To Bleed Or Not To Bleed
The Bard and vampirism
“…Beware my fangs”
-The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare loved him some blood. No doubt he made blood a symbolic presence in his plays. Plus he basically wrote the Elizabethan Death Wish with Titus Andronicus.
And then there’s the blood drinking, or allusions to it. From Richard III to Romeo and Juliet, slurping of the Type O is a poetic device Shakespeare returned to like a bat returning to a cave.
The vampire as we commonly know it — cultured, controlled, highly fuckable— was not around when Shakespeare was having his plays written for him by Francis Bacon and/or Christopher Marlowe. In fact, the word “vampire”, would be unknown in Elizabethan England.
So it’s a head twist when Hamlet utters, in Act 3:
“’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood.”
A churchyard, where cemeteries could be found, opening up, releasing the forces of disease in the form of vampires, is right out of the folklore that gave rise to vampire literature.
Was Shakespeare working a vampire angle in his greatest play?
Egad, would that it were true.
Likely, he was either playing with Biblical restrictions on consuming blood; suggesting that his state was so low that he yearned for the things forbidden by God. Or perhaps he was simply invoking a common perception of witches.
What the hell do I know? Shakespeare is hard. I mean have you tried reading Cymbeline? Jesus Christ.
But hold! Ere we bethink this is ov’r!
Let us consider that drinking blood wasn’t an unheard of folk tale at that time, and Shakespeare could likely name some famous works that dripped with hemoglobin.
In Stratford High’s hottest required reading, 1485's Morte D’Arthur, a noble lady holed up in her castle drinks the blood of virgins; her very survival hinges on her drinking this blood. Hmmm…
There’s also Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium from the 12th century, which relates a number of tales involving people rising from the grave and/or drinking infant blood. Even if schoolboy Bill didn’t read it, he likely absorbed the folk tales contained therein. And we know the Bard was fond of folk tales because of the extensive autobiography and interviews he gave. Just kidding; but isn’t Midsummer is pretty much a lock on this?
And then we have this:
The undead and blood suckers, in other forms and by other names, were a part of English country folklore in Medieval times. There’s some startlingly familiar mythology that predates Shakespeare, the kind that led to the killing of suspected revenants as found by archaelologists in England last year. That skull in the image above is what they did to those who they thought were climbing out of their graves in those yawning churchyards. And what reason do we have to doubt that Shakespeare was aware of all this? Might it have informed his verse? It’d be a hell of a coincidence if it didn’t.
And, by my soul, this pale and angry rose,
As cognizance of my blood-drinking hate,
Will I for ever and my faction wear,
Until it wither with me to my grave
Or flourish to the height of my degree
-Henry VI, Part 4
So what do we do with all this? Maybe Shakespeare wasn’t writing Twilight fan fiction. BUT, I could suggest, humbly, non-scholarly, that the Bard was familiar with mythology that we’d recognize as early vampire lore, and knew his audience was as well, and therefore couldn’t resist invoking the specter of a blood-drinking revenant when it suited him.
Some authors have taken this a step further, like Graham Holderness in Black And Deep Desires and Deborah Harkness in Shadow of Night. They gave the Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter treatment to Shakespeare, and it’s high time. I can’t speak to these books personally, but the authors have more followers on Twitter than I do and that’s how we all measure quality, right?
But thither’s one but final thing to mind:
And it says nothing about Shakespeare’s motivations but does at least give us a literary connecting thread. In other words — if you dismiss everything above this line, at least you can get something out of what comes next:
Hamlet is set in that rotten state of Denmark, specifically Elsinore, which is called Helsingor in it’s native tongue. Helsingor means “Isle of Helsing.” So if you ever wondered where the heroic vampire-slayer and Dutch witch doctor Abraham Van Helsing got his name… now you know!
Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, selected to use “Helsing” to represent Van Helsing’s character due to the doctor’s strong and impenetrable personality that is much like the walls of the castle, Elsinore. Also, Van Helsing himself is like Elsinore where he keeps his emotions in, much like Claudius, King of Denmark and father/uncle to Hamlet, keeps him inside Elsinore’s walls… Without Hamlet, a creation of Shakespeare, Van Helsing would not bear his name or have the characteristics he embraces.
-Kelly Kendrick
Hamlet, meet Helsing. Helsing, meet Hamlet.
Toothpickings is a blog about vampires. That line was iambic pentameter. So was the last sentence and this one too.
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Image sources: Shutterstock, Historic England, Twitter, Universal Pictures.
