Penny Dreadful: A Few Last Thoughts

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Eva Green, Ferdinand Lyle, Homosexuality, Joan Clayton, Josh Hartnett, Larry Talbot, Lycanthropy, Patti Lupone, Penny Dreadful, Polari, Simon Russell Beale, The Wolfman, Victorian England, Witchcraft

For the past couple of posts, I’ve been covering Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. There were a couple of other small points that I couldn’t really develop into full posts, so I thought I’d just put them together in one quick post.

1. Penny Dreadful riffs on Victorian science-fiction, occult, and horror stories. At least it does in theory. It’s got Frankenstein and his monster, Mina Harker from Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Josh Hartnett’s Wolfman. But as I’ve already pointed out, Frankenstein isn’t a Victorian character; he’s from the Regency period a full two decades prior to the Victorian era. And the Wolfman isn’t a particularly Victorian character either. Although there were a handful of short stories published about lycanthropes in the 19th century, the major Wolfman stories are 20th century. The earliest novel on this theme (that I know of, at least) is 1933’s The Werewolf of Paris. The character in this novel, set in the 1870s, is not a wolfman, but a classic werewolf (he turns totally into a wolf, rather than a wolf/human hybrid). But the novel helped inspire the 1935 horror film, The Werewolf of London, whose protagonist, played by Harry Hill, is the first Wolfman. Werewolf established two of the key tropes of such films, namely that lycanthropy is spread by bites and that transformation into a werewolf is governed by the moon. That in turn helped inspire 1941’s The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. as the unfortunate title character. Maybe if we average out the Regency era Frankenstein with the Depression era Wolf Man, we get the late Victorian era. (Incidentally, Josh Hartnett’s character is eventually revealed to be named Ethan Lawrence Talbot, Lawrence Talbot being Lon Chaney Jr’s character in The Wolf Man.)
2. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) watches her witch mentor Joan Clayton (Patti Lupone) burned to death sometime in the 1880s. In reality, the last person executed in the British Isles for witchcraft was the elderly Scottish woman Janet Horne, who was sentenced to detain Scotland, along with her daughter, in 1727. Her daughter managed to escape custody, but Janet was smeared with pitch, paraded through town, and burned alive. Laws decreeing the death penalty for witches were repealed a few years later, so the idea that a group of angry townspeople would burn Joan to death in the 1880s is pretty far-fetched.
3. Simon Russell Beale’s flamboyant homosexual Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle was one of the great charms of season 2. But he has a rather 20th century sense of self. In the last episode he refers to himself as a ‘queen’, using what so far as I know is a term that only emerged in the 1950s.He also describes himself as belonging to a ‘tribe’, but I’m not sure that a 19th century gay man would have thought of himself in those terms. If the show had been more interested in an historically accurate portrayal of homosexuality, it should have had Lyle using polari, a wide-spread British slang system used by homosexual men (among others) in the 19th and 20th century. Polari was a complex mixture of Italian, Romani, London English, rhyming slang, back slang, sailor slang, and thieves’ cant that was employed by gay men to covertly signal their homosexuality to other men and have discrete conversations about sexual activity. For example, “Vada the dolly dish, shame about her naff riah” means “Look at the attractive man, shame about his bad hair.” Although some words (like ‘naff’ in the above example) have become common British slang, polari sadly began to die out as homosexuality won a wider social acceptance in the late 20th century. If you’re interested in polari, check out this short film in which two men have a conversation in it.  (Ignore the number 4–I can’t get the auto-numbering to turn off)
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk

Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I incorrectly wrote that Claude Rains played the Wolf Man in the 1941 movie. While Rains was in the film, it was of course Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role. 

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Penny Dreadful: Vanessa’s Tarot Deck

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Joan Clayton, Patti Lupone, Penny Dreadful, Showtime, Tarot Cards, The Occult, Vanessa Ives, Victorian England

My past few posts have dug into Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. In this (fairly brief post) I’m going to discuss the Tarot cards Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) uses periodically. In the second season, it’s revealed that she got the cards from her witch mentor Joan Clayton (Patti Lupone), a witch who lived from at least the 17th century down to the 1880s. Exactly where and when Joan acquired the deck is never explained, but it seems like it should be fairly old, given that everything else in her house seems to be. So perhaps it’s something she acquired in the 17th or 18th century.

