem to him like some sort of cultural contagion, religious infection, or even racial pollution (Haefele-Thomas, 2012, p.98). Tamar Heller (1996) describes the carriage scene as a “feminine invasion”, illustrating the imperialist anxiety of reverse colonization felt by Laura’s father (Heller, 1996, p.84). However, he sees no such threat and fatherly, perhaps imperial, protective instincts persuade him instead to welcome Carmilla, like the several other foreign females, into the household with Laura.

Cleopatra: mother of serpents, surrogate mothers, orphan girls

One reason that her father seems so welcoming to other female figures into her life is that Laura, who remains nameless (in a way, textless) for much of the novel and who might be a near anagram for oral/aural, suffers from the absence of a biological mother. She has instead a vampire-mother who came to her in childhood, and returns to her in adolescence or young adulthood (Paxton, 2019, p.166). In childhood the absence of nurturing (breastfeeding) motherhood was compensated for by her father by an abundance of inadequate surrogates, including a “nurse” and “nursery maid”, “housekeeper” and the several other “servants” and “dependents” who remain nameless (pp. 7-8) as well as Mme Perredon, her “governess” and Mlle De La Fontaine, her “finishing governess” whose deficiencies are most evident in their inability to keep her proficient in her mother tongue (p. 6). This absence is filled in terms of language (the hearing/speaking part) by her father’s regurgitation of Shakespeare. Laura is thus characterized by two things: Her orphan-ness and her Englishness. Motherless, Smart suggests, Laura is a social cipher – a palimpsest, perhaps – seeking an identity (Smart, 2013, p.14). Since she is a girl on the brink of womanhood, her identity-seeking is framed in terms of “intimacy, both emotional and physical” (Fox, 2013, p.114). If Laura is left vulnerable to Carmilla’s female charms by the absence of her biological mother, Carmilla is rendered most dangerous by the absence of paternal governance. Moreover, Laura’s vampire-mother, Carmilla, “upsets standard English patrilineage”, and chapter seven in the story, where Laura’s otherwise terrifying dreams are for once interrupted by a warning seemingly originating from her deceased mother, highlights the difference between Laura’s mother’s caring femaleness and Carmilla’s predatory femininity (Paxton, 2019, p.30). The voice, never explained any further, “sweet and tender” conveys the warning from her “mother” to “beware of the assassin” (p.52).

Placed now in the care of Laura and her father they choose an unusual room in their schloss in which to lodge Carmilla, for it is decorated with a striking tapestry:

Our visitor lay in one of the handsomest rooms in the schloss. It was, perhaps, a little stately. There was a somber piece of tapestry opposite the foot of the bed, representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom; and other solemn classic scenes were displayed, a little faded, upon the other walls. (pp. 22-3)

