Puppetry and Dramaturgy.

Puppetry and Dramaturgy Didier Plassard PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY Puppetry and Dramaturgy Western European Plays for Puppet Theatre, 1582–2020 Didier Plassard Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History Series Editors Elizabeth Osborne, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA Shannon Walsh, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History i s a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship cur rently available, accessible and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study but utilized as important underpinning or as an historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also ger mane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series and works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought. Didier Plassard Puppetry and Dramaturgy Western European Plays for Puppet Theatre, 1582–2020 Didier Plassard University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France ISSN 2947-5767 ISSN 2947-5775 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History ISBN 978-3-032-05150-9 ISBN 978-3-032-05151-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05151-6 This research has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Pr ogramme (ERC—G.A. 835193) as part of the PuppetPlays project, which also covered the open access publication costs. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2026. This book is an open access publication. 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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Christophe Loiseau and Matt Jackson for PuppetPlays This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper. The puppet is an optical device. Marcel Temporal, Marottes et marionnettes, 1950. Acknowledgements I must begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to the European Union and the European Research Council, whose support made the PuppetPlays project (GA 835193, 2019–25) possible, the results of which are summarised in this book. Their funding enabled the formation of a small, dedicated team whose expertise, discoveries, and insights greatly contributed to the analyses presented here. I would first like to thank Carole Guidicelli, whose extensive knowledge of the contemporary puppet stage, diverse skills, and steadfast dedication have been invaluable throughout PuppetPlays. While a monograph often carries the semblance of a monologue, this book would not have been written without her insightful comments, suggestions, and critiques, which have shaped it into a synthesis of many years of shared experiences and intellectual dialogue. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Francesca Di Fazio and Sophie Courtade, PuppetPlays’ doctoral students, as well as to Jean Boutan, Manuela Mohr, Yanna Kor, Anna Leone, and Cécile Decaix, postdoctoral fellows. Special thanks must go to the members of the project’s Scientific Advisory Board, Lucile Bodson, Maria-João Brilhante, Alfonso Cipolla, Josette Féral, Helga Finter, Joël Huthwohl, François Lazar o, John McCormick, and Rosario Perricone, for their trust, their continuous support, and their precious advice. I also wish to express my gratitude to all the institutions that graciously opened their collections to us and provided valuable guidance throughout our research: the Bibliothèque nationale de France, vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS the Archives nationales, the Musée des Arts de la Marionnette—Musée Gadagne, the Institut International de la Marionnette, the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, the Institut Mémoire de l’Édition Contemporaine, the Bibliothèque municipale de Roubaix, the Archives Départementales de la Somme, the Musée de la Vie Wallonne, the Puppentheatersammlung of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, the Puppentheatersammlung of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, the Museo inter nazionale delle marionette Antonio Pasqualino, the Istituto per i Beni Marionettistici e la Cultura Popolare, the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi, the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, the Castello dei burattini—Museo Giordano Ferrari, the Casa Carlo Goldoni, the Casa delle marionette di Ravenna, the Archivio Franca Rame, the Fondo Nino Pozzo, the Museu da Marioneta of Lisbon, the Scottish Mask and Puppet Theatre Museum, the Biblioteka Jagiello´nska, the archives of the Théâtre des Marionnettes de Genève, those of the Théâtre Toone, of the Teatr o de Marionetas do Porto, of the theatre companies Clastic Théâtre, M.A., Daniel Streble, Théâtre de Mathieu, Pupi di Stac, Teatro delle Guarattelle, a Tarumba, and of the artists Gigio Brunello, Adriano Ferraiolo, Irene Vecchia, Gaspare Nasuto, Anna Cuticchio, Giacomo Cuticchio, Mimmo Cuticchio. Many thanks to the artists, writers, curators, and researchers who enriched PuppetPlays with their knowledge, their resources, and their insights. Among these I must mention Cariad Astles, Alfonso Ayuso Roy, Sylvie Baillon, Howard Barker, Cécile Bassuel-Lobera, Hélène Beauchamp, Johanny Bert, Hervé Blutsch, Patrick Boman, Camille Bozonnet, Greta Bruggeman, Jean Cagnard, Francesca Cecconi, MarieAstrid Charlier, Marta Cuscunà, Matthew I. Cohen, Joseph Danan, Patrick Dubost, Kossi Efoui, Mascha Erbelding, Catarina Firmo, Émilie Flacher, Raphaèle Fleury, Angélique Friant, David Girondin-Moab, Bettina Girotti, Stefano Giunchi, Cristina Grazioli, Jean-Louis Heckel, Shaday Larios, Michel Laubu, Sandrine Le Pors, Jaume Lloret, Sara Maddalena, Teresa Megale, Alissa Mello, Aurélie Morin, Joëlle Noguès, Sylvie Osman, Alan Payon, Laura Per nice, Giorgio Pupella, Lars Rebehn, Françoise Rubellin, Marie Saint-Martin, Simona Scattina, Julie Ser mon, Gwendoline Soublin, Javier Swedzky, Marie-Ève Thérenty, Alban Thierry, Émilie Valentin, Valentina Valentini, Bérangère Vantusso, Élise Vigneron, Catherine Zambon, and Christine Zurbach. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix My thanks are due to Stacy Allan for her excellent translation, and to Johnny McFadyen for his accurate proofreading and copy-editing. I also thank the many master and doctorate students who, either by contributing to the data base PuppetPlays (https://puppetplays.eu)orby another way, collaborated with this project. 2D. PLASSARD is suddenly unlocked; an imaginary world appears, resembling the one we invented for games in which we were at once actors and spectators. Yet, we are now only spectators. The power of the puppet’s appeal to the imaginary world is such that no technique or specific device is required. It can be created simply through movement or speech without a designated stage, without a curtain being raised or the house lights being dimmed. Since it re-activates the once-familiar mental operations from childhood, this mechanism, if one consents to it, is engaged in a spontaneous, almost unconscious way. The change takes place on a visual level: instead of seeing what is r eally produced, attention focuses on the mental image that covers it. Fictional Pact and Puppetry Pact A man holds in his hand a large stapler. He presents it in a way that when viewed in profile, the stapler resembles a sperm whale. A small undulating movement gives the impression of the whale advancing through the waves; when the stapler’s mechanism is pressed, the animal closes its mouth on an invisible prey. This could be the beginning of a show of object theatre. The simplicity of the gesture offers a rudimentary demonstration of how puppet performances work: an actor, a spectator, a material object, and a mental image that does not correspond to this object. Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined this temporary abandoning of our objective perception of the world in favour of a s hared imaginary as ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’.2 For a clearly defined period, we deactivate the critical attention that we usually adopt in the world s o as not to fall victim to traps. We decide to make it seem like we believe in it, and we become part of the act. Any fiction, whatever means by which it is recounted, demands this ‘suspension of disbelief’: it is necessary to accept to believe in the existence of the characters, in order to take pleasure or learning from watching what they do and listening to what they say. This fictional pact draws its strength fro m all the times it has been accepted since childhood, and the memory of the intermix of emotions and knowledge received from it. 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. Adam Roberts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, [1817] 2014), 208. 1 INTRODUCTION 3 When applied to theatre, this pact means that the spectator accepts that what they are told takes the forms of what they are shown, despite the perceptible gap between these two worlds. Like children playing in the forest and imagining that each tr ee stump is a bear,3 the theatregoer has an active part in the mimesis, as Kendall L. Walton defines it: an act of ‘make-believe’ engaging the audience’s imagination. The children in their game pretend the stumps are bears; the spectators at a performance of Electra pretend the scenery is the palace of the Atreides, the lighting is the light of dawn, and the actor Orestes who has returned to avenge his father. All the material or immaterial elements of the theatrical performance are ‘props’ which the audience draw on to construct the mental image of Sophocles’ tragedy. Yet puppet theatre brings us closer to a childlike state by introducing a second pact based on the belief in the animation: the puppetry pact. We must not only believe in the actions and gestures of the actors who claim to represent imaginary characters, but we must also accept to view the object that moves as if it were a conscious being, capable of moving autonomously. The starting point for this book is a simple, somewhat naive question. It seeks to understand whether puppet theatr e’s reliance on particular devices and the spectator’s disposition to adopt a particular state of mind (the doubling of the fictional and puppetry pacts) means that the stories recounted are also particular. Have specific works been written for these devices and, if so, what are their specificities? Or, instead, should puppet theatre simply be considered as a ‘diminished form of dramatic art’,4 without identifiable repertoires or dramaturgical techniques of its own? ‘The Puppet Does Not Exist’5 Exploring the areas where traces of puppets are found, understanding the stages of their development, and distinguishing between verified knowledge and indeterminate traces is not a task that can be carried out without 3 Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the foundations of the representational arts (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 35–43. 