Vanessa’s Tarot deck is purple with white line drawings, and rather pretty, albeit rather sparse on details.

Vanessa’s Tarot Deck

But historically, Tarot cards looked nothing like this, and to judge from the art style, it’s obviously a deck that originated no earlier than the 1990s.In fact, they were designed for the show by Irish graphic artist Anais Chareyre. So while the deck is aesthetically quite nice, it’s wildly anachronistic. They might as well have given Vanessa a Lexus to drive around Victorian London in.

So What Did Tarot Cards Look Like? 

Playing cards arrived in Europe from Mamluk Egypt (probably) in the late 14th century. The earliest surviving decks were created in the 1430s and 40s for the dukes of Milan, and are consequently known as the Visconti-Sforza decks. These decks are thought to be the first to use the non-suit ‘trump’ cards, now usually called the Major Arcana, which feature allegorical images of various sorts. They featured the symbols of the minor suits arranged in geometric patterns and the court and trump cards as figures against dark backgrounds. But no complete set of these cards exist today–the deck as it is currently known is cobbled together from more than a dozen partially-surviving decks.These cards were all hand-painted, because the printing press had not yet been invented.

Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards

The first great age of Tarot cards, however, was the 18th century. The so-called Tarot of Marseilles was probably the most widely-used deck in the period, and its structure closely resembles the modern Tarot deck: 4 suits of Wands, Swords, Cups, and Coins; 4 court cards for each suit, with cards for King, Queen, Knight, and Valet; 21 numbered trump cards that close to the modern ones (some of the names are different, and Death has no name); and an unnumbered Fool. The trumps are individual figures against a blank background.

The show doesn’t give us much to go on, but my guess is that this is the Tarot deck that Joan Clayton would have used. It appears to have originated in the late 1400s, and is documented in France in 1499. The use of playing cards for divinatory purposes goes back to the mid-16th century, but the idea that specific cards had set meanings seems to be an 18th century notion.

There were a wide range of Tarot decks in circulation in the 19th century, but generally speaking, they looked a lot like the Tarot of Marseilles artistically. Some decks began leaving out the non-suit trump cards, because they were an awkward fit for use in card games.

By the late 19th century, Tarot decks were gravitating more toward the style of modern playing cards (and are often called ‘playing tarot’ cards). The Tarot Nouveau was popular in the period of the show, although Vanessa wouldn’t have used that deck, because the Major Arcana (the unique cards like the Moon or the Devil) were stripped out since they weren’t used in tarot games of the period.

Tarot Nouveau

However, Tarot cards didn’t really circulate in England prior to the 1870s. That’s when English occultists took note of the French tradition of Tarot cards for divinatory purposes. So in realty, a 17th century English witch like Joan Clayton probably wouldn’t have had a Tarot deck at all, unless she had spent time in France. Nor were Tarot cards part of English folk magic. The people who were responsible for the rising interest in Tarot cards in England were occultists like Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Eliphas Levi, all of whom were interested in a loftier notion of educated magic that they claimed stretched back to ancient Egypt.

The deck most people are familiar with today, in which each card has a specific scene on it, is called the Rider-Waite Deck or the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck, because it was designed by English occultist Alfred Waite, drawn to his instructions by Pamela Colman Smith, and published William Rider & Sons. It first appeared in 1910, so Vanessa couldn’t have used that deck. And once this deck had been issued, other occultists began producing their own deck in the 1920s and 30, and the genre has proliferated ever since.

Rider-Waite cards

 

Want to Know More?

The Penny Dreadful Tarot is available on Amazon. To judge from the comments, the card-stock is poor, and the imagery on the cards bears no relationship to the traditional readings of the cards, so this is probably a deck better appreciated for its artistry than given serious use. If you want to get a deck of Tarot cards for doing readings, I would suggest the traditional Rider-Waite deck. There’s a reason it’s became the classic deck; its rich symbolism allows for a lot of different readings.

