The subversive subtext of Shakespearean allusion in Sheridan LeFanu's 'Carmilla'

The article argues that Carmilla is a text saturated with inner texts and paratexts, inviting readers to treat reading itself as the key to the novella’s menace. Building on material and performance-oriented Shakespeare scholarship, the authors frame their inquiry as an intertextual investigation: what is Shakespeare doing in LeFanu’s Victorian vampire narrative? They posit that identifying and interpreting Shakespearean quotations, images, and performance echoes can reveal how Carmilla embodies anxieties about cultural otherness, same-sex desire, suicide, and threats to patrilineal continuity. The piece situates LeFanu’s family’s deep theatrical lineage to suggest his sophisticated engagement with Shakespeare as a mutable set of scenes, images, and roles rather than a monolithic source.

The study engages scholarship on textuality and performance in early modern drama (Bergeron 1996; Schneider 2011; Mentzer 2023) and on intertextuality (Carter 2021). It draws on criticism of Carmilla’s queer, postcolonial, and class dimensions (Haefele-Thomas 2012; Smart 2013; Fox 2013; Signorotti 1996; Stoddart 1991; Heller 1996; Brock 1996), as well as Irish/Anglo-Irish identity in LeFanu (Killeen 2013; Smart 2013). It references LeFanu’s theatrical inheritance (Ladd 2018; NUI Galway database) and Dryden’s All for Love as a Shakespearean adaptation relevant to Cleopatra. It also notes prior observations of anagrammatic names (Dobson 2014) and Hamlet resonances (de Sousa 2010) and situates the gothic’s indebtedness to Shakespeare (Salter 2009; Desmet & Williams 2009; Seynhaeve & Ingelbien 2018).

A qualitative intertextual and close-reading approach: (1) identify explicit quotation (e.g., Merchant of Venice opening lines) and implicit allusions rendered as images or staged scenes (e.g., Cleopatra’s asp-suicide on a bedroom tapestry; Ophelia’s funeral rites; cross-dressed/masquerade courtship tropes from Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet); (2) analyze how these Shakespearean elements recur across textual, visual, and performance registers within the novella; (3) situate findings within historical-theatrical context (LeFanu’s family’s Shakespearean performance heritage) and critical debates on gender, sexuality, class, religion, and coloniality; (4) trace thematic through-lines (othering, same-sex desire, suicide, contamination/contagion, reverse colonization, and the policing of bloodlines) that link the intertexts to Carmilla’s narrative arc and reception by male authority figures.

• The Merchant of Venice: Laura’s father’s recitation of Antonio’s melancholy signals contagion, loss, and proximity to threatening foreignness. It frames Carmilla as a Shylock-like cultural/religious other whose threat to Christian/English identity is figured through blood, debt, and flesh, while also reflecting Anglo-Irish anxieties and reverse colonization fears.
• Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra): The tapestry of Cleopatra with asps in Carmilla’s room encodes maternal substitution and eroticized feeding as death (serpents at the breast), conflating nursing, love, poison, and suicide. It parallels Carmilla’s vampiric “nurture” of Laura and invokes taboo romances and female sovereign “otherness.”
• Ophelia (Hamlet): The graveside scene and Carmilla’s rejection of funerary “forms” evoke Ophelia’s curtailed rites for suspected suicide and reveal Carmilla’s religious nonconformity and nihilism about mortal form, foreshadowing Carmilla’s own status as a damned suicide whose body is later desecrated.
• Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet: Carmilla’s parting echo of Juliet’s “good night” entwines sweet romance with lethal possession. Laura imagines a cross-dressed lover in disguise, linking Carmilla’s wooing to Shakespearean gender masquerade and same-sex allure. The novella plays with anagrammatic names (Carmilla/Mircalla/Millarca/Marcia) in a manner reminiscent of Viola/Olivia/Malvolio.
• Class, race, and gender: Carmilla is racialized and aristocratic, menacing bourgeois domesticity and patrilineal succession; Laura’s half-Karnstein lineage makes her a liminal figure. Carmilla spares aristocratic Laura while preying on peasant girls, intensifying class-coded menace.
• Male professional coalition: The General, Laura’s father, clergy, physicians, ranger, woodman, and Baron Vordenburg combine documentary, legal, and ritual violence to destroy Carmilla (staking the heart, decapitation, incineration), reversing the Merchant courtroom logic: here the foreign, disguised figure is not a savior but the target of legally textualized eradication.
• Synthesis: Shakespearean allusions do not function as mere cultural ornament but as subversive engines that reanimate anxieties about same-sex desire, suicide, and foreignness, casting the Bard as an alluring yet morally corrupting presence within the gothic economy of Carmilla.

By reading Carmilla through Shakespearean intertexts, the article shows that these allusions shape readers’ perception of Carmilla as an exotic, gender-deviant, and spiritually damned other whose intimacy with Laura threatens Englishness, religion, class order, and bloodlines. The Merchant sets a template of contagion and foreign threat; Cleopatra converts maternal nurture into eroticized death; Ophelia links heterodox belief to suicide and desecration; Twelfth Night/Romeo and Juliet encode wooing through disguise and same-sex performance legacies. Together they position Shakespeare as an active force within the novella, animating Victorian taboos and precipitating the mobilization of male institutional power to reassert order via textualized, juridical destruction of the vampire. The analysis addresses the central question—what Shakespeare is “doing” in Carmilla—by demonstrating how his revived scenes and figures operate as seductive yet corrupting energies analogous to the vampire herself.

The paper argues that Shakespearean allusions in Carmilla cohere around cross-dressing and suicide, tying same-sex desire to non-procreative eros and damnation. Rather than buttressing English cultural identity, Shakespeare functions as a subversive conduit of moral corruption in LeFanu’s tale: alluring imagery and quotations mask anxieties over foreignness, sexuality, religion, and class, ultimately justifying a modern male, documentary-sanctioned purge of the aristocratic, feminine monster. These intertexts reveal Shakespeare not as inert ornamentation but as an active, unsettling substrate within Victorian gothic narrative.