Cleopatra’s Egypt suffers from the absence of a father (in Freudian terms we might say the law of the father) and, like Carmilla perhaps, makes up for the absence with a little too much of motherhood. As a ruler, at least in Shakespeare’s portrayal of her, Cleopatra makes herself a mother figure to her nation, which is imaginatively associated with the Nile river, which in turn is figured as a serpent. Like the relationship between Laura and Carmilla, the age differential is horrifying, but in reverse. Laura is first corrupted as a six-year-old, but later is still naive and child-like as a teenager or young adult when Carmilla looks the same age but is in fact over a hundred years old. Cleopatra likewise as a young queen plays mother figure to an ancient land, conflated significantly in Shakespeare in Antony’s supposed term of endearment for Cleopatra as “Serpent of old Nile” (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.25). Serpents elsewhere in Shakespeare might enrich our understanding of what is happening here. Hermia awakens from a nightmare in the forest of Arden crying for Lysander, who has just deserted her, to help her: “Help me, Lysander, help me! Do thy best/To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1. 151-2). We might think of Laura waking to the horror of the “assassin” at her breast, as Hermia’s dream seems to project her suspicion of romantic betrayal by her friend Helena. King Lear too says that Regan has “struck” him with cruel words, “Most serpent-like, upon the very heart” (King Lear, 7. 305-6). In Shakespeare then the sting of a serpent seems an apt metaphor for the betrayal of beloved female figures. In LeFanu, this maternal substitution, and inversion, in the absence of the proper nourishment of the child in socially acceptable breastfeeding is a figurative death (Brock, 1996, p.122). Without sustenance, a baby will die and Laura’s surrogate can only leech life from her and lead her away from the order of socially sanctioned nourishment. Egypt can only for a time be sustained by the lifeblood drawn from the increasingly tainted body of its deviant queen until Cleopatra’s body is compromised in a couple of senses. If we return to the sense of contagion, the repeated feeding of a serpent is likely to lead to poisoning by the venom of the snake. What Carmilla was before becoming a vampire – and how she became a vampire – is significant, but it is not entirely clear at first in the novella in which we might find ourselves wondering if she too caught vampirism, or was infected with it. Tamar Heller introduces the idea that Carmilla “infects” other women by spreading knowledge; “a kind of mental or intellectual parthenogenesis whereby one woman’s knowledge spawns another” (Heller, 1996, p.88). Carmilla certainly shares experience(s) with Laura and in turn she infects Laura with something, but instead of dying (like Carmilla’s other victims) “Carmilla drains [Laura] of her socially productive potential” and kills her initial role as the “angel in the house” (Brock, 1996, p.121). On a further level Cleopatra’s political protection of Egypt from the conquering forces of Rome has involved her seducing successive members of the Roman Triumvirate (three-man rule of the empire) first Caesar, and then Antony. Her body is thus corrupted by successive Roman romantic relationships. The enduring nature of Shakespeare’s portrayal is evident in Dryden’s adaptation of it as All for Love: the World Well Lost (1677). That play was revived for performed by Thomas Sheridan in 1751. LeFanu thus revives a figure in portrait (though conjured in prose only) who was first dramatized by Shakespeare out of the biographical sketch in the ancient text of Plutarch’s Lives, adapted by Dryden and performed by LeFanu’s his great-grandfather many years before his birth. Cleopatra’s story thus embodies something ancient and undying, adaptable but eternal, at the same time as being the story of someone whose relationships are taboo and disastrous. The doomed love affair with Mark Antony is the subject matter of Shakespeare’s play. It is further taboo, or forbidden, because Antony is married to Octavia (sister of Octavius). That the painting might simply allude to Cleopatra as a general cultural reference point is possible, but as a writer who shows himself aware of his cultural debt to Shakespeare (if not also his family’s continued role in performing and adapting Shakespeare) it is further suggestive that LeFanu chooses for the portrait to depict what is perhaps the most famous scene of the play.

Rather than surrender to the Roman fleet, now under the command of Octavius, Antony and Cleopatra frustrate their recapture by committing suicide. In Plutarch the asp leaves puncture wounds on her arm, in Shakespeare, Cleopatra manages her death scene far more symbolically, and it is this scene that is recreated in the tapestry in Carmilla’s room. This is what she says as she places the first asp (or serpent) to her breast: “Peace, peace./Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,/That sucks the nurse asleep?” (43.297-9). As she takes the second asp to her breast she also compounds the act with her love for the recently-dead Antony: “O Antony! Nay, I will take thee too./[She takes the second aspic]” (301). In this scene, love and death, nursing and death, nursing and romantic love are all collapsed into a single frame. Symbolically, the asps are death and her children all at once, they suck the lifeblood from her and deal poison in return, and in the instant of her death they also merge with Antony, who (already dead) is also a figure of death and of desired death so that the act of nursing is, by this complicated series of substitutions, conflated with something amorous, something sensual. This same conflation is what takes place in Laura’s initial dream encounter with Carmilla and in the relationship that develops from there. So, here again, as she is welcomed into the household, Carmilla is given a room in such a way as to recall the seduction of a dark foreigner. And here again is Shakespeare, easily missed if we are unaware of his creation of the scene depicted now adapted to portrait but described for us only in the prose of Laura’s epistolary account.