Penny Dreadful: The Devil’s Autobiography

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Ferdinand Lyle, Josh Hartnett, Penny Dreadful, Showtime, Victorian England

In the second season of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, the characters pilfer a box of objects from the British Museum. According to the show, the objects represent the writings of a 11^th century British Carthusian monk who was possessed by a demon. He began writing on whatever he could get his hands on, ultimately scratching words onto an assortment of random objects in a bizarre pidgin language derived from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, and several other languages. This hodgepodge language is referred to repeatedly as Verbis Diablo, “the Devil’s Language”. The resulting text turns out to be a sort of autobiography of a fallen angel. It’s a cool idea, but there are a few problems with it.

• There were no 11^th century British Carthusians. The Carthusian Order was founded in 1084 by the German Bruno of Cologne in the Chartreuse Mountains of France. The order didn’t arrive in England until 1181, when Henry II founded a Carthusian house at Witham as penance for ordering the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. (Fun fact: In the 18^th century, the Carthusians gave their name to green Chartreuse liquor, which they distilled.)
• The collection of objects were apparently housed at this Carthusian monastery and then somehow manage to pass to the British Museum with the collection intact. The fact that this bizarre collection somehow stayed together is somewhere between improbable and miraculous. In 1541, Henry VIII ordered the final dissolution of all English monasteries. The result was the movable property of the monasteries was broken up and scattered. The most important example of this was the monastic libraries, which were for the most part sold off book by book. Modern historians have spent a great deal of energy trying to recreate the catalogs of these lost libraries, and a small number of books have been traced to specific monasteries. In a situation like this, it is hard to imagine that a random collection of worthless objects with gibberish written on them would somehow have stayed together for more than four centuries.
• What makes this even more improbable is that the objects the monk wrote on include a dead bird, a goose-feather quill, and a butterfly the size of a dinner plate. How the hell did any of those things survive nearly a millennium without simply rotting away?
• Verbis diablo is gibberish Latin. Verbis means ‘words’, but diablo doesn’t mean anything in Latin. In Spanish it means ‘Devil’. Proper Latin would be Verbis diaboli, “The Devil’s words”. While verbis can mean ‘language’, it’s not really the most likely way Latin would express the phrase “the Devil’s Language”. A Latin-speaker would probably use lingua (literally, ‘tongue, language’) instead. Perhaps the phrase is supposed to be a pidgin of Latin and Spanish, but that seems unlikely too, since the term seems to be a scholarly one rather than some sort of colloquialism.
• One of the phrases in the autobiography is lupus dei, “the wolf of God”. Josh Hartnett’s Ethan, whose father made him learn Latin as a child, repeatedly mistranslates this phrase as ‘the hound of God’ (the Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle makes this mistake at least once as well). It’s hard to see how anyone who knows Latin as well as Ethan seems to could confuse canis for lupus. Both words are common Latin, about as common as ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’ are in English, and the two words are about as dissimilar in Latin as they are in English. While someone looking at a wolf might mistake it for a dog, the mistake is a fairly implausible one linguistically, especially given that Ethan suffers from lycanthropy and therefore the word for ‘wolf’ probably has some special meaning for him.

 

Want to Know More? 

I got nothing.

I suppose if you want to know more about the history of Satan, you could take a look at Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. There’s also Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages.

Penny Dreadful: The Problem with Frankenstein

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Billie Piper, Dracula, Frankenstein, Henry Treadaway, John Clare, Mary Shelley, Penny Dreadful, Romanticism, Rory Kinnear, Showtime, The Enlightenment, Victorian England

Showtime’s Penny Dreadful is set in the late Victorian era, specifically the early 1890s, and features a cast suggested by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both Frankenstein and his Monster, called Caliban and later John Clare, are prominent characters in the story, which takes place in London. But the series’ version of Frankenstein represents a pretty sharp deviation from Shelley’s character.

