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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Penny Dreadful
and Adaptation
Reanimating
and Transforming
the Monster

Edited by
Julie Grossman · Will Scheibel
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA

R. Barton Palmer
Atlanta, GA, USA
This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text
production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus
on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision
to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames,
mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media,
and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive
understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger
phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not sin-
gular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural
forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations,
remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes
studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and
these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on
aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as con-
nected to various forms of visual culture.
 Julie Grossman • Will Scheibel
Editors

Penny Dreadful and

Adaptation
Reanimating and Transforming the Monster
Editors
Julie Grossman Will Scheibel
Departments of English and Department of English
Communication and Film Studies Syracuse University
Le Moyne College New York, NY, USA
Syracuse, NY, USA

ISSN 2634-629X     ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-12179-1    ISBN 978-3-031-12180-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Phil Novak and Andrea Scheibel, who help us master our demons.
 Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the guidance we received
from Barton Palmer, co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and
Visual Culture series, and Lina Aboujieb, the executive editor of film and
television studies at Palgrave Macmillan, both of whom were invested in
the project’s success from the beginning. Les Friedman and Con Verevis
gave us helpful feedback on our proposal, and Nina Farizova inspired us
with her own scholarship on Penny Dreadful and adaptation. Michele
Combs undertook indexing the book with the utmost professionalism.
Matt Hills and Kate Egan offered endorsements for which we are extremely
grateful. The organizers of the 2022 Association of Adaptation Studies
conference held in Lisbon provided an opportunity for us and some of our
contributors to discuss ideas in this book with peers in the field. We are also
indebted to the many colleagues who supported our work in various ways
as we collaborated across our respective institutions in Syracuse, New York:
Le Moyne College and Syracuse University (SU). At Le Moyne, thanks go
to Maura Brady, Mary Collins, Matt Fee, James Hannan, Linda LeMura,
Beth Mitchell, Michael Streissguth, Miles Taylor, and the Research and
Development Committee. Our gratitude extends to SU’s Department of
English, especially the chair of the department, Coran Klaver, and Will’s
film and screen studies teammates, Roger Hallas and Chris Hanson. Eric
Grode, the director of SU’s Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications
program, wrote episode recaps of Penny Dreadful for The New York Times
and shared his knowledge of John Logan’s theater background early in our
project. Finally, Steve Cohan—retired from SU, but never more active as a
scholar—remains our buddy in popular culture studies.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel
Works Cited  10

Part I Welcome to the Night: Issues of Reading and Media  13

2 The
 Medium Is the Model 15
Thomas Leitch
Works Cited  29

3 The
 Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to
The Dreadfuls 31
Christine Becker
Introduction  31
Showtime’s Inferior Status  33
Speaking Dreadful  35
The Dreadfuls Speak Back  38
Conclusion  43
Works Cited  44

ix
x Contents

4 Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection:

Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media
from Shelley to Showtime 49
Mike Goode
Part I: Penny Dreadful Collections  49
Part II: Canons and Characters  53
Part III: Frankenstein and the Anthology  58
Part IV: Penny Dreadful as Frankensteinian Collection  63
Works Cited  66

Part II Anatomy of a Monster: Horror and the Gothic in

Literature and on the Screen  69

5 In
 the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful’s
Dracula 71
Joan Hawkins
Dracula 1  73
The Woman Question and The Vampire’s Wife  75
Feminism, Suffrage, and Lily  79
Psychoanalysis and the Occult  82
Gothic and Neo-Gothic  84
Works Cited  85

6 Vampirism,
 Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and
Only Lovers Left Alive 87
Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts
The Myth of Blood: The Body in (Vampire) Films  87
Penny Dreadful: The Syncretic Vampire of Popular Culture  91
Melancholizing the Visceral in Only Lovers Left Alive   97
Works Cited 103

7 “The
 Dead Place”: Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny
Dreadful’s London105
Kendall R. Phillips
Cosmopolitan Gothic and the Echoes of Empire 107
Conclusion 118
Works Cited 119
 Contents  xi

8 Adapting
 the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny
Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection121
Will Scheibel
“I Know This Place, I’ve Been Here Before”: Home Texts and
Unhomely Adaptations 124
House of Vanessa Ives: John Logan’s Monster Mash(up) 129
Works Cited 136

Part III The Monster Unbound: Theatrical Performance,

Western Dime Novels, and TV Noir 139

9 Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and

Heritage141
Shannon Wells-Lassagne
Victorian Legacies: The Heritage of Performance in Penny
Dreadful 142
Showtime: The Performance of Heritage in Penny Dreadful  148
Performance and Spectatorship in Penny Dreadful  151
Works Cited 154

10 E
 than Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel;
or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London157
Ann M. Ryan
The Western Hero 158
The Dark Sidekick 166
Conclusion: The American Monster 172
Works Cited 175

11 Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels:

“Monsters, All, Are We Not?”177
Julie Grossman and Phillip Novak
“Where Strangeness is Not Shunned But Celebrated”:
Adapting to City of Angels  178
Cherchez la Femme 181
xii Contents

“You May Think You Know What You’re Dealing With”:

Adapting toward Complexity 184
Works Cited 192

Part IV Meanings of Monstrosity: Identity, Difference, and

Experience 195

12 Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein197

Lissette Lopez Szwydky
The Bride: A Palimpsest of Consent, Class, and
Hypersexualization 199
Pygmalion’s “Perfect” Woman 203
Gendered Trauma and a “Revolution in Female Manners” 206
Conclusion 212
Works Cited 214

13 Predators
 Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny
Dreadful217
Lindsay Hallam
The Sadean Libertine 219
The Marquis de Sade and the Gothic 224
A Dreadful Mix of High and Low 227
Works Cited 231

14 “All
 Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship,
Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful233
James Bogdanski
Works Cited 251

15 Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels253

Seda Öz
Works Cited 266

Index269
 Notes on Contributors

Christine Becker is Associate Professor in the Department of Film,

Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame specializing in
film and television history and critical analysis. Her book It’s the Pictures
That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television (Wesleyan
University Press, 2009) won an IAMHIST Michael Nelson Prize for a
Work in Media and History. She is working on a research project exploring
issues of cultural taste in contemporary American and British television.
She also co-hosts and co-produces the Aca-Media podcast sponsored by
the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
James Bogdanski teaches film studies at Long Beach City College and El
Camino College in southern California. His research interests include pre-­
Code Hollywood, feminist and queer theory, gothic horror and the post-
human. In 2011, he won The Best Drama Teleplay Award at the Austin
Film Festival. He has a forthcoming essay on the maternal abject in the
films of Ingmar Bergman and he presented a modified version of it at
Bergman Week in Sweden in Summer 2022.
Mike Goode is Professor of English at Syracuse University, where he
teaches courses on British Romanticism, media, ecocriticism, historiogra-
phy, and the history of the novel. His book Romantic Capabilities: Blake,
Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media was published in 2020,
and his book Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History was pub-
lished in 2009. His articles have appeared in a variety of journals, includ-
ing Representations, ELH, Textual Practice, Romantic Circles, and PMLA.

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Julie Grossman is Professor of English and Communication and Film

Studies at Le Moyne College. She is author of Rethinking the Femme
Fatale in Film Noir (Palgrave, 2009), Literature, Film, and Their Hideous
Progeny (Palgrave, 2015), and The Femme Fatale (2020). She is co-author
(with Therese Grisham) of Ida Lupino, Director (2017) and co-author
(with Will Scheibel) of Twin Peaks (2020). She is founding co-editor (with
R. Barton Palmer) of the book series Adaptation and Visual Culture
(Palgrave). With R. Barton Palmer, she co-edited the essay collection
Adaptation in Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2017).
Lindsay Hallam is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East
London. She is author of the books Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure,
Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film, and the Devil’s Advocate edition
of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. She is interested in all aspects of horror
cinema, having written on topics such as female vampires, torture porn
and post-9/11 trauma, mad science films, Italian horror, Australian eco-
horror, transmedia horror and the television series Twin Peaks and
Watchmen.
Joan Hawkins is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana
University Bloomington. She has written extensively on horror and the
avant-garde. Her best-known book is Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the
Horrific Avant-garde (2000); her most recent is an anthology, co-­edited
with Alex Wermer-Colan, William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century
(2019). She is working on a two-volume anthology on 1968.
Thomas Leitch holds the Unidel Andrew B. Kirkpatrick Chair in Writing
at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are The Oxford
Handbook of Adaptation Studies and The History of American Literature
on Film.
Phillip Novak is associate professor in the English department and the
department of communication and film studies at Le Moyne College,
Syracuse, New York. His work on both film and literature has appeared in
PMLA, Criticism, Journal of Film and Video, and elsewhere. He is the
author of Interpretation and Film Studies: Movie Made Meanings (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2020).
Seda Öz earned her PhD from the University of Delaware in the
Department of English and is working on adaptation studies with a special
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

emphasis on cross-cultural adaptations and transnational film remakes of

Turkish and German cinema. She has written on adaptation and film in
Critical Survey, Adaptation, and Literature/Film Quarterly.
Kendall R. Phillips is Professor of Communication and Rhetorical
Studies at Syracuse University. His work focuses on the intersection of
rhetoric, politics, and popular culture. He is author of several books related
to horror, including Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
(2005), Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter and the Modern
Horror Film (2012), A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early
American Cinema (2018), and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (2022).
Ann M. Ryan is Professor of English at Le Moyne College. She has writ-
ten numerous articles on Mark Twain, the American gothic, and concep-
tions of race in America. She is the former editor of The Mark Twain
Annual, co-editor (with Joseph McCullough) of Cosmopolitan Twain
(2008), and is working on a book project on “The Ghosts of Mark Twain.”
Will Scheibel is Associate Professor in the Department of English at
Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the
author of Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (2022) and, with
Julie Grossman, the co-author of a “TV Milestones” volume on Twin
Peaks (2020). He is also the author and co-editor, respectively, of two
books on film director Nicholas Ray: American Stranger (2017) and, with
Steven Rybin, Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground (2014).
Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Arkansas, where she also serves as Associate Director of the
Arkansas Humanities Center. She teaches and publishes in the areas of
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Adaptation Studies,
Transmedia Storytelling, Gender Studies, and specializes in the Gothic
tradition across forms and media. She is author of Transmedia Adaptation
in the Nineteenth Century (2020). She teaches and writes about nineteenth-­
century literary history and popular culture from the Romantic period
through the present, including essays in The Routledge Companion to
Adaptation (eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckhart Voights,
2018), Frankenstein Adapted: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular
Culture (eds. Dennis Perry and Dennis Cutchins, 2018), and A Cultural
History of Tragedy, Volume 5: The Age of Empire (eds. Michael Gamer,
Diego Saglia, and Rebecca Bushnell, 2019). Szwydky is working on her
second book, Frankenstein’s Bride: A Transmedia Cultural History of Her
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Own. She also co-directs (with Sean P. Connors) the NEH Summer
Institute for K-12 Educators “Remaking Monsters and Heroines: Adapting
Classic Literature for Contemporary Audiences.” You can follow her on
Twitter @LissetteSz.
Luciana Tamas is a Romanian-German visual artist, researcher, curator,
and translator who is working on two PhDs—one in Literary and Cultural
Studies at Technische Universität Braunschweig and one in Art History
and Aesthetics at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). In 2012, she
received a full, five-year scholarship from the DAAD to study Art; in 2017,
she earned a “Diplom” degree (MA) in Fine Art from HBK and a bache-
lor’s degree in English Studies and Art History from TU. She has, since,
also received a “Meisterschüler” in Fine Art and a second master’s degree,
in Art History and Aesthetics, from HBK. She has participated in and co-
organized over 130 cultural events—solo and group shows, artist talks,
and conferences—and has received a DAAD Prize for outstanding achieve-
ments, among several other awards.
Eckart Voigts is Professor of English Literature at Technische Universität
Braunschweig, Germany. He has written, edited, and co-edited numerous
books and articles, such as the Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018)
and the special issue of Adaptation (vol. 6, no. 2, 2013) on transmedia
storytelling, Reflecting on Darwin (2014), and Dystopia, Science Fiction,
Post-Apocalypse (2015). In 2021, he co-edited the Companion to British-
Jewish Theatre since the 1950s (2021) and Filming the Past, Screening the
Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptation (2021).
Shannon Wells-Lassagne is a professor at the Université de Bourgogne/
University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, where she specializes in film and
television adaptation. Her recently published works include Adapting
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan,
2021), Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations
(2021), Adapting Endings from Book to Screen: Last Pages, Last Shots
(2020), and Television and Serial Adaptation (2017). Her work has
appeared in The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Screen,
Critical Studies in Television, The Journal of Screenwriting, Series, TV/
Series, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television, among other venues.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Vanessa levitates above the séance table and speaks in the voice
of the missing Mina Murray [Episode 1.2] 23
Fig. 3.1 Bereft at the death of Vanessa and frustrated by the addition of
new serial threads in the final episode that would henceforth
go unpursued, many fans rejected the notion it could have
been the intended ending [Episode 3.9] 42
Fig. 4.1 Dorian Gray’s portrait gallery [Episode 1.2] 50
Fig. 4.2 The Creature reading books of poetry [Episode 1.3] 57
Fig. 5.1 When Ethan comes to rescue Vanessa, he finds her in a white
room that appears as the transcendent version of the white
padded room we had seen from her institutionalized past
[Episode 3.9] 76
Fig. 5.2 When Ethan comes to rescue Vanessa, he finds her in a white
room that appears as the transcendent version of the white
padded room we had seen from her institutionalized past
[Episode 3.9] 77
Fig. 6.1 Foregrounding the sanguine, Vanessa is shown in close-up
during the Blood Ball [Episode 2.6] 95
Fig. 7.1 The Gothic flaneurs assemble in cosmopolitan London
[Episode 3.8] 115
Figs. 8.1 Although Lawrence Talbot is named after Universal’s most 130
and 8.2 popular lycanthrope, he looks more like the titular character in
Werewolf of London, the studio’s first werewolf film [Episode
2.10]
Fig. 9.1 Penny Dreadful cites Nosferatu [Episode 1.1] 144
Fig. 9.2 Caliban luxuriates in the light of the stage [Episode 1.3] 145