Later, this conflation of mother/lover, seems to generate in Laura what we might think of as a desire-repulsion cycle for Carmilla. It parallels the way the other characters of the story, especially the men, also feel towards Carmilla; they are immediately allured by her, continuously pointing out her beauty, but at the same time repulsed by her and by her difference before eventually treating her as a dangerous outsider. Indeed, her beauty is remarked by everyone in the novella including the female servants of Laura’s household. Mlle De LaFontaine, for instance, “threw in”, having “peeped for a moment into the stranger’s room”, “‘She is absolutely beautiful’” (p. 12) while her revelation at the masked ball inspires General Spielsdorf to observe, “the young stranger lowered her mask, displaying a remarkably beautiful face. I had never seen it before, neither had my dear child” (p. 40). But these initial observations do not last as her beastly, vampiric nature eventually, nocturnally, reveals itself. She is thus, as otherness often is, paradoxically both “abject monster and desirable other” (Smart, 2013, p.4). Identifying the Shakespearean scene in the still picture of a seemingly incidental portrait of Cleopatra hanging in Carmilla’s bedroom thus gives cultural, racial, and sexual significance to the situation that Carmilla creates in the household. Reading the “text” of the portrait again provides a way of capturing the reality of what Carmilla is and the danger that she poses.

Ophelia: romancing the grave

One further way that Carmilla is immediately unsettling to the other characters is in her religious nonconformity. This reveals itself most potently as Laura and Carmilla, sitting under a tree, observe the funeral of what must be assumed is one of Carmilla’s other victims, who we are told died because of an “intruder” (p.11). The scene may subtly evoke the similar observation, undetected, of Ophelia’s funeral by Hamlet and Horatio (18.177-217). That scene is evoked more directly in LeFanu’s The House by the Churchyard, when Mervyn, pondering a tombstone epitaph turns expecting to see the rector, only to be faced with Paul Dangerfield who greets him, “Hamlet in the church-yard!” He confesses himself “too old to play Horatio” but offers “a friendly word or two” anyway. The House by the Churchyard revolves around the mysterious burial of an unnamed corpse, later revealed to be a suicide. In ‘Carmilla’, as the two friends watch the funeral pass, Carmilla is distressed by the hymns and they argue. When Laura, who is apparently Protestant, sings along with the funeral hymn, Carmilla aggressively interrupts her, saying: “You pierce my ears” (p.31). Hamlet, who has only just arrived home from England to Elsinore, watches on in secret for a while as Laertes argues with a priest about the “maimed rites” (180) being offered for Ophelia, (i.e. like the body in The House by the Churchyard, they cannot give her full Christian burial as a suspected suicide). When Hamlet realizes that it is Ophelia who is being buried, he reveals himself and fights with Laertes (in one version of the play in the actual grave) about who loved her more. There’s not much here to connect the two scenes, but the grave-side argument collapsing love and death into contested ritual is a potent point of intersection and LeFanu’s use of the scene elsewhere illustrates his pre-occupation with the intricacies of the scene. Further, Carmilla’s sustained argument with Laura regarding “forms” is a further, more subtle, link. “[H]ow”, she asks Laura, “can you tell that your religion and mine are the same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals” (p.31). The initial question here seems to assert religious difference and we may be tempted to think of the religious differences in LeFanu’s Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, or we may be encouraged to think further afield and be reminded of the turban worn by Matska. But the ambiguity of the word “forms” is also interesting, as it might suggest anything from prayer to ritual to hymn. However, it might also – given Carmilla’s vampirism – allude to Laura’s human form, her very substantiality. Hamlet uses the word for this purpose too when he describes man’s perfection: “How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! … And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (7.256-9) Form then, is the mortal part of man, as opposed to the divine or immortal soul. In this context the “fuss” that Carmilla scorns as she proceeds might likewise advert either to respect for religious behaviour or to mortal life itself: “What a fuss! Why you must die — everyone must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home” (p. 47). The ambiguity in the final injunction is again striking; on a simple, surface, level this probably just enjoins Laura to leave the scene and go back to the house with her, but it certainly hints at a more fundamental directive to die; to spiritually yield up her bodily form and to join her in death. To do so actively would of course be suicide, which we later discover is the actual reason for Carmilla’s vampirism, and is the dark secret behind The House by the Churchyard. Damned as a consequence of the mortal sin of suicide Carmilla cannot be granted entry to heaven and is thus left to wander in her monstrous state, exiled and othered from redeemed Christian souls. Ophelia is punished in death for her mortal sin by minimized funeral ritual, Carmilla will later be punished further in death as a collective of male characters will dig up her grave and desecrate it. Carmilla’s alternative religious beliefs and her exotic looks enable her to embody the position of the alluring but dangerous other. Moreover, Hamlet and Ophelia, like Anthony and Cleopatra, are among of the most (fatally) romantic relationships in Shakespeare. That Ophelia and Cleopatra are also culturally beloved suicides is scandalous. Here we have a dramatic scene, visually striking and dynamic, that – like the picture of Cleopatra – is without a verbal echo: that is, we must read the scene to recognize the significance of the parallel even though there is little in the way of verbal text to analyze. Geraldo de Sousa has also seen parallels between Hamlet and ‘Carmilla’, but specifically in the sense of how the two stories “undermine[] the security of boundaries” (de Sousa, 2010, pp.116-117). In one sense the vampire story very obviously tells us that when the ultimate boundary is crossed between death and life (as it is in suicide, as in vampirism) so nothing can be contained anymore; but simultaneously it seems to tell us that ancient texts, like the ones that hold the lives of Cleopatra, or Ophelia, may change or be adapted over time but they retain within them the person ready for (theatrical) revival at the arrival of any susceptible reader, or actor, or victim. Unlike traditional source studies, the intertext is subtle and complicated, and for that very reason all more significant, perhaps all the more dangerous.