 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Although popular imagination views both Dracula and Frankenstein as Victorian works of literature, they come from opposite ends of the 19^th century, and in fact Frankenstein is not a Victorian novel at all, having been published in 1818, just under two decades before Victoria became queen. Frankenstein is roughly contemporary, not with Dracula, which was published in 1897, but with the novels of Jane Austen, all of which were published in the 1810s. And the events of Shelley’s novel are set at an unspecified period in the 18^th century, meaning that Frankenstein probably created his creature around the period of the French Revolution at the latest. So Penny Dreadful’s Frankenstein is a long way from his proper context.

Frankenstein is usually seen as one of the greatest examples of Romantic literature (as well as one of the first works of Science Fiction). The Romantic movement was a reaction against the rationality of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. While the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment sought to use science and human reason to explain all the mysteries of nature, Romantic artists and authors were much more attracted to the grandeur, power, and mysteriousness of nature. Romantic painters loved depicting shadowy moonlight landscapes, medieval buildings ruined by the passage of time, and a contrast between the immensity of the landscape and the smallness of humanity.

Mary Shelley

Whereas the Enlightenment favored the power of reason to explain things, Romantic authors and artists favored the internal experience of their own emotions, which they struggled to express in painting, music, poetry, and prose. The content of their creativity was supposed to emerge from the artist’s own imagination, and to express their inward reality more than the objective external reality. Shelley’s inspiration for her novel was reportedly a waking dream she had. Because Romantics sought to express their own interior feelings, another major theme in Romanticism was the isolation of the individual, both within nature and within society. Romantic characters in novels struggle to convey their feelings to those around them, find themselves overwhelmed by their emotions, and, overcome by a sense of isolation and the inability to communicate with others on a deep level, often commit suicide.

Shelley’s novel explores many of these themes. In her novel, Frankenstein is a brilliant scientist who discovers how to create life. In other words, he uses the tools of science to usurp one of the most mysterious facts of nature, the power of life and death. In doing this, he is transgressing the limits of nature and exploring What Man is Not Meant To Know; Shelley practically created this now-clichéd theme in Science Fiction. Thus from a Romantic point of view, Frankenstein is doing something foolish, and demonstrating the errors of the Enlightenment. The novel describes the process by which he learns the error of his ways.

He creates his Monster through an unnamed process, literally putting together an enormous human body and reanimating it. Both the modern idea of the Monster as being stitched together and the idea of electricity as the tool for its reanimation are later cinematic additions to the story. But the Monster is hideous, and unable to exist in human society, because Frankenstein is not truly the master of life and cannot replicate the beauty of nature, only crudely imitate it.

The Monster is never quite given a name, but there are several references to it as Adam, so that’s what I’ll call it. In contrast to the arrogant Frankenstein, who foolishly blunders into things he doesn’t understand, Adam is the Romantic hero. He is a deeply sensitive man who simply wants to fit into society and find friends, but is unable to do so because of his monstrous appearance. Tormented by his isolation, Adam demands that Frankenstein create a mate for him, but Frankenstein is disgusted by his own efforts and destroyed her, which drives Adam into seeking revenge by killing Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth.

Although Adam is ugly on the outside, he is human on the inside. Frankenstein is just the opposite. Although to outward appearances he is a great and wise man, inwardly he is a sort of monster: selfish, arrogant, obsessed with discovering the secrets of nature and keeping them for himself. He steals corpses to cobble together Adam’s body. He is gradually consumed by his hatred of his creation.

Finally, Adam flees northward into the arctic, pursued by the increasingly weak Frankenstein. Discovered by a ship’s captain, Frankenstein relates his tale. He is wracked by guilt and has came to realize his folly. But he dies before he can destroy his creation. Adam appears to mourn his creator and then declares his intention to commit suicide. He is last seen on an ice floe, drifting into the darkness, still alone in the vastness of nature.