xvii
xviii List of Figures

Fig. 9.3 Penny Dreadful cites The Great Train Robbery [Episode 1.1] 147
Fig. 10.1 Walt Whitman strikes a pose on the cover of Leaves of Grass, a
performative declaration of an authentic American manhood 163
Fig. 10.2 Ethan Chandler strikes a pose reminiscent of his cinematic
forebearer Ethan Edwards in the last scene of The Searchers
[Episode 2.9] 164
Fig. 10.3 Ethan and Sembene sit by Vanessa’s door [Episode 1.7] 167
Fig. 11.1 Charlton Townsend, buoyed by his love for Kurt, does a bit
of soft-­shoe in his living-room in Penny Dreadful: City of
Angels [Episode 5] 189
Fig. 12.1 Victor Frankenstein and Lily discuss the physical and
figurative constraints of nineteenth-century women’s fashion
[Episode 2.4] 204
Fig. 13.1 The character Justine directly references the Marquis de
Sade’s Justine, and her guardians Lily Frankenstein and
Dorian Gray both fit into the mold of the Sadean libertine
[Episode 3.6] 218
Fig. 14.1 Vanessa’s relationship with Mina, one “closer than sisters,”
evokes lesbian desire [Episode 1.5] 247
Fig. 15.1 A Latinx neighborhood squares off against the Los Angeles
police in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels [Episode 10] 264
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel

The Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful ran for three
seasons from 2014 to 2016, inspiring critical acclaim, a cult of fan-viewers
(calling themselves “The Dreadfuls”), tie-ins such as a prequel and sequel
comic-book series published by Titan Comics,1 and a television spin-off,
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, cancelled after the first season aired on
Showtime in 2020. A subject of growing academic attention, Penny
Dreadful has also received scholarly analysis in articles by Sarah Artt, Nina
Farizova, and Benjamin Poore, chapters in monographs by Yvonne Griggs,
Antonija Primorac, and Saverio Tomaiuolo, contributions to a special
issue of Critical Survey (see Louttit, Akıllı and Öz, Rocha, and Manea),
and the essays in an entire section of Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart
Voigts’s edited collection Filming the Past, Screening the Present:
Neo-Victorian Adaptations (see Böhnke, Mendes, VanWinkle, and

J. Grossman (*)
Departments of English and Communication and Film Studies,
Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA
e-mail: grossmjj@lemoyne.edu
W. Scheibel
Department of English, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA
e-mail: lscheibe@syr.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation,
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_1
2 J. GROSSMAN AND W. SCHEIBEL

Mantrant)—and this work only represents a sample of what has been pub-
lished since the series aired.
It is no wonder that this neo-Victorian mash-up—adapting Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), among other sources—
has attracted audiences from different taste cultures and interest from a
range of academic fields. Creator and showrunner John Logan, credited as
the writer on 24 of the 27 episodes, cites not only eighteenth- and
nineteenth-­century Gothic novels but also the stage melodrama of the
Grand Guignol, Romantic poetry, and popular horror movies (specifically
from Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s and Hammer Film
Productions in the 1950s and 1960s). Having previously written for the
stage and the cinema, Logan entered serial television for the first time with
Penny Dreadful. Red, his play about artist Mark Rothko, which opened in
London in 2009 and on Broadway in 2010, went on to win six Tony
Awards, including Best Play. Logan earned his reputation in Hollywood
with the Oscar-nominated screenplays for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000)
and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011). Contributing
to the scripts for Sam Mendes’s James Bond films Skyfall (2011) and
Spectre (2015), he also demonstrated his ability to work within a commer-
cially successful franchise.2
Whether writing in a theatrical or cinematic mode, Logan views himself
as an actor’s director. In a 2016 interview with Variety, he explained, “I’ve
always said I have one job, which is writing scenes for actors. My goal is
always to write great scenes for actors. Everything else is secondary”
(Ryan, “Penny Dreadful”). To that end, while writing Penny Dreadful
with the character Vanessa Ives at its center, Logan “fell in love with the
idea of Eva Green and her playing Vanessa” (qtd. in Gosling 124). Green
had starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), a sexually
explicit art-house drama set on the backdrop of the Cinémathèque
Française in May 68; Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), a histori-
cal epic about the twelfth-century siege of Jerusalem during the Crusades;
and the James Bond reboot Casino Royale (2006), a reimagining of 007
as much as the so-called Bond Girl. Needing “a courageous actor,” Logan
felt Green “would have the complexity, the passion and frankly, the nerve
to play this part” (124).3 Although Penny Dreadful’s other leads would
also have been recognizable from film, including British actor Harry
Treadaway as Victor Frankenstein, two-time James Bond Timothy Dalton,
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

and millennial-Hollywood heartthrob Josh Hartnett as werewolf Lawrence

Talbot (a.k.a., sharpshooter Ethan Chandler), many cast members estab-
lished their acting careers on the stage: Rory Kinnear as Frankenstein’s
Creature, Reeve Carney as Dorian Gray, Simon Russell Beale as
Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle, Helen McCrory as witch Evelyn Poole
(a.k.a., spiritualist Madame Kali), Sarah Greene as Evelyn’s daughter
Hecate, Douglas Hodge as Scotland Yard police inspector Bartholomew
Rusk, and Patti LuPone in a dual role as psychiatrist Dr. Seward and
Vanessa’s mentor Joan Clayton.
We point to the intertextuality of the series and the theatrical or cine-
matic backgrounds of its creative personnel not to suggest that the series
is somehow anti-televisual but to show how accommodating a televisual
adaptation can be to different medial sources and influences. Even one of
Penny Dreadful’s main cast members, former teen pop-singer Billie Piper,
has developed a star image by moving among film, theater, and television
(prior to playing consumptive sex worker Brona Croft and her reanimated
alter ego Lily Frankenstein on Penny Dreadful, Piper was best known for
her role as Rose Tyler, the companion to the ninth and tenth Doctors in
the revival of Doctor Who [BBC, 2005–2006]). Note that the serialized
and sensationalist mode of Penny Dreadful as a horror-television series
recalls the pulp horror narratives of the Victorian “penny dreadfuls” from
which the title derives, as well the American dime novels to which the
third season alludes in its storyline set on the Western frontier. Moreover,
despite horror’s usually exclusive associations with fiction and film, televi-
sion has been a home for the genre as early as the 1950s, when Universal
sold the syndication rights to its pre-1948 horror catalogue to Columbia
Pictures’s television subsidiary Screen Gems. Two packages of films were
locally broadcast on a program titled Shock Theater, featuring horror-­
themed hosts in costume who introduced Dracula, Frankenstein, and the
Wolf Man to a new generation via the small screen (Grant 4).
In their book TV Horror, Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott trace the
history of the genre back to BBC’s Quatermass serials (1953, 1955, 1958),
anthology series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS, 1955–1960;
NBC, 1960–1962), The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964), and Boris
Karloff’s Thriller (NBC, 1960–1962), and the daytime soap opera Dark
Shadows (ABC, 1966–1971). With its vampire protagonist Barnabas
Collins, the authors argue, Dark Shadows “gave birth to the sympathetic
monster that would become a defining feature of TV horror for years to
come, not simply because it made the monster palatable for television
4 J. GROSSMAN AND W. SCHEIBEL

audiences, but because it allowed audiences to see the human within the
monster and the monster within the human” (209). The quotidian
medium of television may in fact be ideally suited for sympathetic mon-
sters, “or those who walk a fine line between good and evil, and whose
popularity implicates the audience in [their] moral ambiguity” (205). As
Jowett and Abbott contend, “If the contemporary horror film is built
around an ambivalent relationship between the monster and normality,
then the presence of horror on television in some ways normalizes the
monstrous, blurring the lines between normality and the monster, and in
so doing implicating the audience” (202). How monsters elicit (or fail to
elicit) sympathy is a recurring theme in our collection, as Penny Dreadful
plays on the recognition of characters, storylines, genre conventions, and
spoken words from a whole host of sources across media.
Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the
Monster is the first book-length critical study of the series (in the context
of adaptation or otherwise), serving as a laboratory for experimentation
with recent interdisciplinary methodologies that seeks to understand the
mechanisms of adaptation more broadly. We claim that as an adaptation of
multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful gives scholars, teach-
ers, and students (hopefully some Dreadfuls, as well) an ideal textual cor-
pus for thinking about adaptation beyond the traditional dyad of literature
and screen media. Following the lead of the television series, which itself
anatomizes the processes and possibilities of adaptation, we aim to respond
to Logan’s brazen provocation: to rethink where stories begin and end; to
appreciate how texts communicate with each other; to decipher the rela-
tionship between text, context, and intertext; and to explore how meaning
is made and remade. In its crossover storylines and expansive narrative
universe, Penny Dreadful reminds us of the endlessly generative potential
of textuality and world building.
Rather than proceeding with a production history of the series (for that
information, we would direct our readers to Yvonne Griggs’s comprehen-
sive account in Adaptable TV), in this introduction we want to explain
how the terms “Gothic,” “horror,” and “adaptation” will be used in the
chapters that follow. In his book The Pleasures of Horror, Matt Hills
observes how “performative acts of generic (re)classification have occurred
around horror on TV, with ‘Gothic TV’ functioning as a discursive other
to TV horror—the latter being associated with gore and low culture, and
the former carrying connotations of historical tradition, and ‘restrained’
suggestion or implication rather than graphic monstrosity and splatter”
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

(120). Such cultural distinctions have occurred at every level of discourse

surrounding television, from the production of programming content to
the publicity of television programs, to writing about television, whereby
slipping from the genre label of “horror” to “Gothic” lays claim to the
cultural value of period drama or literary adaptation (119–120). “By
showing less gore and being diegetically cast back in time,” Hills writes,
“‘Gothic TV’ not only takes on a literariness or worthy wordiness, it also
overwrites the culturally dangerous category of ‘TV horror’” (120). He
continues, “The safety of ‘the Gothic’ for TV producers, schedulers and
publicists lies partly in the fact that its texts are often highly familiar to
audiences, being effectively pre-sold through audience recognition”
(120). While Penny Dreadful takes place in late-Victorian London and
capitalizes on audience familiarity with characters from works of canonical
literature, it also revels in the bloody excesses of contemporary horror, a
topic that our contributors Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts take up in
Chap. 6. Indeed, as Christine Becker uncovers in Chap. 3 of our collec-
tion, Showtime shaped its marketing of the series around fan responses on
social media, exploiting themes of monstrosity, marginality, and transgres-
sion with which the fan community identified as “outsiders” themselves.
As scholars have noted, horror and franchise/worldbuilding cultures
bloomed after the millennium. Building from Jowett and Abbott’s earlier
work on TV horror (“TV Horror”), Simon Brown and Stacey Abbott
refer to the “2010s as a new golden age of TV horror” (98). Examples
include American Horror Story (FX, 2011–present), Bates Motel (A&E,
2013–2017), Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015), Sleepy Hollow (Fox,
2013–2017), Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–present), True Blood (HBO,
2008–2014), and The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–2022). The variety of
platforms (broadcast and cable networks, streaming services) and sources
and inspirations (novels, short stories, comic books, films) suggests the
ubiquity of this phenomenon (98–99). Kyle Meikle notes that shows dur-
ing this period turned away from the “prudish mores of mainstream fare
to the lovingly prurient interest of fans” (83), a point well illustrated in
Penny Dreadful’s promotion and reception chronicled in Becker’s chapter.
In the series, Logan marries the tradition of Gothic literary adaptation
with this recent trend in popular TV horror. The genre of penny dreadfuls
is an intriguing analog to conceptions of adaptation as imitative “low”-
culture pot-boilers, serving audiences doubly in showing how creatively
and entertainingly the most canonical of story worlds can be reimagined.
If penny dreadfuls (and dime novels) are traditionally seen as disposable
6 J. GROSSMAN AND W. SCHEIBEL