Twelfth night and Romeo and Juliet: cross-dressed Lovers

Parting from her for the first time, in her room with a portrait of Cleopatra in it, Carmilla bids Laura goodnight like this: “Good night, darling, it is very hard to part with you, but good night; tomorrow, but not early, I shall see you again.” These lines do echo in a subtly-altered form Shakespeare’s Juliet who after one night with her beloved Romeo says “Good night, good night. Parting is such sweete sorrow,/That I shall say goodnight, till it be morrow. (9.228-9) What Carmilla does not quote, but that seems rather relevant is that immediately preceding these words Romeo had offered to be Juliet’s captive songbird, Juliet wanting to treasure him as a bird in a cage. But when he offers, she doubts it momentarily, saying “Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing” (227). Carmilla wisely omits this part, but clearly, as a vampire, this is exactly the threat that she poses to Laura. The sickly-sweet language of love that Carmilla uses towards Laura is certainly captivating, endearing, but also unsettling, even threatening.

Indeed, Carmilla’s language is so clearly romantic, her behavior so sensual, that Laura finds herself wondering if some secret admirer has snuck in in disguise to woo her. Romeo arrives to Juliet in a masked ball (scene 6), and there is such a scene in the General’s narration of the events of the ball in honor of the Grand Duke Charles at which the General and his ward, or “daughter”, fatally encountered Millarca/Carmilla and her mysteriously masked supposed mother, “Madame la Comtesse” (pp.69-78, 73). However, it is not this that she is thinking of here, she is not thinking of “star-crossed lovers” as Romeo and Juliet are described (Pro. 6), but of a cross-dressed lover of which there are also many examples in Shakespeare: “What if” she wonders, “a boyish lover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade, with the assistance of a clever old adventuress” (p.18). The motif is traditional in English comedy and might be construed as a blend of characters from The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio and Hortensio who disguise themselves, respectively, as a Latin and a music tutor. However, a closer fit for this disguised suitor – a trick borrowed from Plautus’ Roman comedies – happens by accident in Twelfth Night. In that play Viola, disguises herself as a boy, Cesario, to gain employment with the Duke, Orsino, as his page boy, or serving man. Orsino, who is in love with Olivia, sends Cesario – who is really Viola – as his suitor to woo her on his behalf. This scenario very playfully questions traditional assumptions and norms of propriety in love on the level of gender and social rank – although the conclusion may be more conservative than this playfulness suggests. Casey offers a useful treatment of cross dressing and the performance of gender in the play (Casey, 1997). In a seemingly same sex romance, Cesario woos Olivia for Orsino, but Olivia falls in love with Cesario who is disguised as a page boy but is in fact Viola. Olivia seems to be aware of falling in love below her station (while suspecting Cesario’s noble birth) but is oblivious to having fallen in love with another woman. The play resolves the gender-bending and cross-dressing romance by the entirely normative solution of marrying Olivia to Viola’s brother, Sebastian and by having Cesario – who is now Viola once more – marry Orsino. However, it is hard to forget that Orsino has thus married someone known only to him up to very recently as his page boy, or that Viola – dressed as Cesario – had also admitted attraction to Olivia: “if you were the devil, you are fair!” (1.5.206) This line that captures the apparent paradox of the “fair devil” (Othello, 33.470) or of the “monstrous feminine”, of course, would be very fitting indeed for Carmilla (Creed, 1993, pp.60ff). There is no need to pin down any particular play as the source for this trope of the cross-dressed lover, which might be recognizable to readers in the gothic tradition from Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk or Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, both of which feature gender masquerade for reasons of sexual desire. Indeed the gothic tradition has long been established as having been influenced by Shakespearean text and both of these stories also wear their debt to Shakespeare on their sleeves (Salter, 2009; Seynhaeve and Ingelbien, 2018; Desmet and Williams, 2009). However, what we have been arguing is that LeFanu’s treatment of Shakespearean text is rich in kind, not just the clean deployment of direct quotation, or the mapping of a plot trope, or striking scenic image, but a regular interweaving of a complex set of these kinds of Shakespearean ‘textual’ existences.