 

Penny Dreadful’s Frankenstein

The series’ Frankenstein (Henry Treadaway) is a far cry from Shelley’s character. Both men are scientists, and Treadaway’s character occasionally voices skeptical, if not atheist viewpoints. But he’s not the moral monster of the novel. He’s quite sensitive and loves Romantic poetry by figures like Wordsworth and Keats, as well as Shakespeare, whereas Shelley’s character is primarily interested in science. Only when he smothers Brona (Billie Piper) in the season 1 finale does he demonstrate any of the arrogant assertion of the power of life and death that so characterizes Frankenstein in the novel, and even then, his act can be viewed as trying to make amends for failing Caliban (Rory Kinnear).

Treadaway as Frankenstein

The biggest issue, for me at least, is a moment in the third episode of season 1 when Caliban explicitly tells Frankenstein “you are a Romantic.” But Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t a Romantic. He’s too arrogantly obsessed with understanding the secrets of nature to be a Romantic. In fact, he’s the anti-Romantic. The whole point of the novel is that Frankenstein’s lack of appreciation for the power of nature causes much sorrow.

The series does a better job of depicting Caliban as a Romantic figure. He too likes poetry, and in the second season takes his name from the Romantic poet John Clare. Like his creator, he is a sensitive soul, and what he wants most of all is what Adam wants, a mate. He demands that Frankenstein reanimate a woman for him, and threatens to kill Frankenstein’s friends until he does so, thus driving Frankenstein to eventually murder Rose Tyler Brona.

Kinnear as Caliban

(One nice thing the series does in the second season is to collapse Frankenstein’s beloved, Elizabeth, with the ‘bride’ he starts to make for Adam in the person of Brona/Lily Frankenstein. That creates an interesting love triangle for Frankenstein and his creation to grapple with. Actually, ‘triangle’ isn’t the right word, because Dorian and Ethan are also interested in her, but Ethan thinks she’s dead. I think the correct term for this geometric shape is a ‘clusterfuck’.)

Overall, the series loves Romanticism. Malcolm Murray quotes Keats’ Ode to a Nightengale, for example. In fact, the series’ creator, John Logan, has admitted that the series’ ultimate origin was Wordsworth’s poetry. Wordsworth led him to read Percy Bysshe Shelley, which led to Frankenstein, which led to Dracula.

For a show set in the 1890s, it’s perhaps not unreasonable that the well-educated characters would enjoy the poetry of half a century before. But why don’t any of them read poets closer to their own day, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Matthew Arnold, or Algernon Swinburne? Why don’t any of them quote Gilbert and Sullivan? Why doesn’t the Bohemian Dorian Gray read the works of the Bohemian Oscar Wilde? That’s such an obviously meta thing for the show to do, I’m a bit sad they didn’t think of it.

And while we’re talking about the late 19^th century, would it kill Dorian to wear a fucking tie occasionally? For a show set in the high society of late Victorian London, he’s rather absurdly louche. The whole point of Wilde’s Gray is that the man appears reputable on the outside but is corrupt on the inside. The trope doesn’t work very well if he dresses in a way that rejects social convention.

 

Want to Know More?

Penny Dreadful is available at Amazon.

You have read Shelley’s Frankenstein, haven’t you?

If you want to know more about Romanticism, a good place to start would be Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction.

Penny Dreadul: The Grand Guignol

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, André de Lorde, Dr Frankenstein, Eva Green, Frankenstein's Monster, Henry Treadaway, Josh Hartnett, Max Maurey, Paula Maxa, Penny Dreadful, Rory Kinnear, Showtime, The Grand Guignol, Timothy Dalton, Victorian England

The Showtime series Penny Dreadful, set in London in the early 1890s focuses on the occult underworld of the late Victorian period, using a variety of characters inspired by and in some cases directly taken from 19^th century literature. Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), and Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) are searching for Mina Murray, who would under other circumstances be the Mina Harker lusted after by Dracula. Meanwhile, Victor Frankenstein (Henry Treadaway) pursues his quest to master the secrets of life and death, while his first creation, here called Caliban (Rory Kinnear), takes work as a stage hand at the Grand Guignol Theater in London, while Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) carries on his decadent life with prostitutes, libertines, and kinksters.

As the show depicts it, the Grand Guignol Theater stages plays of graphic violence that attract a London crowd eager for horror. While many viewers probably think the theater is just a fabrication of the show, it was actually a real place.