and sensationalist, the series Penny Dreadful finds poignancy and depth in
a retelling of iconic monster stories. So, too, we find the show’s mash-up
of beloved and legendary characters and storylines not a series of cheaply
conceptualized adaptations but a compelling exploration of themes of
monstrosity embodied by superb acting.
When we refer to Penny Dreadful’s status as “Gothic TV,” then, it is
not to reaffirm the Gothic as a “respectable” alternative to horror but to
underscore how the horror of Penny Dreadful operates within the mode
of the contemporary Gothic. According to Catherine Spooner in her book
on the subject, the contemporary Gothic spans fiction, film, television,
popular music, fashion, contemporary art, and consumer culture. Instead
of understanding the Gothic as a distinct, historically specific genre, as it
had been previously conceptualized in relation to Medieval architecture
and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spooner regards
it as “a more diverse, loosely defined set of narrative conventions and liter-
ary tropes” that may be found in multiple genres (26). Chief among those
conventions, for the purposes of our collection, are the Gothic’s preoc-
cupation with the past, not only in its “historical settings and narrative
interruptions of the past into the present” (9) but also in how it investi-
gates “its own past, self-referentially dependent on traces of other stories,
familiar images and narrative structures, intertextual allusions” (10). Penny
Dreadful therefore makes an exemplary case study in the Gothic’s canni-
balistic process of self-adaptation, drawing from literary, theatrical, cine-
matic, and televisual histories, as aware of its “high” cultural iterations as
its “low” (distinctions that are always historically determined, anyway).
The “use” of the Gothic in the series is also not merely a repetition of
past traditions but an adaptation of certain sensibilities or social concerns
to the needs, desires, and appeals of new contexts. As Spooner persuasively
argues, “There is no ‘original’ Gothic; it is always already a revival of
something else” (10). In other words, “The notion of revival can be seen
to imply a reappropriation and reinvention of previous forms rather than
straightforward repetition. Thus contemporary Gothic discourses can be
viewed as relating to an earlier Gothic tradition while expressing at times
an entirely different range of cultural agendas” (12). We hope our readers
will appreciate what Penny Dreadful’s Gothic horror reveals about the
late-Victorian era as much as present-day issues of aesthetics, performance,
gender, sexuality, race, and our complex relationship to reading and media.
Just as horror has been seen as a degenerate form of the literary Gothic,
so too have new-media adaptations been sometimes viewed as inferior
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

versions of their source texts. Kamilla Elliott problematizes the common-

place value judgments ascribed to ostensibly original sources. In her book
Theorizing Adaptation, Elliott shows how, before the nineteenth century,
adaptation theory “was diverse, complex, nuanced, contested, and often
ingenious” (86). Since the Romantic period, however, aesthetic judg-
ments have privileged originality, turning adaptations into “bad theoreti-
cal objects.” Although Elliott’s longer history of the retelling of stories
reveals attitudes toward adaptations that were positive and forward-­
looking, audiences have often internalized a Romantic commitment to
originality, finding adaptations to be secondary and derivative. Many con-
temporary readers, viewers, critics, and scholars may share this retrospec-
tive view of sources and adaptations, preferring the earlier text and
evaluating it as superior. But Elliott calls a preoccupation with an adapta-
tion’s faithfulness to its source the “fake news” of adaptation studies (20),
suggesting that a historical account of adaptation reveals different priori-
ties over time. Indeed, adaptations’ greater concern historically has been
how re-versioned texts are products of their own time as much as or more
than they are attempting to adapt earlier sources (see Elliott 86, 94).
Much in the same way that the Gothic is “always already a revival of
something else” (Spooner 10), contemporary adaptation theory empha-
sizes how adaptations are always already adaptations of adaptations—there
is no “original” source text—and this process of constant textual remaking
is nothing new. R. Barton Palmer reminds us that though we think of
multi-media practices of textual remixing and mash-ups as contemporary
modes, adaptation has been a vibrant cultural practice as long as stories
have been told. Focused on Medieval revisioning of Percival and referenc-
ing Bernard Cerquiglini, Palmer observes that “‘[i]ncessant re-writing’ is
an apt description […] not only of medieval practice but of text-making
enterprises in every period, including our own; these are fundamentally
transtextual and characteristically hypertextual, and where the opening of
the already written to further extension is necessary to ensure the predict-
able ‘flow’ of new text that sustains the cultural tradition” (79). Adaptation
studies gives us a lens through which to explore and dissect how given
texts change and live on: “once continued, the ‘work’ is revealed as incho-
ate rather than boundaried, its self-containment more a matter of conven-
tion and interpretation rather than of material fact, with its present form
open to further extension” (83). Penny Dreadful illustrates un-­boundaried
textuality whereby familiar characters are ripped from their original con-
text, as the Creature bursts violently from the body of Proteus in Episode 2.

* * *
8 J. GROSSMAN AND W. SCHEIBEL

The essays in the first section of our collection posit ways we might under-
stand reading Penny Dreadful in particular contexts of media. Thomas
Leitch provocatively relates mediation (in the spiritualist sense dramatized
in the series) to the notion of adaptation as itself a medium. Shifting to the
marketing and reception of Penny Dreadful as, distinctly, a television
series, Christine Becker demonstrates how Showtime’s adaptive strategies
for responding to fan identification with characters and themes branded
the series as an “outsider” text from an underdog cable network. While
Penny Dreadful is a product of twenty-first-century cable television, it is
equally indebted to the conventions of “monstrous media” from the nine-
teenth century, as Mike Goode suggests in his chapter on literary antholo-
gies, museums, and the culture of collecting.
The second section of our book offers readings of Penny Dreadful in
the contexts of Gothic horror literature and film. As Joan Hawkins pro-
poses in her chapter on Penny Dreadful as an adaptation of Stoker’s
Dracula, the influence of this novel is not confined to the third season,
when Dracula finally appears, but is present throughout the series in its
explorations of gender and sexuality. Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts
continue an examination of vampirism in the series with their chapter
comparing Penny Dreadful’s representation of the sanguinary to a con-
temporaneous vampire text, Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive
(2013). Turning to the London setting of Penny Dreadful and Dracula as
a Gothic space, Kendall R. Phillips posits the framework of the “cosmo-
politan Gothic” for reading the city in the shadow of Empire. Will Scheibel
concludes this section by connecting Penny Dreadful to its cinematic
intertexts in the Universal Classic Monsters films of the 1930s and 1940s,
drawing from Freud’s “the uncanny” to articulate a model of adaptation
based on unhomely returns.
Unbinding the monster from Gothic horror on the page and the screen,
the third section looks at less obvious sources of inspiration for Penny
Dreadful. Given the recurring motif of performance in the series, from
Ethan’s Wild West shows to the Grand Guignol setting in Season 1, to the
visual allusions to Max Schreck’s physiognomy as Count Orlok in Nosferatu
(1922), Shannon Wells-Lassagne considers theatrical spectacles as histori-
cal precedents, aspects of mise-en-scène, and a central thematic in the
series. Whereas Wells-Lassagne takes up the figure of the sharpshooter as
a theatrical personage, Ann M. Ryan shifts our attention to Ethan as a
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

frontier hero in the tradition of the American dime novel, particularly in

Ethan’s companionship with racial Others. Julie Grossman and Phillip
Novak conclude this section with an introduction to Penny Dreadful’s
2020 spin-off City of Angels, arguing that in Logan’s pivoting from Gothic
horror to the detective genre, this new series redefines the monstrous by
adapting classic film noir such as Chinatown (1974), incorporating
Mexican folklore, and responding to the social-historical conditions of
1930s Los Angeles.
Issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are the subjects of the fourth
and final section of the book. Lissette Lopez Szwydky finds in Lily
Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful’s version of the “bride” of Frankenstein,
one of the latest incarnations of a palimpsestuous female figure with ori-
gins in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley up through the many film
adaptations of Frankenstein. Not only does Lily’s protégé Justine recall
the Frankenstein family maid, Justine Moritz, from Shelley’s novel, but
she also evokes the eponymous protagonist in the Marquis de Sade’s 1791
novel. Reading Penny Dreadful as work of the “Sadean Gothic,” Lindsay
Hallam interprets de Sade’s textual presence in sexually transgressive char-
acters such as Justine, Lily, and Dorian Gray, as well as in the melding of
high and low cultural forms. Also interested in the representations of sex-
ual transgression, James Bogdanski locates a “queer sublime” in the series.
Bogdanski foregrounds the authorial legacy of James Whale, director of
Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in Logan’s
vision as an openly gay writer while also attending to certain queer rela-
tionships in the series’ narrative, such as Vanessa’s close bond with Mina.
The final chapter of the book revisits City of Angels, as Seda Öz investi-
gates “borderland identities” in 1930s Los Angeles, the time and place of
social unrest that gave rise to the Chicano Movement and bear a chilling
resonance with U.S. efforts to redraw borders following the 2016 presi-
dential election of Donald J. Trump. To borrow the words of Jonathan
Harker in his cherished journal, this is Gothic horror “up to date with a
vengeance” (Stoker 37).

Notes
1. Written by supervising producer Chris King and Season 3 staff writers Krysty
Wilson-Cairns and Andrew Hinderaker, the prequel series was collected in a
trade-paperback edition titled Penny Dreadful in 2017. The sequel series,
written by King and titled Penny Dreadful: The Ongoing Series, was collected
10 J. GROSSMAN AND W. SCHEIBEL

in three trade-paperback volumes: The Awakening (2017), The Beauteous

Evil (2018), and The Victory of Death (2019).
2. When making Penny Dreadful, Logan and Mendes (the executive producer
of the series) would unite cast members from the Bond franchise, including
Timothy Dalton, Eva Green, Rory Kinnear, and Helen McCrory.
3. For more on Logan’s work with Green and his conception of Vanessa Ives,
including his rationale for her death in the Season 3 finale, see Goldberg and
Ryan, “Creator.”

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Akıllı, Sinan, and Seda Öz. “‘No More Let Life Divide…’: Victorian Metropolitan
Confluence in Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016,
pp. 15–29.
Artt, Sarah. “‘An Otherness That Cannot Be Sublimated’: Shades of Frankenstein
in Penny Dreadful and Black Mirror.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol.
11, no. 2, 2018, pp. 257–275.
Böhnke, Dietmar. “The ‘Grand Guignol’ Approach to Adapting the Victorians:
Penny Dreadful and the Multiple Adaptations of Globalised Popular
Victorianism,” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian
Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts, Wissenschaftlicher
Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 123–140.
Brown, Simon, and Stacey Abbott. “Inspiration as Adaptation: TV Horror,
Seriality, and the Adapted Text.” New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation,
ed. Betty Kaklamanidou, Wayne State UP, 2020, pp. 97–115.
Elliott, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford UP, 2020.
Farizova, Nina. “Romantic Poetry and the TV Series Form: The Rhyme of John
Logan’s Penny Dreadful.” Adaptation, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 176–193.
Goldberg, Lesley. “Why Showtime is Ending Penny Dreadful.” Hollywood
Reporter, 20 Jun. 2016, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-­news/
penny-­dreadful-­canceled-­at-­showtime-­903757/.
Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015.
Grant, Barry Keith. Monster Cinema. Rutgers UP, 2018.
Griggs, Yvonne. “Penny Dreadful: The Neo-Victorian ‘Made-for-TV’ Series,”
Adaptable TV: Rewiring the Text, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 13–66.
Hills, Matt. The Pleasures of Horror. Continuum, 2005.
Jowett, Lorna, and Stacey Abbott. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the
Small Screen. I.B. Tauris, 2013.
Meikle, Kyle. Adaptations in the Franchise Era, 2001–16. Bloomsbury, 2019.
———. “TV Horror: Santa Clarita Diet.” Horror: A Companion, ed. Simon
Bacon, Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 45–52.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Louttit, Chris. “Victorian London Redux: Adapting the Gothic Metropolis.”

Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 2–14.
Manea, Dragoş. “A Wolf’s Eye View of London: Dracula, Penny Dreadful, and
the Logic of Repetition.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 40–50.
Mantrant, Sophie. “Jack the Ripper in the Age of Trauma: Ethan Chandler in
Penny Dreadful, Season One.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-­
Victorian Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts,
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 169–178.
Mendes, Ana Cristina. “The Cumulative Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fandoms of
Penny Dreadful.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian
Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts, Wissenschaftlicher
Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 141–154.
Palmer, R. Barton. “Continuation, Adaptation Studies, and the Never-Finished
Text.” Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds,
ed. Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017,
pp. 73–100.
Poore, Benjamin. “The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the
Gothic.” Victoriographies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 62–81.
Primorac, Antonija. “Re-fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations:
Tailoring and Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation and Appropriation,” Neo-­
Victorianism on the Screen: Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations of
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Rocha, Lauren. “Angel in the House, Devil in the City: Explorations of Gender in
Dracula and Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 30–39.
Ryan, Maureen. “Creator John Logan and Showtime’s David Nevins on the
Decision to End Penny Dreadful.” Variety, 20 Jun. 2016, https://variety.
com/2016/tv/news/penny-­dreadful-­ending-­season-­3-­series-­finale-­creator-­
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———. “Penny Dreadful Creator Talks Season 3, Vanessa’s Demons and the
American West.” Variety, 4 May 2016, https://variety.com/2016/tv/fea-
tures/penny-­dreadful-­john-­logan-­interview-­1201766847/.
Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. Reaktion Books, 2006.
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pp. 155–168.
 PART I

Welcome to the Night: Issues of

Reading and Media
 CHAPTER 2

The Medium Is the Model

Thomas Leitch

At the heart of all the dire, sanguinary threats to the Penny Dreadful’s
colorful cast of characters are a more existential threat: their inability to
define themselves to each other’s, the audience’s, or even their own satis-
faction. Sometimes the continuing characters act very much like their
Victorian namesakes; sometimes they don’t, especially when they cross
each other’s paths. Count Dracula’s alter ego, Dr. Alexander Sweet, works
as a well-regarded zoologist in the Natural History Museum of London.
Victor Frankenstein’s colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, is addicted to radical
experiments, but now these experiments are carried out on other people
rather than himself. Dorian Gray is a pansexual seducer who remains eter-
nally young-looking because a portrait he’s hidden away in his palatial
home ages in his place, but his story changes dramatically when he part-
ners with the Bride of Frankenstein, who wishes to exploit her ties with
him to convene a cabal of homicidal streetwalkers bent on exacting revenge
against men.
The most prominent plotline in the show’s first season concerns the
efforts of Sir Malcolm Murray, a wealthy explorer who’s constantly off in

T. Leitch (*)
University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
e-mail: tleitch@udel.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Switzerland AG 2023
J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation,
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_2
16 T. LEITCH

Africa, to discover what’s become of his daughter Mina, who vanished

without a trace during his last journey but now seems to be reaching out
from the spirit world. The fact that her name is Mina Murray gives a broad
hint about what’s become of her. The second and third seasons focus
increasingly on malevolent spirits’ constant threats against Sir Malcolm’s
ward, Vanessa Ives, and the attempts of Sir Malcolm, Frankenstein, the
sharpshooter Ethan Chandler, and Ethan’s adoptive Apache father
Kaetenay to save her from eternal damnation. Most of the threats to
Vanessa take the form of demonic possession through one of his earthly
agents: Mina Murray, who in life was Vanessa’s best friend; the sorceress
Evelyn Poole, who first appears as the society medium Madame Kali; and
Dracula, whose benevolent, absent-minded alter ego Dr. Sweet she falls in
love with. The underlying fear that drives Penny Dreadful is the threat of
invasion by malevolent otherworldly presences capable of penetrating into
the characters’ most secure dwellings, their bodies, and their psyches. The
earliest example of this invasion in the series, and one of the most unnerv-
ing, is the jump-scare moment when the Creature, not yet self-identified
as John Clare, emerges from the body of Proteus, the creation of
Frankenstein whom he’s just killed [Episode 1.2].
Who exactly is John Clare? His namesake was both a leading English
Romantic poet and a man who suffered from delusions that he was a biga-
mist and a prizefighter and the reincarnation of Shakespeare and Lord
Byron, several of whose poems he rewrote, and who spent the second half
of his life confined to the High Beach asylum. Is Penny Dreadful’s John
Clare another incarnation of the poet, a monster created by Frankenstein,
or a resurrected version of an attendant in the Banning Clinic, in which
Vanessa Ives is lobotomized in Episode 3.4? Lavinia Putney, the blind
daughter of the waxworks owner who employs Clare for much of Seasons
1 and 2, muses, “It’s like he’s not really alive.” Clare tells Frankenstein:
“I’m your other self. Your truer self” [Episode 2.10]. In the same episode,
Vanessa tells him, “I think you are the most human man I have ever
known,” even though the long flashback to her stay in the Banning Clinic
shows his general demeanor of self-effacing compassion alarmingly
inverted when his eyes suddenly burn red and he tells her, “I believe what
you say about Lucifer. After all, I was there. We have a lot to catch up on.”
The same fear of possibly demonic possession haunts Lily Frankenstein,
who wonders when Dorian Gray identifies her as Brona Croft, who died
of consumption before she was reanimated by Frankenstein, whether she’s
really Lily, Brona, or “some divine admixture of both” [Episode 2.9], and
 2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MODEL 17

Ethan Chandler, who’s secretly a werewolf. As the story unfolds, this fear
of otherworldly possession shared by so many characters is focused increas-
ingly on Vanessa, who a long flashback in Episode 1.5 reveals seduced
Captain Charles Branson on the eve of his wedding to Mina, perhaps in
revenge for the sexual encounter Vanessa saw between Sir Malcolm and
Vanessa’s mother earlier in that episode.
If the first season of Penny Dreadful is organized around Sir Malcolm’s
ultimately futile attempt to track down his daughter and rescue her from
the realm of the Undead, the series as a whole is organized around the
quest to identify the true nature of Vanessa and rescue her from external
threats like Lucifer and Count Dracula. Who is Vanessa Ives? When we
first meet her, she seems to be a bored socialite whose openness to new
experiences is continually repaid by threats of demonic possession. Another
long flashback in Episode 2.3 recounts her formative experience when she
apprenticed herself to the Cut-Wife Joan Clayton, the rural witch of
Ballentree Moor, whom she approached with questions about how to
understand her disturbing visions and how to help her troubled friend
Mina. By the time Vanessa, confronted in the final episode of Season 2
with the possibility that she has been possessed by the primordial Egyptian
goddess Amunet, cries, “My soul is mine!”, it’s hard to share her confi-
dence, since the series has gone to extraordinary lengths to call that very
assertion into question for any number of characters, from Vanessa herself
to the Cut-Wife, who years after she’s burned as a witch at the end of
Episode 2.3 returns as Dr. Seward, the alienist Vanessa insists she’s met
before—a conviction that’s made considerably less irrational by the fact
that Dr. Seward and the Cut-Wife are both played by Patty LuPone.
Penny Dreadful uses the threat of otherworldly possession to dramatize
questions about identity the characters frequently make explicit. In a sin-
gle episode [2.8], John Clare asks Lily Frankenstein: “Who are you?”;
Vanessa asks Ethan, who has avoided a forced return to America by turn-
ing into a werewolf and killing his predator: “What are you?”; Dorian
Gray asks Angelique, the transgender prostitute who’s fallen in love with
him, “Can you accept me as I am?”; Sir Malcolm’s servant and companion
Sembene remonstrates with him: “Know who you are”; and a doll fash-
ioned in Vanessa’s image asks her, “Is that not the engine of all human
creatures: to be loved for who you are?” In the third season, Dr. Sweet
assures Vanessa, “I love you for who you are, not for who the world wants
you to be” [Episode 3.6], just before they make unholy love. In the fol-
lowing episode, he tells her as she holds him at gunpoint: “I don’t want to
18 T. LEITCH

make you good. I don’t want you to be normal. I don’t want you to be
anything but who you truly are” [Episode 3.7]. When she replies not by
accepting him but by accepting herself, he bites her neck and feeds on her.
Penny Dreadful places extraordinary emphasis on questions of identity
precisely because it is so difficult for the characters to establish, even to
themselves, who they are. The series abounds in images of identities mul-
tiplied, fractured, or otherwise thrown into question. The one-armed
Inspector Bartholomew Rusk, who eventually arrests Ethan and accompa-
nies him back to America, calls Ethan, the fugitive son of the rancher Jared
Talbot, “a phantom limb” [Episode 2.9] like Rusk’s own amputated arm,
which he found after losing it but then tossed away. In the long flashback
following Episode 3.3, in which Dr. Sweet takes Vanessa into a hall of mir-
rors that disorients her by multiplying images of her, the Banning Clinic
attendant John Clare carefully applies makeup to Vanessa’s ravaged face,
holds up a mirror, and tells her, “this is who you are” [Episode 3.4]. In the
following episode, Jared Talbot tells Ethan, now dressed in some of
Talbot’s own clothes, “It’s like looking into a mirror” [Episode 3.5].
The resulting confusion is as much hermeneutical as psychological, for
Penny Dreadful undermines any number of narrative, visual, and thematic
tropes that would normally help its audience determine the characters’
true identities—or at the very least allow them to decide whether a given
character was good or evil. Moral character, exceptionalism, happiness,
sensory experience, free will, religious faith, and nature are all shown to be
unreliable foundations or indexes of identity. So are sin, because “every-
one has sinned,” as Vanessa tells Dr. Seward [Episode 3.2]; love, because
every sexual encounter in the series turns out badly; medicine, like the
dose Frankenstein wants to inject into Lily’s brain to banish the rage she
takes as defining her [Episode 3.6]; family, especially the twisted families
of Sir Malcolm and Ethan; memory, since the characters are constantly
tormented by recollections whose accuracy they cannot trust; power, since
apparently pitiable victims like Lily Frankenstein, her protegee, the young
streetwalker Justine, and the blind Lavinia Putney all show their claws to
those who befriend them; abjection, for soon after telling Evelyn Poole,
“You don’t need to blackmail me. I’m your creature” [Episode 2.8], the
campy Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle takes part in the assault on her strong-
hold and later refers Vanessa to the alienist Dr. Seward and the thanatolo-
gist Catriona Hartdegen, her two most indispensable helpers in Season 3;
and cosmology, for, as Vanessa tells Dr. Sweet, “We make our own heaven
and our own hell” [Episode 3.9]. In place of any stable identity, Dr. Jekyll
 2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MODEL 19

unsurprisingly posits “the duality that makes us who we are” [Episode

3.2]; Frankenstein tells Vanessa, comparing his drug addiction to her
“addiction to God”: “Scientifically speaking, life’s nothing but a series of
chemical reactions” [Episode 2.9]; and Sembene tells Ethan: “Things
become other things. The leopard consumes the monkey and becomes
leopard and monkey. The crocodile consumes the leopard and becomes
crocodile and leopard and monkey…. The ones so cursed do not always
fully remember it, this becoming” [Episode 2.7].
The series heightens this indeterminacy still further by its delight in
darkly playful general remarks that clearly refer simultaneously to multiple
characters and plot strands, as when Lily tells Dorian, “I’m not sure there
are any lifetimes,” a remark equally true of them both [Episode 2.6], or
Evelyn Poole’s daughter, the apprentice-witch Hecate, tells Ethan: “I sus-
pect we’re not so different, you and I” [Episode 3.5], or Sir Malcolm tells
Ethan, “We prize things most when we’ve lost them” [Episode 3.7]—an
observation that could apply without alteration to every other character in
the series. A montage of sexual couplings in one episode [2.5] cuts freely
between Dorian and Angelique, Frankenstein and Lily, and Sir Malcolm
and Evelyn Poole, melding them into a single licentious sequence, and the
final episode in Season 2 [2.10] cuts back and forth between the unhappy
reunions of Frankenstein with the creatures he’s created and Sir Malcolm
with the family members he’s betrayed. Although it follows both its
Victorian models and other television series in ending any number of epi-
sodes with melodramatic cliffhangers, the big reveals of these cliffhangers,
which unmask Ethan as a werewolf, or Dr. Sweet as Dracula, or Kaetenay
as another werewolf, turn out to be complications or equivocations, deep-
ening the characters’ contradictions rather than resolving them. Even as it
freely complicates popular moral, psychological, and eschatological duali-
ties, the series freely traffics in these dualities, palimpsestuously stacking
them atop each other instead of rejecting them. In short, Penny Dreadful
is a gallery of variously human and demonic monsters defined precisely by
the fearfully protean instability that makes them impossible to define.
In the process of developing these adapted characters and bringing
them into collision with each other, Penny Dreadful foregrounds the
secret other adaptations labor to hide: that the process of adaptation is
ceaseless, licentious, often scandalous. The tropism toward constant
refashioning, sometimes by themselves, sometimes by otherworldly forces
they cannot understand or control, that makes its characters so threaten-
ing to each other and so disturbing to their audience is faithfully reflected
20 T. LEITCH

in the status of Penny Dreadful itself, a prototype in this regard for all
serial fiction. Unlike an Aristotelian tragedy with a beginning, a middle,
and an end that provides a definitive rationale for its entire structure, serial
fiction aspires to be all middle, multiplying its complications indefinitely
without ever bringing them to the definitive end that would kill the series.
Intertextual adaptation has generally been defined as an attempt to rep-
licate or transfer narrative components like characters or events or settings
or entire narratives from one presentational medium to another—from
page to stage, from the live theater to the movie theater, from radio to
television, from comic books to theme parks, from canonical fiction to
online fanfiction, and, to take the intermedial transfer that remains most
often studied, from novels to films. This model assumes that these media
are stable and knowable, with borders as clearly demarcated as those of
nations, and that adaptations cross these borders at their peril, risking
opprobrium from purists devoted to the texts they adapt and rejection by
partisans of the media in which they seek a new home. Recent develop-
ments in digital media and the challenges they pose to older media and to
ways of thinking about media generally have raised fundamental questions
about this model. Henry Jenkins’s highly influential work on intermedial-
ity traces the ways texts like The Matrix, originally conceived in a single
medium, colonize other media so successfully that it is no longer possible
to think of them as works in a single medium that have been adapted par-
tially to other media but require us to think of them as multimedial or
transmedial texts.
Now that investigations of transmediality have so radically challenged
the distinctiveness and independence of different presentational media
and their distance from the cultures that generate, police, and consume
them, I’d like to propose that adaptation is itself a medium. This proposi-
tion flies in the face of three generations of discussions among adaptation
scholars and an even longer period of analyses of presentational media.
The consensus to date among scholars, reviewers, fans, and the general
public is that adaptation is an intermedial, not a medial, practice. But since
adaptations have from their earliest days raised questions about the rela-
tions among apparently irreconcilable media, and since these questions
have been multiplied and intensified by the rise of media studies and trans-
medial studies, I’d suggest that media is a term that could fruitfully be
applied to discursive practices like reproduction, translation, and adapta-
tion as it is already routinely applied to specific texts whose uniqueness
 2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MODEL 21

they call into question and traditional media whose discreteness they
challenge.
Traditional media like music, painting, sculpture, dance, theater, opera,
novels, newspapers, magazines, cinema, radio, television, video games,
and digital media are widely understood as platforms for communicating
information or providing aesthetic pleasure, and adaptation is understood
as an intermedial or transmedial, rather than a medial, practice. As John
Durham Peters points out, however, this way of conceiving media is a rela-
tively recent historical development in “the long lineage of media as ambi-
ance” (48) that “was connected to nature long before it was connected to
technology” (46). “Medium,” notes Peters, “has always meant an ele-
ment, environment, or vehicle in the middle of things.” Aristotle’s notion
of το περιεχον (to periekhon), or “surrounding,” posited “atmosphere,
cloud, climate, and the air” (46) as media. It was not until the thirteenth
century that Thomas Aquinas, translating Aristotle, “smuggle[d] in the
term medium to account for the missing link in the remote action of see-
ing” (46–47). With Isaac Newton, “medium became a more instrumental
concept, ‘an intermediate agent,’ a condition for the transmission of enti-
ties such as light, gravity, magnetism, and sound” (47). But Peters finds a
“decisive break” in our understanding of media as “a conveyance for spe-
cifically human signals and meanings” (47) in the middle of the nine-
teenth century:

The telegraph as a medium of communication combined physical phenom-

ena long observed in nature (speedy immaterial processes) with an old social
practice (writing to distant correspondents). […] Perhaps the most critical
shift came with spiritualism, around 1850, when a person, typically a woman
imitating the telegraph’s ability to bridge wide chasms, came to be called a
medium, which no longer meant a natural element but a human intermedi-
ary between the worlds of the living and the dead. […] This was a stepping-­
stone to the sense prevailing in the twentieth century that media were
human-made channels that carried news, entertainment, advertising and
other so-called content. The spiritualist quest for communiqués from dis-
tant minds went together with the shrinkage of the notion of communica-
tion to mean intentional sendings among humans. (47–48)

In other words, “media” didn’t originally mean platforms for human com-
munication; that meaning is relatively recent in origin; and one of its har-
bingers is the designation of spiritualists as mediums, a term that has been
22 T. LEITCH

applied to them longer than it has been applied to books, movies, or the
Internet.
In between the shift Peters describes and the rise of convergence cul-
ture, the pivotal text in the study of media is Marshall McLuhan’s
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, whose subtitle indicates
how absolutely it opposes what would come to be Peters’s understanding
of media as rooted in natural phenomena. McLuhan famously begins his
monograph with a chapter entitled “The Medium Is the Message,” a for-
mulation he elaborates by saying that “the personal and social conse-
quences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result
from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of
ourselves, or by any new technology” (7). In exploring the implications of
his aphorism for a range of media that include not only printed texts,
newspapers, photography, telegraphy, comic strips, movies, radio, and
television but also speech, numbers, clothing, housing, wheels, money,
clocks, games, motorcars, and weapons, McLuhan does not so much reject
the subordination of media to the messages they carried as transpose the
messages into media themselves, for “the ‘content’ of any medium is
always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the writ-
ten word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph”
(8). Echoing T.S. Eliot, he asserts that “the ‘content’ of a medium is like
the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of
the mind” (18). Despite the plain sense of his most famous pronounce-
ment, McLuhan does not equate the medium with its content; he sees the
medium as far more important than its content, which at any rate is always
another medium.
In his second most famous passage, McLuhan divides all media into hot
and cool media. A hot medium like photography and radio

is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is
the state of being well filled with data. […] Telephone is a cool medium, or
one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of informa-
tion. And speech is a cool medium of low definition because so little is given
and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media
do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot
media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in partici-
pation or completion by the audience. (22–23)
 2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MODEL 23

McLuhan’s argument has two broad implications I doubt that he would

endorse himself: that the medium offers the model, not the message, for
contemporary communications theories and for communication itself and
that some mediums are both hot and cool. Although McLuhan gives radio
as an example of a hot medium, for example, radio plays, which provide a
great deal of auditory information which they invite audiences to supple-
ment by providing a visual track of their own imagining, seem like a much
cooler medium, one that requires and rewards active participation. I’d like
to develop these two implications further by taking a closer look at
Madame Kali, the medium in Penny Dreadful whose seance creates such a
stir in the series’ second episode. Invited to give the gentlefolk assembled
at Ferdinand Lyle’s party the sense that they have been vicariously in touch
with the spirit world, she summons malignant spirits that swiftly infect
Vanessa, who levitates above the table and speaks in the voice of the miss-
ing Mina Murray (Fig. 2.1).
Madame Kali’s fearsomely, uncontrollably contagious activity is associ-
ated with shock, horror, sensationalism, and discontinuity but also with a
powerful vision denied other characters unless the medium herself, per-
haps unwillingly, shares it with them or infects them with it. Several epi-
sodes later, when Sir Malcolm recognizes Madame Kali in a shop, she

Fig. 2.1 Vanessa levitates above the séance table and speaks in the voice of the
missing Mina Murray [Episode 1.2]
24 T. LEITCH

identifies herself as “Evelyn Poole, from Brighton.” Most members of the

audience are probably inclined at first to see this as her true identity. But
the sidelong glance she gives the camera after telling Sir Malcolm that
she’s sure they will meet again suggests that her identity is ultimately
ambiguous. She isn’t Evelyn Poole dressing up as Madame Kali; she inhab-
its both identities at once and maybe others besides. More than most sto-
ries, whether or not they’re continuing series, Penny Dreadful works to
make questions about the status of spiritualist mediums, the possibility of
demonic possession, and the difficulty in fixing individual identity both
ambiguous in themselves (is the person in question truly possessed?) and
ambiguous in determining the possessed victim’s identity (is the possessed
person better identified as herself or as the spirit who speaks and acts
through her?). As a result, the series makes these questions equally impos-
sible to answer and to ignore in very much the same way the medium of
adaptation makes it both more important and more difficult to establish
just what counts as a definitive text.
The questions Penny Dreadful raises about the relations between
autonomous individuals, the spiritual realm, and the mediums who make
them available to each other become increasingly fraught as the series
draws to an end because apart from the Creature, the leading characters
have already rejected the teleological markers of individual and group
identities classic fiction offers—normalcy, stability, peace, and a return to
your loved ones and your true self—as temptations to be shunned at any
cost. Although Catriona Hartdegen calls “the End of Days, the one con-
stant in all thanatologies” [Episode 3.7], the very possibility of the End of
Days is challenged by the form of serial drama, whose later episodes are
more properly adapting, or, as Penny Dreadful might have it, feeding on,
its earlier episodes and the franchise itself than any earlier sources. So the
main features that establish the final episode of Season 3 as the series’ end-
ing are the unusually slow pace of its last 15 minutes; the Creature’s vale-
dictory recitation of the first stanza and part of the fourth stanza of William
Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode as he watches Vanessa’s funeral proces-
sion, then approaches, and kneels at Vanessa’s grave; and the final fadeout
to the intertitle “The End,” a title rarely seen in serial dramas, or indeed
in television programs of any kind. In an article in Deadline Hollywood,
Dominic Patten reported that

[John] Logan had decided during the middle of the second season that the
third season should be the last, and he pitched the third season to Showtime
 2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MODEL 25

president David Nevins accordingly. They did not release this information
until after the final season had completed, as Nevins stated, “given what I
knew the ending of Penny Dreadful was going to be felt like a massive spoiler
and it felt disrespectful to the experience that people were having with the
show.” Logan said regarding not releasing the information: “That’s what
the ending of this series is, it is meant to be a strong, bold, theatrical ending
because I think that’s what our fans like and to water that down with an
announcement or having them know I think would be an act of bad faith.”
(“Penny Dreadful [TV series]”)

Fans were far from unanimous in accepting this account of the series’ sud-
den ending. Online columnist Trace Thurman took the number of plot
threads left dangling as proof that Logan had planned to continue the
series and was thwarted by Showtime because the series had never justified
its expensive production costs, and most of the 74 fans who commented
on his column agreed. Vox contributor Melanie McFarland, who found
the third series both deviant and anticlimactic, contrasted Logan’s closing
characterization of the series as “about a woman grappling with God and
faith” with an announcement he’d made three years earlier, before the
series premiered: “Growing up as a gay man, before it was socially accept-
able as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated, to
feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me mon-
strous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was”
(McFarland).
How could Penny Dreadful possibly have ended in a way that satisfied
viewers hooked on its gleefully licentious mashup of what Steven Marcus’s
1966 monograph called “the other Victorians”? Continuing television
series are notoriously difficult to end, as fans’ reactions to the endings of
The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015), and
The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008) attest; Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013)
succeeded only by killing off its protagonist and his leading antagonist in
the final episode. Even deaths like these would not have provided defini-
tive closure in Penny Dreadful, which had established from its opening
episodes that characters can continue to stir the pot long after they have
died, whether or not they are reincarnated as new characters, because
character itself is a medium of experience, a trope for identity, rather than
a kind of experience or identity itself.
26 T. LEITCH

Consider the relations between the uncontrollably proliferating mon-

sters of Penny Dreadful and several other tropes that we typically consider
more stable in the context of Grossman’s observation that

any adaptation might be considered “monstrous,” that is, isolated from its
predecessors because it is born of new concerns, new desires to express ideas
in a different medium, with a changed-up narrative reflecting shifting cul-
tural priorities. Because of these altered contexts, adaptations are often born
resisting the original desires of their sources. A provoking figure for reani-
mations of their earlier source texts, “monstrous” describes the shocking
violation of original and organically pure matter when adapted or reshaped
in new contexts. (2)

For Grossman, adaptations are often monstrous whether or not their casts
include actual monsters. Penny Dreadful, of course, is full of actual mon-
sters that threaten to disrupt the characters’ lives and their world. But
these monsters might be seen not as scandalously exceptional creatures
but as literalizations of the tropes of fluid identity in Victorian classics that
are apparently more invested in stability and closure: the protean figure of
Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1848), the endless, all-consuming lawsuit of
Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Bleak House (1853), the French Revolution in
A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the River Thames in Our Mutual Friend
(1865), and the social gatherings that periodically bring the characters in
Middlemarch (1872) into potentially revealing contact with each other,
and all those hyperextended moments in Trollope’s novels when the hero-
ines agonize over whether to accept a proposal of marriage that will fix
their identities forever.
Moving forward from the Victorians, consider the moment early in the
single uneventful June day Virginia Woolf chronicles in Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) when Clarissa Dalloway observes: “She would not say of anyone in
the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the
same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at
the same time was outside, looking on” (11). Do the previsions of Penny
Dreadful here indicate Woolf’s debt to shilling shockers like Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) a more general debt High Modernism
owes the other Victorians or simply the ubiquity of psychological insights
that are both radical and commonplace? Just as the abundance of tradi-
tional pleasures of the sumptuous Victorian set pieces like Dorian Gray’s
ball suggests that all fiction mixes stabilizing and destabilizing tropes, in
 2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MODEL 27

whatever different proportions, Vanessa’s confrontation with the doll

Evelyn Poole has fashioned in her image reminds us not only of the wax
museum that looms so large in the first two seasons of Penny Dreadful but
of the fact that all its characters who solicit our interest are only audiovi-
sual simulacra of iconic fictional figures, a medium for a horrifying experi-
ence the audience never wants to end.
Going further, we can see Penny Dreadful itself as a medium whose
gleefully boundary-breaking mashup brings together plot lines from
nineteenth-­century English novels; memes from dime Western novels and
Grand Guignol melodramas; characters from Frankenstein (1818) to
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), with sidelong glances at Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo [Episode
3.2] and the Marquis de Sade’s long-suffering heroine Justine; and
twentieth-­century monster movies from The Exorcist (1973) to An
American Werewolf in London (1981). In the process, it reveals unex-
pected kinships among them by casting a given character like Victor
Frankenstein in diverse roles in simultaneously unfolding stories and ret-
rospectively reveals a tradition of the other Victorians which, like “the
broken circuit” (1) Richard Chase describes as a defining feature of the
classic American novels, challenges and subverts the socially cohesive tra-
dition long associated with the contemporaneous English novelists Scott,
Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy: a
counter-­tradition whose hallmarks are trauma, monstrosity, isolation,
transgression, revolution, and protean, uncontrollable transformation,
one that implies a view of adaptation as a liminal conduit or medium quite
as potent and suggestive as more traditional views of adaptation that
emphasize fidelity, coherence, continuity, and transparency.
Imagine how our ways of thinking about the contemporary mediascape
and its historical antecedents might change if we thought of adaptation as
a medium like the psychic mediums who offer to put grieving relatives and
friends in touch with the loved ones they have lost to death. Although
these mediums cannot bring the dead back to life, they can provide them
further opportunities to speak across what might seem to be an unbridge-
able abyss. Adaptation, in this model, can be as seductive, as transgressive,
and as treacherous as Madame Kali—that is, as Evelyn Poole—who is a hot
medium, like McLuhan’s movies, for the exceptionally vivid, high-­
definition spirits she summons, and a cool medium, like McLuhan’s televi-
sion, for the active participation those spirits demand from Vanessa Ives.
28 T. LEITCH