A further character in Twelfth Night provides a helpful metaphor for how references to Shakespeare in the novella are manipulated by LeFanu. Malvolio is also in love with Olivia, though he is mercilessly ridiculed for it. The names here are of interest by virtue of being very near anagrams of the Latinate stem for “will”, or “desire”: volio and are explored helpfully by Hassel, Jr (Hassel, Jr, 1993). Viola/Olivia/Malvolio is each simply a rearrangement of the others’ letters, with the exception of Malvolio for whom the initial “mal-” might suggest that he is a bad or a sick version of the other two. Carmilla we find through the course of the novella has also gone by the name of Mircalla – when she stayed with the General and ultimately killed his ward/daughter, Bertha – and is originally the Countess Marcia Karnstein. Here we have context with no detail, an allusion so subtle that, were it not that the names Olivia, Viola, and Malvolio perform the same sort of anagrammatic trick that LeFanu also performs with Carmilla, Mircalla, Millarca and Marci(ll)a, we might miss it entirely. Similarly Shakespearean text is twisted and rearranged and reconstituted in playful and creative ways in LeFanu’s writings.

In Twelfth Night, what is wrong with Malvolio’s love seems to be that he is in love above his social station (Cahill, 1996). All other loves in the story may be resolved because the characters are of the same high social class, but Malvolio will never be worthy of his mistress’s love. He is, of course, also just awful. Class is also a prominent feature of what’s going on in ‘Carmilla’. To Carmilla, peasant girls are simply food, while she seems to wish to preserve Laura. Both share a bloodline that is aristocratic through the Karnstein family, and from which Laura descends on her mother’s side. However, Laura’s family, particularly it seems in the hands of her father, have descended in status, perhaps ruined like an old, deserted castle. Laura’s narrative begins with descriptions that allude to her and her father’s economic struggle, while at the same time indicating the sort of comfort that is hardly working class. They were, she tells us, “by no means magnificent people” but were reliant on a “small income” but nonetheless, she says that she cannot “see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to [their] comforts, or even Luxuries” (p. 4). Carmilla, however, is not only descended from an aristocratic family, she is the purest representative of the Karnsteins (p. 39, 95), not descended (or polluted, perhaps) but actually the Countess herself. She thus represents an undiluted aristocracy, pure and perhaps primitive in the eyes of her British victims (Stoddard, 1991, p.28; Paxton, 2019, p.166); the former highlighting her “uncanny roots in the animal world”, and the latter ringing of “the primitivism of a pre-revolutionary era” (Stoddard, 1991, p.28), both making the older idea of women as lustful “the true revenant” (Heller, 1996, p.88).