Trigger Warning: This post describes some fairly graphic violence and has a photo some may find disturbing.

 

Le Théatre de Grand Guignol

The Grand Guignol Theater (literally ‘the Theater of the Big Puppet’) was founded in Paris in 1897. Its original aim was to be a home to naturalistic theater that explored the lives of men and women who were not thought to be appropriate subjects for theater, namely the criminals, prostitutes, orphans, and similar figures who resided at the bottom of the lower class. It originally served as a forum to critique the social inequities of its day; it takes its name from Guignol, a traditional French puppet character who is sort of a combination of Punch and Judy and Jon Stewart.

However, in 1898, the Theater acquired a new director, Max Maurey, who remained in charge until 1914. Working with the playwright André de Lorde, he pioneered an entirely new style of theater, naturalistic horror, which the Theater explored until its eventual closure in 1962. Whereas most 19^th century horror was supernatural tales of vampires and ghosts, de Lorde’s plays were stories of human madness. He wrote around 150 plays, many of them co-authored with psychologist Alfred Binet, the inventor of IQ testing. Their characters commit appalling acts of violence and degeneracy against each other.

In “A Man of the Night”, a necrophiliac breaks into tombs to violate the corpses. The nanny in “The Horrible Passion” strangles the young children entrusted to her. “The Laboratory of Hallucinations” depicts a doctor who finds his wife’s lover in his operating room and he revenges himself by performing a graphic brain surgery until the now-deranged lover drives a chisel into his brain. “The System of Dr. Tar and Professor Feather”, based on a short story by Poe, deals with a madhouse in which the inmates believe themselves to all sorts of objects and creatures, while the staff treat them as if they actually are those things until the patients revolt and turn the tables on the staff. “The Torture Garden”, set in China, focuses on a European woman who loves watching people being tortured until some revolutionaries decide to punish her by inflicting the same on her. Some plays explored the effects of diseases such as leprosy, rabies, and syphilis on their victims. Hypnosis, panic, and other altered states of consciousness were another popular subject. (A few of de Lorde’s plays have been translated into English. His “At the Telephone” is quite tame by Grand Guignol standards, but it gives a sense of his style.)

“The Torture Garden”

The Theater’s most famous actress, Paula Maxa, was called the Most Assassinated Woman in the World, because over the course of her career she was shot with rifles and revolvers, scalped, hanged, disemboweled, strangled, guillotined, crushed by a steamroller, dismembered, burned alive, poisoned, operated on, doused in acid, and more; she performed in an estimated 3,000 rape scenes. Despite this, the plays were not generally misogynistic so much as misanthropic; both men and women behaved abominably and both men and women were victims and killers.

“The Woman who Loved Heads”

The plays also addressed a wide range of social prejudices, such as hostility to immigrants and strangers, fear of infection and uncleanliness, class prejudices, fear of technology, and so on. True crime stories were another inspiration.

As the preceding description demonstrates, the Theater specialized in gore and graphic violence on stage. They created a wide range of special effects involving blood squibs, fake knives that spurted blood, animal intestines and eyeballs, blood pumps, fake body parts, and similar tricks. Gouging out eyeballs was a particularly favored effect. It also employed sound rather than music to heighten the psychological impact of the violence. Another trick involved the schedule. The plays were short enough that 5-6 plays were performed in a single night. The tales of violence alternated with bawdy sex comedies, producing a sort of whipsaw between ribaldry and horror that the Theater called la douche ecossaise, “the hot and cold shower”.

A scene from one of the plays

These plays had no moral or deeper meaning. The whole point was simply to trigger intense emotions of fear, disgust, and horror, although some plays also employed eroticism. Maurey felt that a play was a bust if it didn’t cause at least two faintings a night. The theater employed a physician to tend any theater-goers who required assistance. The intensity of the plays, the sensational subject matter, the clever publicity, and the violation of 19^th century social mores made the Theater successful for 5 decades. It was attended by everyone from factory workers to European royalty. Anais Nin was a fan, as was the future revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who was working in Paris as a pastry chef. The boxes in the balcony were known for sexual goings-on, as horrified theater-goers sought release from the intensity of their feelings.