So too specific adaptations, and adaptation in general, can be at once hot

and cool.
Madame Kali is of course far from the only medium available as a model
for adaptation. She may be set alongside the mediums Arthur Conan
Doyle and Harry Houdini became convinced could speak for their own
beloved dead, the burlesque figure of Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s
1941 play Blithe Spirit, and the transparently fraudulent mediums in real
life or any number of mystery novels who ply their trade by promising
something they have no intention of delivering. Just as the medium of
adaptation can be figured as a shaman, a psychic, a magician, a scripted
performer, a con man, or a mystery, audiences for this medium can think
of the texts the medium promises to channel as their loved ones, their
estranged ones, ghosts, familiars, or texts they wish or fear to see defamil-
iarized. And different audiences can adopt an attitude of unquestioning
faith, conditional faith, broad skepticism, determination to expose the
fraud of adaptation, and eagerness to enjoy a performance that allows their
willing suspension of disbelief—or, more generally, of interrogating both
the adapting texts and the adapted texts Linda Hutcheon has said are
“haunted” (6) by the texts they have adapted.
Of the many possible valences mediums suggest for adaptation and its
audiences, one area in particular stands out. Seances like the one in Penny
Dreadful are highly ritualized performances whose audiences are gov-
erned by norms of communal decorum and collective behavior as tightly
scripted as that of the medium herself. The requirements that participants
in seances sit in a circle, take each other’s hands, and remain silent unless
the medium or the spirits she invokes specifically ask a particular member
of the circle to speak are ritual requirements to contain the possibility of a
radically indecorous, boundary-breaking experience in which hell may lit-
erally break loose. It is all the more striking that in fictional seances, the
ritual norms designed to subordinate individual reactions that may include
skepticism, denial, or boredom to collective behavior invariably have the
opposite effect of singling out a single member of the circle for a traumatic
visitation. Vanessa’s sudden and terrifying visitation by the spirits Madame
Kali has summoned in Penny Dreadful takes its place alongside Madame
Arcati’s comically unintentional summoning of the spirit of Charles
Considine’s late first wife in Blithe Spirit. The same pattern appears in dif-
ferent terms in the seances in Dorothy Sayers’s Unnatural Death (1925),
Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery (1931), Carter Dickson’s The
Plague Court Murders (1934), Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear
 2 THE MEDIUM IS THE MODEL 29

(1943), Hake Talbot’s Rim of the Pit (1944), Paul Gallico’s The Hand of
Mary Constable (1964), and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good
Omens (2006). These mediums are both hot, because they promise to
summon spirits who can provide vital but otherwise inaccessible data, and
cool, because they end up provoking specific members of their audience to
react to those spirits in highly interactive ways. Whatever their tone or
their original intent, the fact that seances are tightly scripted communal
experiences that invariably overrun their boundaries to become traumatic
experiences for individual participants rather than the entire community
reminds us that the medium of adaptation is equally tightly scripted and
transgressive, individual and collective.
There are many other ways that considering adaptation as a medium
might change our understanding of adaptation. We might be more
inclined to consider adaptation its own thing rather than a relation, a
medial rather than an intermedial practice. Or we might invert the argu-
ment and use its medial status to further interrogate our assumptions
about the ascription of identity to individual texts. In the same way, think-
ing of adaptation as a medium could change the way we thought about
media generally. We might be more inclined to see media as practices
rather than resources. We might be more inclined to ascribe agency to
media instead of considering them mere affordances. Or we might follow
John Durham Peters in looking more broadly at the natural, non-human
nature of all adaptation and all media. Mediums like Madame Kali are
celebrated for allowing remote presences to speak, a very specific power
they share with adaptations. But they also have at least two much less
widely remarked powers: they teach their audience how to listen more
closely and attentively, and they remind us of the ethical dimensions of
creating and interpreting texts. Imagine the possibilities if we thought of
adaptation, not only as a new way of allowing dead texts to speak but as an
invitation to listen better and to be especially mindful as we did of the eth-
ics of writing and reading.

Works Cited
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Doubleday, 1957.
Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and
ElasTEXTity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed,
Routledge, 2013.
30 T. LEITCH

McFarland, Melanie. “How Penny Dreadful’s Surprise Series Finale Betrayed Its
Best Character.” Vox, 30 Jun. 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/6/30/
12053744/penny-­dreadful-­finale-­recap-­vanessa-­ives-­dies.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw–
Hill, 1965.
Patten, Dominic. “Penny Dreadful Ends after 3 Seasons, Series Creator &
Showtime Boss Confirm.” Deadline Hollywood, 20 Jun. 2016, https://dead-
line.com/2016/06/penny-­d readful-­e nds-­a fter-­t hree-­s easons-eva-­g reen-
john-­logan-­showtime-­david-­nevins-­patti-­smith-­video-­1201775483/.
“Penny Dreadful (TV series).” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Penny_Dreadful_(TV_series).
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental
Media. U of Chicago P, 2015.
Thurman, Trace. “Penny Dreadful Was Meant to End After Three Seasons? I’m
Not Buying It.” Bloody Disgusting, 21 Jun. 2016, https://bloody-­disgusting.
com/editorials/3395635/penny-­dreadful-­finale-­lies/.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925.
Another random document with
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your news to my father, Pelides. Tell, him about my 35
shocking deeds, about his degenerate Neoptolemus,
and do not forget. Now die.’ With these words he
dragged him to the very altar, palsied and sliding in a pool
of his son’s blood, wreathed his left hand in his hair, and
with his right flashed forth and sheathed in his side the
sword to the hilt. Such was the end of Priam’s fortunes,
such the fatal lot that fell upon him, with Troy blazing
and Pergamus in ruins before his eyes—upon him, once 5
the haughty ruler of those many nations and kingdoms,
the sovereign lord of Asia! There he lies on the shore,
a gigantic trunk, a head severed from the shoulders, a
body without a name.

“Now, for the first time grim horror prisoned me round—I 10

was wildered—there rose up the image of my dear
father, as I saw the king, his fellow in age, breathing out
his life through that ghastly wound. There rose up Creusa[137]
unprotected, my house, now plundered, and the chance to
which I had left my little Iulus. I cast my eyes back and 15
look about to see what strength there is round me. All
had forsaken me, too tired to stay; they had leapt to the
ground, or dropped helplessly into the flames. And now
I was there alone. When lodged in the temple of Vesta,
and crouching mutely in its darkest recess, the daughter of 20
Tyndareus[138] meets my eye; the brilliant blaze gives light
to my wandering feet and ranging glance. Yes, she in her
guilty fears, dreading at once the Teucrians whom the
overthrow of Pergamus had made her foes, and the vengeance
of the Danaans, and the wrath of the husband she 25
abandoned—she, the common fiend of Troy and of her
country, had hid herself away, and was sitting in hateful
solitude at the altar. My spirit kindled into flame—a
fury seized me to avenge my country in its fall, and to do
justice on a wretch. ‘So she is to see Sparta and her 30
native Mycenæ again in safety, and is to move as a queen
in a triumph of her own? She is to look upon her lord
and her old home, her children and her parents, with a
crowd of our Trojan ladies and Phrygian captives to wait
on her? Shall it be for this that Priam has died by the 35
sword, that Troy has been burnt with fire, that the Dardan
shore has gushed so oft with the sweat of blood? No,
never—for though there are no proud memories to be
won by vengeance on a woman, no laurels to be reaped from
a conquest like this, yet the extinction of so base a life
and the exaction of vengeance so merited will count as a
praise, and it will be a joy to have glutted my spirit with
the flame of revenge and slaked the thirsty ashes of those 5
I love.’ Such were the wild words I was uttering, such
the impulse of my infuriate heart, when suddenly there
appeared to me, brighter than I had ever seen her before,
and shone forth in clear radiance through the night, my
gracious mother, all her deity confessed, with the same 10
mien and stature by which she is known to the dwellers
in heaven. She seized me by the hand and stayed me,
seconding her action with these words from her roseate
lips; ‘My son, what mighty agony is it that stirs up
this untamed passion? What means your frenzy? or 15
whither has fled your care for me? Will you not first see
where you have left your father Anchises, spent with age
as he is? whether your wife, Creusa, be yet alive, and
your child, Ascanius? All about them the Grecian armies
are ranging to and fro, and were not my care exerted to 20
rescue them, ere this they had been snatched by the flame,
devoured by the foeman’s sword. It is not the hated
beauty of the daughter of Tyndareus, the Spartan woman—not
the reviled Paris. No, it is heaven, unpitying
heaven that is overturning this great empire and levelling 25
Troy from its summit. See here—for I will take away
wholly the cloud whose veil, cast over your eyes, dulls
your mortal vision and darkles round you damp and
thick—do you on your part shrink in naught from your
mother’s commands, nor refuse to obey the instructions 30
she gives. Here, where you see huge masses rent asunder,
and stones wrenched from stones, and blended torrents
of smoke and dust, is Neptune with his mighty trident
shaking the walls and upheaving the very foundations;
here is Juno, cruellest of foes, posted at the entry of the 35
Scæan gate, and summoning in tones of fury from the
ships her confederate band, herself girt with steel like them.
Look behind you—there is Tritonian Pallas, seated already
on the summit of our towers, in the lurid glare of
her storm-cloud and grim Gorgon’s head. The great
Father himself is nerving the Danaans with courage and
strength for victory—himself leading the gods against
our Dardan forces. Come, my son, catch at flight while 5
you may and bring the struggle to an end. I will not leave
you, till I have set you in safety at your father’s door.’
She had ceased, and veiled herself at once in night’s
thickest shadows. I see a vision of awful shapes—mighty
presences of gods arrayed against Troy. 10

“Then, indeed, I beheld all Ilion sinking into flame, and

Neptune’s city, Troy, overturned from its base. Even as
an ancient ash on the mountain-top, which woodmen have
hacked with steel and repeated hatchet strokes, and are
trying might and main to dislodge—it keeps nodding 15
menacingly, its leafy head palsied and shaken, till at
last, gradually overborne by wound after wound, it has
given its death-groan, and fallen uprooted in ruined
length along the hill. I come down, and, following my
heavenly guide, thread my way through flames and foemen, 20
while weapons glance aside and flames retire.

“Now when at last I had reached the door of my father’s

house, that old house I knew so well, my sire, whom it
was my first resolve to carry away high up the hills—who
was the first object I sought—refuses to survive the 25
razing of Troy and submit to banishment. ‘You, whose
young blood is untainted, whose strength is firmly based
and self-sustained, it is for you to think of flight. For me,
had the dwellers in heaven willed me to prolong my life,
they would have preserved for me my home. It is enough 30
and more than enough to have witnessed one sack, to
have once outlived the capture of my city. Here, O
here as I lie, bid farewell to my corpse and begone. I will
find me a warrior’s death. The enemy will have mercy on
me, and my spoils will tempt him. The loss of a tomb 35
will fall on me lightly. Long, long have I been a clog on
time, hated of heaven and useless to earth, from the day
when the father of gods and sovereign of men blasted me
with the wind of his lightning, and laid on me the finger
of flame.’[139]

“Such the words he kept on repeating and continued

unshaken, while we were shedding our hearts in tears—Creusa,
my wife, and Ascanius and my whole house, 5
imploring my father not to be bent on dragging
all with him to ruin, and lending his weight to the avalanche
of destiny. But he refuses, and will not be moved
from his purpose or his home. Once more I am plunging
into battle, and choosing death in the agony of my 10
wretchedness—for what could wisdom or fortune do
for me now? What, my father? that I could stir a step
to escape, leaving you behind? was this your expectation?
could aught so shocking fall from a parent’s lips? No—if
it is the will of heaven that naught of this mighty city 15
should be spared—if your purpose is fixed, and you find
pleasure in throwing yourself and yours on Troy’s blazing
pile, the door stands open for the death you crave. Pyrrhus
will be here in a moment, fresh from bathing in
Priam’s blood—Pyrrhus, who butchers the son before the 20
father’s face, who butchers the father at the altar. Gracious
mother! was it for this that thou rescuest me from fire and
sword—all that I may see the foe in the heart of my
home’s sanctuary—may see my Ascanius, and my father,
and my Creusa by them sacrificed in a pool of each other’s 25
blood? My arms, friends, bring me my arms! the call
of the day of death rings in the ears of the conquered.
Give me back to the Danaans, let me return and renew the
combat. Never shall this day see us all slaughtered unresisting. 30

“Now I gird on my sword again, and was buckling and

fitting my shield to my left arm, and making my way out
of the house—when lo! my wife on the threshold began
to clasp and cling to my feet, holding out my little Iulus to
his father. ‘If it is to death you are going, then carry us 35
with you to death and all, but if experience gives you any
hope in the arms you are resuming, let your first stand be
made at your home. To whom, think you, are you leaving
your little Iulus—your father, and me who was once
styled your wife?’

