Episode Details

Vampire mythology first appears in the West in works as early Romantic authors meld themes from folk ballads of resurrected lovers with Balkan folklore of the undead.

Valentine’s Day seemed a fitting occasion for this show’s look at the vampire’s tragically romantic tendency to prey upon those they love.

We begin with  a (very seasonal) snippet of one of Ophelia’s “mad songs” from Hamlet, “Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day.”  The song speaks of a lover’s clandestine nocturnal visit to a partner’s bedchamber.  It represents a class of folk song called “night visit ballads.” A  more ghoulish subset of these deals with lovers who happen to be dead, or undead actually.

We hear two sample songs of revenant lovers from the 16th-17th century: “Fair Margaret and Sweet William” (referencing “cold corpsey lips”) and “The Suffolk Miracle,” which bears comparison to the German poem “Lenore,” much beloved by the Romantics and Gothics, and mentioned in Dracula as discussed in Episode One.

Next we discuss the “Vampire Panic” that took place in Serbia in the 1720s-30s.  We hear of Petar Blagojević, who was said to have been exhumed and found incorrupt with fresh blood at his mouth and flowing from his heart once properly staked.  We hear of a similar case involving the foot soldier Arnold Paole, whose staking produced more disturbing results and whose alleged vampiric deeds led to two distinct waves of panic.

We learn how these reports were assimilated by the literary world, with an early example  being German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s  1734 poem “Der Vampir.”  Then we look at a more nuanced suggestion of vampirism in Goethe’s  “The Bride of Corinth