Unfortunately for the Theater, after World War II, it went into decline, because the war had dulled the appetite for such bloody spectacle. Its last director, Charles Nonon, once said, “We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things–and worse–are possible.”

But by the late 1970s, as memories of the war had faded a little and a new generation grown up, interest in the Theater’s genre began to re-awaken, in the form of the American slasher film. Films like The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Friday the 13^th are arguably cinematic descendants of “The Laboratory of Hallucinations.” Other horror films, such as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, rejected naturalistic horror in favor of more supernatural stories but still fed the appetite for graphic violence that Le Grand Guignol pioneered. It was the inspiration for Anne Rice’s Théatre des Vampires in Interview with the Vampire, and it has lent its name to any work of over-the-top gore. Some of de Lorde’s works are still periodically performed today, often around Halloween and a few theater troupes specialize in Grand Guignol theatrics today.

 

Penny Dreadful

The version of the Grand Guignol in the show is not an exact copy. It’s located on the wrong side of the English Channel, and it’s open a half-decade too soon. Nor are its plays all naturalistic; the second play we see is a story about a werewolf who kills a young woman, while the third play seems to involve a male victim who goes up to Heaven. Nor does the theater seem to employ the Hot and Cold Shower. Its shows are apparently all gore. Caliban runs the below-stairs equipment, attaching hidden hoses to pumps that spurt fake blood. From the few snippets we see, the plays were also not scripted in a naturalistic style, but rather emphasized a more artificial style of acting; the second play involves rhyming couplets.

(There was a short-lived London Grand Guignol, but much later, opening in 1920.  The London Grand Guignol, as it was simply called, copied the French theater’s approach, performing 4 to 6 short plays in a night’s entertainment that emphasized madness, revenge, and gore. Many of the scripts were direct translations of the French originals, while others were original plays, include several bawdy satires by Noel Coward. But the London stage was subject to censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, limiting what they could do. As a result, it closed after only two years.)

Penny Dreadful’s Grand Guignol

The show uses the Grand Guignol as a tool to reveal the brutality of its London society. One of the major themes of the show is the moral corruption and violence that lurks just underneath the fancy clothing and sophisticated society of London. The poor prostitutes of the city are repeatedly murdered by a serial killer and Dorian presides over decadent sex parties. Later Dorian takes Ethan to an underground club where people place bets on how many rats a dog can kill.

And just as the London Grand Guignol’s plays are supernatural rather than natural, so too do the human sins of its characters have supernatural effects. Vanessa’s sexual sins serve as a catalyst for her mediumistic abilities, make her vulnerable to possession, and set Mina on the path toward becoming a vampire.

Despite all this, the show plays the same game Ridley Scott’s Gladiator does. It wants to leave us appalled by the cruelties of the Victorian era: the casual violence of the rat-killing scene and the blood-lust of the men and women watching it, the cruel medical treatments of the asylum Vanessa is committed to, the way Caliban is subjected to unprovoked assault simply because his face is scarred. It tells us that we are superior to our Victorian forebears because we can recognize these things for the horrors they truly are.

Frankenstein and his monster having a reunion

Yet at the same time, the show is itself a Grand Guignol of sex and violence because we  watch it for those same horrors it condemns. It offers us a spectacle of graphically dismembered women and their children, of tubercular prostitutes who spit blood during sex, of Caliban literally ripping another of Frankenstein’s revenants in half with his bare hands. The show hypocritically draws us in with the same violence and sexual displays that it invites us to look down on and feel superior to. This technique demonstrates that despite the passage of time, we’re not so far removed from our ancestors after all.

 

Want to Know More?

Penny Dreadful is available on Amazon.

There are a number of books about Le Grand Guignol. Mel Gordon’s Theater of Fear and Horror and Richard Hand and Michael Wilson’s Grand Guignol are two worth looking at; the latter includes a number of complete scripts of the theater’s plays.