“Thus she was crying, while her moaning filled the

house, when a portent appears, sudden and marvellous to
relate. Even while the hands and eyes of his grieving 5
parents were upon him, lo, a flickering tongue of flame
on the top of Iulus’ head was seen to shoot out light,
playing round his soft curly locks with innocuous contact
and pasturing about his temples. We are all hurry and
alarm, shaking out his blazing hair and quenching the 10
sacred fire with water from the spring—but Anchises
my father raised his eyes in ecstasy to heaven, directing
hand and voice to the stars: ‘Almighty Jove, if any
prayer can bow thy will, look down on us—’tis all I crave—and
if our piety have earned requital, grant us thy 15
succour, father, and ratify the omen we now see.’ Scarce
had the old man spoken, when there came a sudden peal
of thunder on the left, and a star fell from heaven and
swept through the gloom with a torchlike train and a
blaze of light. Over the top of the house we see it pass, 20
and mark its course along the sky till it buries itself lustrously
in Ida’s wood—then comes a long furrowed line
of light, and a sulphurous smoke fills the space all about.
Then at length overcome, my father raises himself towards
the sky, addresses the gods, and does reverence to the 25
sacred meteor: ‘No more, no more delay from me. I
follow your guidance, and am already in the way by which
you would lead me. Gods of my country! preserve my
house, preserve my grandchild. Yours in this augury—your
shield is stretched over Troy. Yes, my son, I 30
give way, and shrink not from accompanying your flight.’
He said—and by this the blaze is heard louder and louder
through the streets, and the flames roll their hot volumes
nearer. ‘Come then, dear father, take your seat on my
back, my shoulders shall support you, nor shall I feel the 35
task a burden. Fall things as they may, we twain will
share the peril, share the deliverance. Let my little Iulus
walk by my side, while my wife follows our steps at a
distance. You, our servants, attend to what I now say.
As you leave the city there is a mound, where stands an
ancient temple of Ceres all alone, and by it an old cypress,
observed these many years by the reverence of our sires.
This shall be our point of meeting in one place from 5
many quarters. You, my father, take in your hand these
sacred things, our country’s household gods. For me, just
emerged from this mighty war, with the stains of carnage
fresh upon me, it were sacrilege to touch them, till I
have cleansed me in the running stream.’ 10

“So saying, I spread out my shoulders, bow my neck,

cover them with a robe, a lion’s tawny hide, and take up
the precious burden. My little Iulus has fastened his
hand in mine, and is following his father with ill-matched
steps, my wife comes on behind. On we go, keeping in the 15
shade—and I, who erewhile quailed not for a moment at
the darts that rained upon me or at the masses of Greeks
that barred my path, now am scared by every breath of air,
startled by every sound, fluttered as I am, and fearing alike
for him who holds my hand and him I carry. And now I 20
was nearing the gates, and the whole journey seemed
accomplished,
when suddenly the noise of thick trampling
feet came to my ear, and my father looks onward through
the darkness. ‘Son, son,’ he cries, ‘fly: they are upon
us. I distinguish the flashing of their shields and the 25
gleam of their steel.’ In this alarm some unfriendly
power perplexed and took away my judgment. For,
while I was tracking places where no track was, and
swerving from the wonted line of road, woe is me! destiny
tore from me my wife Creusa. Whether she stopped, 30
or strayed from the road, or sat down fatigued, I never
knew—nor was she ever restored to my eyes in life.
Nay, I did not look back to discover my loss, or turn my
thoughts that way till we had come to the mound and
temple of ancient Ceres; then at last, when all were 35
mustered, she alone was missing, and failed those who
should have travelled with her, her son and husband both.
Whom of gods or men did my upbraiding voice spare?
what sight in all the ruin of the city made my heart bleed
more? Ascanius and Anchises my father and the Teucrian
household gods I give to my comrades’ care, and lodge
them in the winding glade. I repair again to the city
and don my shining armour. My mind is set to try every 5
hazard again, and retrace my path through the whole of
Troy, and expose my life to peril once more. First
I repair again to the city walls, and the gate’s dark entry
by which I had passed out. I track and follow my footsteps
back through the night, and traverse the ground 10
with my eye. Everywhere my sense is scared by the
horror, scared by the very stillness. Next I betake me
home, in the hope, the faint hope that she may have turned
her steps thither. The Danaans had broken in and were
lodged in every chamber. All is over—the greedy flame 15
is wafted by the wind to the roof, the fire towers triumphant—the
glow streams madly heavenwards. I pass
on, and look again at Priam’s palace and the citadel. There
already in the empty cloisters, yes, in Juno’s sanctuary,
chosen guards, Phœnix and Ulysses the terrible, were 20
watching the spoil. Here are gathered the treasures of
Troy torn from blazing shrines, tables of gods, bowls of
solid gold, and captive vestments in one great heap. Boys
and mothers stand trembling all about in long array.

“Nay, I was emboldened even to fling random cries 25

through the darkness. I filled the streets with shouts, and
in my agony called again and again on my Creusa with unavailing
iteration. As I was thus making my search and
raving unceasingly the whole city through, the hapless
shade, the spectre of my own Creusa appeared in my 30
presence—a likeness larger than the life. I was aghast,
my hair stood erect, my tongue clove to my mouth, while
she began to address me thus, and relieve my trouble
with words like these: ‘Whence this strange pleasure
in indulging frantic grief, my darling husband? It is 35
not without Heaven’s will that these things are happening:
that you should carry your Creusa with you on your journey
is forbidden by fate, forbidden by the mighty ruler
of heaven above. You have long years of exile, a vast
expanse of ocean to traverse—and then you will arrive
at the land of Hesperia, where Tiber, Lydia’s river, rolls
his gentle volumes through rich and cultured plains.
There you have a smiling future, a kingdom and a royal 5
bride waiting your coming. Dry your tears for Creusa,
your heart’s choice though she be. I am not to see the
face of Myrmidons or Dolopes in their haughty homes,
or to enter the service of some Grecian matron—I, a
Dardan princess, daughter by marriage of Venus the immortal. 10
No, I am kept in this country by heaven’s
mighty mother. And now farewell, and continue to love
your son and mine. Thus having spoken, spite of my
tears, spite of the thousand things I longed to say, she left
me and vanished into unsubstantial air. Thrice, as I 15
stood, I essayed to fling my arms round her neck—thrice
the phantom escaped the hands that caught at it in vain—impalpable
as the wind, fleeting as the wings of sleep.
“So passed my night, and such was my return to my
comrades. Arrived there, I find with wonder their band 20
swelled by a vast multitude of new companions, matrons
and warriors both, an army mustered for exile, a crowd
of the wretched. From every side they were met, prepared
in heart as in fortune to follow me over the sea to
any land where I might take them to settle. And now 25
the morning star was rising over Ida’s loftiest ridge
with the day in its train—Danaan sentinels were blocking
up the entry of the gates, and no hope of succour appeared.
I retired at last, took up my father, and made for the
mountains. 30
 BOOK III
“After that it had seemed well to the powers above to
overthrow Asia’s fortunes and Priam’s guiltless nation;
after that Ilion fell headlong from its pride, and Troy,
which Neptune reared, became one levelled smoking ruin,
we are driven by auguries from heaven to look elsewhere 5
for the exile’s home in lands yet unpeopled. We build us
a fleet under the shadow of Antandros,[140] and the range of
our own Phrygian Ida, all uncertain whither fate may
carry us, where it may be our lot to settle, and muster
men for sailing. Scarcely had summer set in, when my 10
father, Anchises, was bidding us spread our sails to destiny.
Then I give my last tearful look to my country’s shores
and her harbours, and those plains where Troy once stood
but stands no longer. A banished man, I am wafted into
the deep with my comrades and my son, my household 15
gods and their mighty brethren.

“In the distance lies the land of the war-god, inhabited,

in vast extent—the Thracians are its tillers—subject
erewhile to Lycurgus’[141] savage sway, bound by old hospitality
to Troy, their household gods friends of ours, while 20
our star yet shone. Hither I am wafted, and on the
bending line of coast trace the outline of a city, a commencement
made in an evil hour, and call the new nation
Æneadæ,[142] after my own name.

“I was sacrificing to my parent, Dione’s[143] daughter, and 25

the rest of the gods, that they might bless the work I
had begun, and was slaying to the heavenly monarch of the
powers above a bull of shining whiteness on the shore.
It happened that there was a mound near, on whose top
were plants of cornel, and a myrtle bristling thick with 30
spearlike wands. I drew near, and essayed to pull up
from the ground the green forest growth, that I might
have leafy boughs wherewith to shadow the altar, when I
see a portent dreadful and marvellous to tell. For the
first tree that I pull up from the soil, severing its roots, 5
from that tree trickle drops of black blood, staining the
earth with gore. For me, a freezing shudder palsies my
frame, and my chilled blood curdles with affright. Again
I go on to pluck the reluctant fibres of a second tree, and
thus probe the hidden cause to the bottom; as surely 10
from the bark of that second tree the black blood follows.
Much musing in my mind, I began to call on the nymphs
of the wood, and Gradivus,[144] our father, patron of the land
of Thrace, that they might duly turn the appearance to
good, and make the heavy omen light. But when I come 15
to tear up a third spear-shaft with a still greater effort,
straining with my knees against the sand which pressed on
them—ought I to tell the tale or hold my peace?—a lamentable
groan is heard from the bottom of the mound, and
the utterance of a human voice reaches my ear: ‘Why, 20
Æneas, mangle a wretch like me? Spare me at length in
my grave—spare those pious hands the stain of guilt.
It was not an alien to you that Troy bore in bearing me—it
is no alien’s blood that is trickling from the stem. Ah!
fly from this land of cruelty, fly from this shore of greed, 25
for I am Polydorus. Here I lie, pierced and buried by a
growing crop of spears that has shot into sharp javelins.’

“Then, indeed, terror, blank and irresolute, came over

me—I was aghast—my hair stood erect, my tongue
clove to my mouth. Yes, this Polydorus had long ago 30
been sent secretly by Priam, unhappy then as ever, with
a vast weight of gold, to be brought up by the king of
Thrace, when he had already come to despair of the arms
of Dardania, and saw the siege folding closer round his
city. When the power of the Trojans had been broken, 35
and their star set, the Thracian followed Agamemnon’s
fortunes, and joined the standard of the conqueror—every
tie of duty is snapped—he murders Polydorus, and
by violence possesses himself of the gold. Cursed lust of
gold, to what dost thou not force the heart of man? After
the cold shuddering had ceased to tingle in my marrow,
I lay this portent from heaven before the select senate
of our nation, and my father as their chief, and ask them 5
what they think. All are of the same mind, to depart from
the land of crime, to leave the home of violated friendship,
and indulge our fleet with the gales that wooed it. So we
give Polydorus a solemn funeral: earth is heaped high
upon his mound; there stand the altars reared to his 10
manes,[145] in all the woe of dark fillets and sad-coloured
cypress: and round them are daughters of Ilion, their
hair unbound in mourner fashion: we offer bowls of new
milk warm and frothing, and dishes of consecrated blood:
so we lay the spirit to rest in its grave, and with a loud 15
voice give the farewell call.[146]

“Then, when the deep first looks friendly, and the

winds offer a smooth sea, and the south’s gentle whisper invites
us to the main, our crews haul down their ships and
crowd the shore. We sail out of the harbour, land and 20
town leaving us fast. There is a sacred country with
water all round it, chief favourite of the mother of the
Nereids and the god of the Ægean. Once it drifted among
the coasts and seaboards round about, till the heavenly
archer in filial gratitude moored it to the rock of Myconos 25
and to Gyaros, and gave it to be a fixed dwelling-place
henceforth, and to laugh at the winds. Hither I sail:
here it is that in a sheltered harbour our weary crews
find gentlest welcome. We land, and worship the city of
Apollo. King Anius, king of men at once and priest of 30
Phœbus, his temples wreathed with fillets and hallowed
bay, comes running up; in Anchises he owns an old friend,
we knit hand to hand in hospitality and enter his roof.
“Behold me now worshipping the temple of the god,
built of ancient stone. ‘Give us, god of Thymbra,[147] a home 35
that we can call our own: give us weary men a walled
habitation, a posterity, a city that will last: keep from
ruin Troy’s second Pergamus, all that was left by the
Danaans and their ruthless Achilles! Who is our guide?
Whither wouldst thou have us go? where set up our
roof-tree? Vouchsafe us a response, great father, and
steal with power upon our souls!’

