Frankenstein

Appearing on the English stage only five years after Mary Shelley's groundbreaking novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, Richard Brinsley Peake's Frankenstein, or the Dangers of Presumption is the first adaptation of that venerable novel. Peake's monster is an early version of the horror that would star in more than 50 films in the last 100 years. Performed in the style of classic melodrama, including song, lovers, and spectacle, Peake's stage adaptation was the only version Shelley attended, an event which she recounted in a letter to her father, stating, "I was much amused!" Frankenstein was such a hit in the theaters that the publisher of Shelley's novel produced a second edition, and the place of that novel in the English canon was secured. Several stage imitators followed in the decade after Peake's 1823 play, but this play endures as the original stage version of Frankenstein.