Plays of Frankenstein
Frankenstein is best known today through the many films based on the novel, although the most famous
movie Frankenstein came after more than a century of popular stage
adaptations. As early as 1823, Frankenstein had
been adapted for the stage: Peake's Presumption appeared on the stage
only five years after Mary Shelley's novel was published. In response to
its success, William Godwin published
the second edition of Frankenstein in the same year.
Peake's adaptation was not, however, the last. As Steven Earl Forry, the
best authority on this dramatic history, has catalogued nearly one hundred
dramatic adaptations between 1821 and 1986. He writes in "Dramatizations
of Frankenstein, 1821-1986: A Comprehensive List":
Pre-Karloffian dramatizations played an important role in disseminating
popular conceptions -- and misconceptions -- of Mary Shelley's novel, from
the incipient gothic melodramas such as Peake's Presumption, Henry M. Milner's The Demon of
Switzerland (1823) and The Man
and the Monster (1826), and Merle and Antony's Le Monstre et le
magicien (1826) to their burlesque counterparts -- Humgumption; or,
Dr. Frankenstein and the Hobgoblin of Hoxton, Presumption and the
Blue Demon, and Frankin-Steam; or, The Modern Promise to Pay --
through political burlesque in the form of William and Robert Brough's
Frankenstein; or, The Model Man (1849), the musical comedy of
Richard Butler and Henry Chance Newton's Frankenstein; or, The Vampires
Victim (1887), the farce of Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard's The
Last Laugh (1915), and finally Peggy Webling's drawing room melodrama
Frankenstein: An Adventure in the
Macabre (1927). (p. 65)
His comprehensive catalogue of
adaptations includes details on performances and publications for
ninety-six plays, including the 1927 play of Frankenstein by Peggy
Webling, which was the basis of the 1931 movie Frankenstein, directed by James Whale and starring Colin
Clive and Boris Karloff.