As the story goes on, we learn that Laura’s mother is descended from the same aristocratic family, “I am descended from the Karnsteins; that is, mamma was” (p. 40), making Laura half-Aristocratic. Laura thus straddles a middle position between aristocracy (on her mother’s side), held in popular contempt, and a more favourable bourgeoisie (represented by her father who is “retired” from “the Austrian service” (p.4)) who have rightfully earned their money. As Stoddard puts it, “Carmilla’s pumped-up proportions of power can be read as the monstrous result of injections of various different ingredients, each of which is recognizably anathematical to the socio-economic exigencies of a particular late-Victorian, British, bourgeois masculinism” (Stoddard, 1991, p.28). Thus, in this world where the “decadent aristocrats are pitted against the virtuous bourgeoisie”, it makes sense that Carmilla wishes to preserve Laura, whilst simultaneously unsettling the bourgeois domesticity (Heller, 1996, p.88); Carmilla’s attachment to Laura sharpens her threat to the nuclear family and the progression of the bourgeoisie as a class (Stoddard, 1991, p.28). The case is only solved by the consultation of several male members from all walks of society. The General is the first to get involved; for his own ward, Bertha, he has already consulted an initial “physician”, before getting a second opinion from another “from Gratz” (p.84), who recommends “a priest” (perhaps the one consulted by Laura’s father, p. 63) before mentioning a knowledgeable Baron (p.85). Together the General and Laura’s father further gain help from a “woodman” who has learned everything he knows from his father, and the “ranger” for whom they have both worked (p.82), the Baron Vordenburg (p.89; we learn his name at p. 93) who draws his information from the papers of an ancient “Moravian nobleman” (pp.82-3, 94-5), the local “priest” or “ecclesiastic” (p.82); and “two medical men” (p.92). The last of these men are witnesses and signatory to the “Imperial Commission” (p.92) that finally documents Carmilla’s destruction. Laura’s father thus represents a more modern society, and his involvement of several males to resolve the problems posed by this residual aristocratic monstrosity, this unruly and ungoverned female other, is the triumph of modern male professional society ultimately ratified in textual form.

That the final hunt, desecration and decapitation of the older ruling order is done with such documentary precision provides legal justification for Laura’s father’s, and the General’s, bloodthirsty vengeance and brings us back to text and to the quotation of Antonio. In The Merchant of Venice Antonio’s life will eventually be redeemed by the disguised, cross-dressed Portia, in the guise of a lawyer, Balthazar, who argues his case and saves the forfeit of a pound of flesh. Again, this is an inversion, for the lover in ‘Carmilla’, only ever imagined as a cross-dressed boy, is the one extracting the pound of flesh, and the disguised beauty is not the saviour but the horrifying religious other. Further, the judge commands Shylock to take his pound of flesh, by cutting out the heart without spilling a drop of his blood. In order to rescue Laura from her monster (and to release her lost blood, which flows out in a “torrent”) the male figures of ‘Carmilla’ will have to stake and destroy Carmilla’s heart, sever her head and incinerate everything that remains of her, thus severing her forever from her lost bloodline.

Conclusion

So, what is Shakespeare doing in a nineteenth century vampire novella apart from being one more crumbling edifice among other gothic architectural remnants? Do the Shakespearean allusions do more than haunt the text with ancient and doomed lovers of old? The common threads in these otherwise disparate references to Shakespeare may be cross-dressing and same-sex-attraction. In three of the four cases cross-dressing is highlighted. The switch in gender in the allusion to Twelfth Night is particularly relevant because it highlights the fact that all instances of romantic attachment on the early modern stage were same sex because a boy was always disguised as a girl in order to woo or be wooed, as all girls had to be performed by boys. Cleopatra draws attention to this fact when she meta-theatrically imagines some future moment when clever actors will “stage” her and Antony “present[ing]” their love affair. Antony, she fears, will be “brought drunken forth” and “[s]ome squeaking Cleopatra [will] boy [her] greatness/I’ th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.210–217). That the other Shakespearean allusions are to Shakespeare’s other two most famous suicides (Juliet and Ophelia) connects the cross-dressed, same-sex tendency in Carmilla (and Laura) to that mortal sin. This may suggest a reading that urges the procreative unproductiveness – fatal also to bloodlines, perhaps – of same sex relationships. If we were in doubt about LeFanu’s position on same-sex romance, this connection, effectively equating the two, suggests that each of them is grounds for damnation, deserving a fate worse than death: both, like Carmilla herself, might offer from time to time an attraction (albeit horrifying) but they are the temptations of the devil. In that context, these allusions seem to connect to two of the most taboo violations of Victorian social order, suggesting that rather than a prop to English cultural preservation Shakespeare is instead a considerable force of moral corruption.