In 281 of the posts that follow, I link to comments I made on Danny Horn’s blog, “Dark Shadows Every Day.”
I added most of these comments in the months between the shutdown of live theater in March of 2020 and the completion of the blog in April of 2021. But I have added some comments since. Yesterday, I read Julius Evola’s The Mysteries of the Grail (translated by Guido Stucco; Rochester, Vermont, 1997.) Evola is not someone I agree with about things, to put it mildly, but that book describes dozens of moments from legends about the Quest for the Holy Grail that may have been in the minds of people making Dark Shadows.
In this long comment on Danny’s post about episode 559, I collect various moments in the medieval romances concerning the quest for the Holy Grail that may have inspired story points on Dark Shadows. The whole thing starts as a response to Danny’s exasperated remark about the apparently uncharacteristic infatuation of evil wizard Nicholas Blair for nice girl Maggie Evans, an infatuation that will lead to Nicholas’ downfall. I do not claim that the show does a good job of fitting this relationship into the story, but I do use it as a jumping-off point for a long catalog of similarities:
“Also, Nicholas is in love with Maggie.
“Sorry to spring it on you like that, but it’s that kind of storyline. Nicholas Blair is some kind of evil wizard man, and so far we haven’t had any indication that he’s looking for a girlfriend. In fact, he’s been mocking Angelique relentlessly for having human emotions. And yet, here we are.”
I think there’s a possible explanation for this. By the end of the 1960s, the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail had been in vogue for decades. New York theater people like those involved in Dark Shadows would of course have been keenly mindful of Lerner and Loewe’s CAMELOT, which was a hit on Broadway from 1960 to 1963 and which appeared as a feature film in 1967. As part of that fashion, bookstores generally would carry paperback translations of Thomas Malory’s 1453 LE MORTE D’ARTHUR and of selections from the romances about the Holy Grail written in the years 1175-1225 on which the legends of Arthur and his group were based.
Nicholas is a representative of the Devil. In Malory (especially Book 14, verses 9 and 10,) we see a theme that recurs in several of the Grail romances, that Lucifer fell from Heaven because he had conceived a passion for a mortal woman.
In fact, many of the themes of the Grail romances show up in DARK SHADOWS. The title of the novel on which the musical CAMELOT was based is THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, harking back to a legend that King Arthur only appears to be dead- he is in suspended animation, confined to a coffin in a hidden tomb, awaiting a hero who will revive him and restore his dynasty. There are many many such figures in the Grail romances and in similar legends in Norse and Celtic myth. Obviously vampires like Dracula, Barnabas Collins, and Mamuwalde* represents a dark inversion of this legend, as do figures like The Mummy of the Universal and Hammer horror movies.
One of the more interesting of the Hidden Kings in the Grail romances is Amfortas. As the tale is told in Heinrich of Turlin’s THE CROWN, Amfortas was a king who was wounded, paralyzed and confined to a hidden coffin because of a wound he received from a sorceress he disappointed in love, the mighty Orgeluse. Sir Gawain found Amfortas and restored to him both his strength and his ability to die. Barnabas’ transformation into a vampire at the hands of Angelique recalls the wounding of Amfortas; his reemergence as a mortal man under the ministrations of Dr Lang recalls Amfortas’ restoration by Gawain.
After he is restored, Amfortas yields his kingdom to Sir Percival, marking the end of the original dynasty of the Grail. Barnabas’ attempt to replace himself with Adam, whether Adam has the face he actually has or Peter/Jeff’s face, an attempt which will eventually lead Adam to ask him “How can you hate yourself so much?,” brings this self-effacement to mind.
After his abdication, Amfortas’ wound reappears and seems to make him a leper. Again, Barnabas’ eventual return to vampirism, accompanied as it is by all the Grail-inflected imagery of the Leviathans, may have echoes of this story.
The dynasty of the Grail appears in several of the romances in connection with the figure of Joseph of Arimathea. This Joseph of Arimathea is very different from the man of the same name who appears in the New Testament. There he is a Jewish elder, a member of the Council, and a secret disciple of Jesus. In the Grail legends, Joseph is a pagan knight, who was never Jewish and is never quite Christian. He comes to be associated with Simon Peter and with Jesus’ other fisherman followers, and is known as The Rich Fisherman or the Fisher King. His dynasty rules over the Grail itself and all of its heads are known by these same titles. Again, that the Collinses are supposed to have derived their wealth from the Atlantic fisheries of Maine is not only historically plausible, since the first prosperity of upper New England came from the cod industry, but also mythically resonant, as it would make them a line of Rich Fishermen.
There is more. For a series of writings that appeared in northwestern Europe around the turn of the twelfth century, the Grail romances are startlingly cool to the whole idea of Christianity. There are no good guy priests, and the Christian imagery overlaid on the stories is so inconsistent with the traditions of the church that it must be deliberately opposed to it. Indeed, Sir Percival explicitly renounces the whole idea of serving God on his way to attain the highest honors. For its part, the church repaid the compliment by declaring that there was no such thing as the Holy Grail and denouncing the whole cycle of the romances. That the only identifiable representatives of organized Christianity in the show are the Reverends Trask, and that it is in general, as Danny says, “one of your more Satan-friendly TV shows,” is at least consistent with a connection to the Arthurian stories.
Also, when the various knights are initiated into the mysteries of the Grail, their first response is usually an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. Again, this connects us to DARK SHADOWS, where most of the characters seem to be torn between a desire to return to the past and a desire to reinvent it.
*Also known as “Blacula.”
I considered adding one more point. Throughout the Grail romances, there are moments when knights and kings fail in their missions because they fail to ask a crucial question- usually, “Where is the Grail?” Time and again watching Dark Shadows, we find ourselves frustrated with the characters for their failure to communicate with each other. This could be a sign that the writers, producers, and others were not reading the Grail romances while they were creating the show.
They may not have had to read them, or works derived from them, at all to achieve the similarities noted above. As I said, the stories were prominent enough in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century, and certainly in the New York theater world in the 1960s, that a group of creative people could be influenced by them at second-hand or third-hand. It’s a shame, though- if they’d read Wolfram of Eschenbach calling Sir Percival a tool of the Devil for his failure to ask the right question, they may have seen a way to convert the characters’ taciturnities into productive story points.
Dark Shadows Commentary 