“Scarce had I spoken, when methought suddenly came 5

a trembling on the whole place, temple-gate and hallowed
bay, a stir in the mountain from height to depth, a muttering
from the tripod as the door of the shrine flew open.
We fall low on earth, and a voice is wafted to our ears:
‘Sons of Dardanus, strong to endure, the land which first 10
gave you birth from your ancestral tree, the same land
shall welcome you back, restored to its fruitful bosom:
seek for your old mother till you find her. There it is
that the house of Æneas shall set up a throne over all
nations, they, and their children’s children, and those 15
that shall yet come after.’ Thus Phœbus; and a mighty
burst succeeds of wild multitudinous joy, all asking as one
man what that city is—whither is Phœbus calling the
wanderers, and bidding them return. Then my father,
revolving the traditions of men of old: ‘Listen,’ he cries, 20
‘lords of Troy, and learn where your hopes are. Crete
lies in the midst of the deep, the island of mighty Jove.
There is Mount Ida, and there the cradle of our race.
It has a hundred peopled cities, a realm of richest plenty.
Thence it was that our first father, Teucer, if I rightly 25
recall what I have heard, came in the beginning to the
Rhœtean coast, and fixed on the site of empire: Ilion and
the towers of Pergamus had not yet been reared: the
people dwelt low in the valley. Hence came our mighty
mother, the dweller on Mount Cybele, and the symbols 30
of the Corybants, and the forest of Ida: hence the inviolate
mystery of her worship, and the lions harnessed
to the car of their queen. Come, then, and let us follow
where the ordinance of heaven points the way: let us
propitiate the winds, and make for the realm of Gnossus[148]—the 35
voyage is no long one—let but Jupiter go with us,
and the third day will land our fleet on the Cretan shore.’
He said, and offered on the altar the sacrifice that was
meet—a bull to Neptune, a bull to thee, beauteous
Apollo—a black lamb to the storm-wind, to the favouring
Zephyrs a white one.

“Fame flies abroad that King Idomeneus[149] has been

driven to quit his paternal realm, that the shores of Crete 5
are abandoned, houses cleared of the enemy, dwellings
standing empty to receive us. So we leave Ortygia’s
harbour, and fly along the deep, past Naxos’ bacchant
mountains, and green Donysa, Olearos, and snowy Paros,
and the Cyclades sprinkled over the waves, and seas thick 10
sown with islands. Up rises the seaman’s shout amid
strain and struggle—each encourages his comrades,
‘For Crete and our forefathers, ho!’ A wind gets up
from the stern and escorts us on our way, and at length we
are wafted to the Curetes’ time-honoured shore. 15

“And now the site is chosen, and I am rearing a city’s

walls and calling it Pergamia: the new nation is proud
to bear the name of the old: I bid them love hearth and
home, and raise and roof the citadel. Already the ships
had been hauled up high and dry on the shore, the crews 20
were busied with marriage and tilling the new country, and
I was appointing laws to live by, and houses to dwell in—when
suddenly there came on the human frame a wasting
sickness, shed from the whole tainted expanse of the sky,
a piteous blight on trees and crops, a year charged with 25
death. There were men leaving the lives they loved, or
dragging with them the bodies that burdened them,
while Sirius baked the fields into barrenness, the herbage
was parching, the corn was sickening, and would not
yield its food. Back again to Phœbus and his Ortygian 30
oracle over the sea my father bids us go, and there sue for
grace, asking the god to what haven he means to bring our
overtoiled fortunes, whence he orders us to seek for help
in our sufferings—whither to direct our course.

“It was night and all living things on earth were in the 35
power of sleep, when methought the sacred images of the
gods, the Phrygian household deities, whom I had borne
away with me from Troy, even from the midst of the blazing
town, stood before my eyes as I lay in slumber, clear in
a flood of light, where the full moon was streaming through
the windows of the house. Then they began to address
me thus, and relieve my trouble with words like these:
‘The answer which Apollo has ready to give you when you 5
reach Ortygia, he delivers here, sending us, see, of his own
motion to your very door. We, the followers of you and
your fortune since Dardanland sunk in flame—we,
the comrades of the fleet which you have been guiding over
the swollen main—we it is that will raise to the stars the 10
posterity that shall come after you, and crown your city
with imperial sway. Be it yours to build mighty walls
for mighty dwellers, and not abandon the task of flight for
its tedious length. Change your settlement: it is not this
coast that the Delian god moved you to accept—not in 15
Crete that Apollo bade you sit down. No, there is a
place—the Greeks call it Hesperia[150]—a land old in
story, strong in arms and in the fruitfulness of its soil—the
Œnotrians were its settlers. Now report says that
later generations have called the nation Italian from the 20
name of their leader. That is our true home: thence
sprung Dardanus and father Iasius, the first founder of our
line. Quick! rise, and tell the glad tale, which brooks no
question, to your aged sire; tell him that he is to look for
Corythus[151] and the country of Ausonia. Jupiter bars you 25
from the fields of Dicte.’[152] Thus astonished by visions
and voices of heaven—for sleep it was not: no—methought
I saw them face to face, their wreathed locks and
their features all in full view; and a cold sweat, too,
trickled down my whole frame. I leap from the bed, and 30
direct upturned hand and voice to heaven, and pour on the
hearth the undefiled libation. The sacrifice paid, with
joy I inform Anchises, and expound the whole from first to
last. He owns the double pedigree and the rival ancestors,
and his own new mistake about the two old countries. 35
Then he says: ‘My son, trained in the school of Troy’s
destiny, Cassandra’s was the one voice which used to
chant to me of this chance. Now I recollect, this was the
fortune she presaged as appointed for our line, calling often
for Hesperia, often for the land of Italy. But could anyone
think that Teucrians would ever reach the Hesperian
shore? Could Cassandra’s prophesying in those days gain
any one’s credence? Let us give way to Phœbus, and 5
follow the better course enjoined.’ He said, and with one
consent we gladly obey. So we quit this settlement as we
quitted the last, and leaving a few behind, set sail, and
make our hollow barque fly over the vast world of waters.

“Soon as the ships had gained the mid-sea, and land was 10
no more to be seen, sky on every side, on every side ocean,
then came a murky storm-cloud and stood over my head,
charged with night and winter tempest, and darkness
ruffled the billow’s crest. At once the winds lay the sea in
heaps, and the waters rise mountains high: a scattered 15
fleet, we are tossed upon the vast abyss: clouds enshrouded
the day, and dank night robbed us of the sky, while fire
flashes momently from the bursting clouds. We are
dashed out of our track, and wander blindly over the blind
waters. Nay, even Palinurus owns he cannot tell day 20
from night in a heaven like this, or recollect the footpath
in the watery wilderness. Three dreary suns, blotted by
blinding darkness, we wander on the deep: three nights
with never a star. On the fourth day, at last, land was
first seen to rise, and mountains with curling smoke 25
wreaths to dawn in distant prospect. Down drop the
sails: we rise on our oars: incessantly the crews, straining
every nerve, toss the foam and sweep the blue.

“Escaped from the sea, I am first welcomed by the coast

of the Strophades—the Strophades are known by the 30
name Greece gave them, islands in the great Ionian, which
fell Celæno[153] and the rest of the Harpies have made their
home, ever since Phineus’[154] doors were closed against
them, and fear drove them from the board which once fed
them. A more baleful portent than this—a fiercer plague 35
of heaven’s vengeance never crawled out of the Stygian
flood. Birds with maiden’s faces, a foul discharge, crooked
talons, and on their cheeks the pallor of eternal famine.

“On our arrival here, and entering the harbour, see! we

behold luxuriant herds of oxen grazing dispersedly in the
fields, and goats all along the grass, with none to tend them.
On we rush, sword in hand, inviting the gods and Jove
himself to share the spoil with us: and then on the winding 5
shore pile up couches for the banquet, and regale on the
dainty fare. But on a sudden, with an appalling swoop
from the hills, the Harpies are upon us, flapping their
wings with a mighty noise—they tear the food in pieces,
and spoil all with their filthy touch, while fearful screeches 10
blend with foul smells. Again, in a deep retreat under a
hollow rock, with trees and crisp foliage all about us, we set
out the board and put new fire on new altars. Again,
from another quarter of the sky, out of their hidden lair,
comes the troop, all rush and sound, flying about the prey 15
with their hooked talons, tainting the food with their
loathsome mouths. I give the word to my comrades to
seize their arms and wage war with the fell tribe. As I
ordered they do—they arrange their swords in hiding
about the grass, and cover and conceal their shields. So 20
soon as the noise of their swoop was heard along the winding
shore, Misenus, from his lofty watch-tower, makes the
hollow brass sound the alarm. On rush my comrades, and
essay a combat of a new sort, to spoil with their swords the
plumage of these foul sea-birds. But no violence will 25
ruffle their feathers, no wounds pierce their skin: they are
off in rapid flight high in the air, leaving their half-eaten
prey and their filthy trail behind them. One of them,
Celæno, perches on a rock of vast height—ill-boding
prophetess—and gives vent to words like these: ‘What, 30
is it war, for the oxen you have slain and the bullocks
you have felled, true sons of Laomedon? is it war that
you are going to make on us, to expel us, blameless Harpies,
from our ancestral realm? Take then into your minds
these my words, and print them there. The prophecy 35
which the Almighty Sire imparted to Phœbus, Phœbus
Apollo to me, I, the chief of the Furies, make known to you.
For Italy, I know, you are crowding all sail: well, the winds
shall be at your call as you go to Italy, and you shall be
free to enter its harbours: but you shall not build walls
round your fated city, before fell hunger and your murderous
wrong against us drive you to gnaw and eat up your
very tables.’[155] She said, and her wings carried her swiftly 5
into the wood. But for my friends, a sudden terror curdled
their blood, their hearts died within them; no more arms—no,
we must sue for grace, with vows and prayers, be
the creatures goddesses or fell and loathsome birds. And
my father Anchises, spreading his hands from the shore, 10
invokes the mighty powers, and ordains meet sacrifice—‘Great
gods, forefend these menaces! Great gods, avert a
chance like this, and let your blessing shield your worshippers!’
Then he bids us tear our moorings from the shore,
and uncoil and stretch our ropes. 15

“The winds swell our sails, we scud over the foaming

surge, where gale and pilot bid us go. Now rising from
the wave are seen the woods of Zacynthos,[156] and Dulichium,
and Samos, and the tall cliffs of Neritos: we fly
past the rocks of Ithaca, Laertes’ realm, breathing a curse 20
for the land that nursed the hard heart of Ulysses. Soon,
too, the storm-capped peaks of Leucata dawn on the
view, and their Apollo, the terror of sailors. In our
weariness we make for him, and enter the little town:
our anchors are thrown from the prow, our sterns ranged 25
on the coast.

“So now, masters of the land beyond our hope, we perform

lustrations to Jove, and set the altars ablaze with
our vows, and solemnize the shores of Actium[157] with the
native games of Troy. My comrades strip, and practise 30
the wrestle of the old country, all slippery with oil: what
joy to have passed in safety by all those Argive cities,
and held on our flight through the heart of the foe!
Meanwhile the sun rolls round the mighty year, and the
north winds of icy winter roughen the sea. A shield of 35
hollow brass, once borne by the great Abas, I fasten up
full on the temple gate, and signalize the deed with a
verse: ‘These arms are the offering of Æneas, won from
his Danaan conquerors.’ Then I give the word to leave
the haven and take seat on the benches. Each vying with
each, the crews strike the water and sweep the marble
surface. In due course we hide from view the airy summits 5
of Phæacian[158] land, coast the shore of Epirus, enter
the Chaonian haven, and approach Buthrotum’s lofty
tower.

“Here a rumour of events past belief takes hold of our

ears—that Helenus, son of Priam, is reigning among
Grecian cities, lord of the wife and crown of Pyrrhus, 10
Achilles’ very son, and that Andromache had again been
given to a husband of her own nation. I was astounded:
my heart kindled with a strange longing to have speech
of my old friend, and learn all about this wondrous stroke
of fortune. So I advance into the country from the haven, 15
leaving fleet and coast behind, at the very time when
Andromache, before the city, in a grove, by the wave of
a mock Simois, was celebrating a yearly banquet, the
offering of sorrow, to the dead, and invoking her Hector’s
shade at a tomb called by his name, an empty mound of 20
green turf which she had consecrated to him with two
altars, that she might have the privilege of weeping.
Soon as her wild eye saw me coming with the arms of
Troy all about me, scared out of herself by the portentous
sight, she stood chained to earth while yet gazing—life’s 25
warmth left her frame—she faints, and after long time
scarce finds her speech:—‘Is it a real face that I see?
are those real lips that bring me news? Goddess-born,
are you among the living? or, if the blessed light has left
you, where is my Hector?’ She spoke—her tears flowed 30
freely, and the whole place was filled with her shrieks.
Few, and formed with labour, are the words I address to
her frenzied ear, broken and confused the accents I utter:—‘Aye,
I live, sure enough, and through the worst of
fortunes am dragging on life still. Doubt it not, your eye 35
tells you true. Alas! on what chance have you alit,
fallen from the height where your first husband throned
you? What smile has Fortune bright enough to throw
back on Hector’s Andromache? is it Pyrrhus’ bed you
are still tending?’ She dropped her eyes, and spoke with
bated breath:—‘O blest pre-eminently over all, Priam’s
virgin daughter,[159] bidden to die at the grave of her foe,
under Troy’s lofty walls! she that had not to brook the 5
chance of the lot, or, a slave and a captive, to touch the
bed of her lord and conqueror! While we, after the burning
of our city, carried over this sea and that, have stooped
to the scorn, the youthful insolence of Achilles’ heir, the
slave-mother of his child; he, after this, goes in quest of 10
Leda’s Hermione[160] and her Spartan alliance, and gives me
over to Helenus, the bondwoman to be the bondman’s
mate! Him, however, Orestes, fired by desperate passion
for a ravished bride, and maddened by the frenzy-fiend of
crime, surprises at unawares, and slays at his sire’s own 15