theatre site isolated, dividing the auditorium from the back of house, a minimum height above street level for any part of the audience, providing two separate exits for every section of the audience, improved stage construction including a smoke flue, and fire-resistant construction throughout. The first theatre built to these principles was the rebuilt New Theatre Royal in Exeter. Influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula From 1878, Bram Stoker worked for Irving as a business manager at the Lyceum. Stoker idolised Irving to the point that "As one contemporary remarked, 'To Bram, Irving is as a god, and can do no wrong.' In the considered judgment of one biographer, Stoker's friendship with Irving was 'the most important love relationship of his adult life.'" Irving, however, "… was a self-absorbed and profoundly manipulative man. He enjoyed cultivating rivalries between his followers, and to remain in his circle required constant, careful courting of his notoriously fickle affections." When Stoker began writing Dracula, Irving was the chief inspiration for the title character. In his 2002 paper for The American Historical Review, "Buffalo Bill Meets Dracula: William F. Cody, Bram Stoker, and the Frontiers of Racial Decay", historian Louis S. Warren writes: Later years The chief remaining novelties at the Lyceum during Irving's term as sole manager (at the beginning of 1899 the theatre passed into the hands of a limited-liability company) were Arthur Conan Doyle's Waterloo (1894); J. Comyns Carr's King Arthur in 1895; Cymbeline, in which Irving played Iachimo, in 1896; Sardou's Madame Sans-Gene in 1897; and Peter the Great, a play by Laurence Irving, the actor's second son, in 1898. Irving received a death threat in 1899 from fellow actor (and murderer of William Terriss) Richard Archer Prince. Terriss had been stabbed at the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre in December 1897 and in the wake of his death, Prince was committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Irving was critical of the unusually lenient sentence, remarking "Terriss was an actor, so his murderer will not be executed." Two years later, Prince had found Irving's home address and threatened to murder him "when he gets out". Irving was advised to submit the letter to the Home Office to ensure Prince's continued incarceration, which Irving declined to do. In 1898 Irving was Rede Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. The new regime at the Lyceum was signalled by the production of Sardou's Robespierre