
Contents
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Life Science Life Science
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Frankenstein Frankenstein
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Music and Sympathy Music and Sympathy
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Music as Stimulant Music as Stimulant
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Notes Notes
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Seven Good Vibrations: Frankenstein on the London Stage
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Published:January 2017
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Abstract
Hibberd considers two stage adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appearing in London in 1823: Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, which played at the English Opera House near the Strand, and Henry Milner’s Frankenstein; or the Man and the Monster!, for the Coburg, a theatre for a primarily working-class audience, which was situated on the South Bank of the Thames. Both of these plays were melodramas, which meant that their dialogue was spoken but they also featured prominent mime, and the latter was generally accompanied by segments of descriptive music. In both, the monster was played by a mime. Hibberd situates Shelley’s novel and its adaptations in the context not only of contemporaneous developments in electrical medicine, but also of public scientific debates on animal electricity and vitalism, debates most prominently played out in the second half of the 1810s between two prominent members of London’s Royal College of Surgeons: John Abernethy and William Lawrence. Theatrical popularizations of the Frankenstein story, Hibberd argues, contributed in significant ways to these debates, most notably by configuring or staging music as a vital force, an electrical phenomenon imbued with the capacity to at once soothe, civilize, and shock.
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