Prolific and popular British playwright (known for his strong sense of the visual and the melodramatic), librettist, poet, translator, antiquarian, and theater manager who dramatized a number of popular literary works (including The Beauty and the Beast in 1841). Planché is important in the Gothic tradition for his dramatization of John Polidori's 1819 novella The Vampyre, one of many popular stage versions of Polidori's tale which dominated theater in Britain and France in the late Romantic period.
Planché's play is not based directly on Polidori's work but on a French melodrama, Le Vampire by Pierre Carmouche, Charles Nodier, and Achille de Jouffroy, which was first performed in Paris on 13 June 1820; this French play was itself a loose adaptation of Polidori's tale. There are, in fact, relatively few similarities between The Vampire and The Vampyre, with the substantial departures from Polidori's version not limited to the extremely different conclusion.