4 Lothar Buschmeyer, Die Kunst des Puppenspiels (Leipzig: Oppelner Nachrichten C. J. Pohl, 1931), cited in Henryk Jurkowski, Aspects of Puppet Theatre, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 17. 5 I thank François Lazar o for suggesting this phrasing. 4D. PLASSARD the risk of error, even today. Before examining the dramaturgy of puppet theatres, it i s necessary to clearly define the area covered by this branch of the performing arts whose divisions are highly complex and sometimes entangled. To do so requires starting from the following statement: ‘the puppet’, in and of itself, does not exist. This simple term offers only the illusion of a consensus, which immediately dissolves when one takes stock of the variety of devices designated as such. The questions then follow of whether this term brings together comparable objects and if it has clearly defined limits. The issue of the objects themselves reveals various linguistic and cultural difficulties. Western puppet traditions are usually organised according to two groupings: first, those controlled from below and directly worn on hands; and, second, those controlled from above using strings, metal rods, or a combination of the two systems. Whilst some languages like Spanish (‘títere’) and French (‘marionnette’) use the same word for the two families, others, such as English, German, and Dutch, have different terms for the first (‘puppet’, ‘Puppe’, ‘pop’) and second groups (‘marionette’, ‘Marionette’, ‘marionet’). Italian distinguishes between three categories, ‘burattini’ (glove puppets), ‘marionette’ (string-marionettes), and ‘pupi’ (rod marionettes), which each belong to distinct symbolic universes. In an article on eighteenth-century Venetian puppet theatres, the literary historian Vittorio Malamani strongly contrasts the ‘burattini’, the ‘caricature’ of humans, with the ‘marionette’, their ‘imitation’.6 Naturally, this division is too simplistic even when discussing the eighteenth century. However, it is a reminder that the word ‘puppet’, far from referring to a homogenous group, brings together practices that must be differentiated accor ding to the devices used, the performance conditions, and the target audience. This assessment leads to the assumption that these traditions also have distinct repertoires. Any analysis in this area must therefore take into account their differences. In the second half of the twentieth century, as animation techniques diversified, more general designations began to be adopted: the German term ‘Figurentheater’ gave rise to ‘theatre of figures’ in English, ‘théâtre de figure’ in French, and ‘teatro di figura’ in Italian to refer to more contemporary forms. Gradually, these appellations, and others like ‘puppetry’, started to bring together new and old techniques within one single 6 Vittorio Alamani, ‘Marionnettes at Venice: Marionnettes and Burattini in Venice in the 18th Century’, trans. Dorothy Neville Lees, The Marionnette 1, no. 11 (1918): 346–47. 1 INTRODUCTION 5 yet highly heterogeneous conceptual field. This leads to the second question: can the limits of this field be defined? A recent companion work added ‘material performance’7 alongside ‘puppetry’ in its title to refer to ‘the use of raw materials such as craft paper, plastics, rope and fabrics as performing objects on stage’.8 In addition to the vast collection of puppets properly speaking, everyday objects, raw materials, or parts of the body may acquire the appearance of autonomous life when br ought to the stage. Object theatre, in particular, makes abundant use of these devices: plastic figurines of a married couple who are suddenly confronted with the proliferation of their doubles on their wedding night9 ; a handful of sweets taken from a paper bag and an aspirin tablet that play out a drama of social exclusion10 ; large dried prawns that engage in different human activities.11 Showing the process of creation to the audience has even become the very subject of the performance—for example, characters emerging from a heap of clay moulded in real time who become jealous of one another and face off.12 The list of everything that could be transformed into a puppet seems to know no bounds. These performances raise questions about the very notion of puppet theatre: where do the limits of the puppet lie? Whether object theatre belongs to puppetry is not always evident, including amongst artists. Yet the case of traditional performances is not entirely clear-cut either. Ventriloquism acts, for example, have not always been considered as part of the field of puppetry. Whilst John E. Varey13 includes demonstrations of automata, this choice is only rarely replicated since the presence of human operators, their interactions with the performance devices, and a rough outline of dramatic action appear as essential components. Even when all these conditions are met, doubts over what can be classified as a puppet may persist. This is the case, for example, for the articulated 7 See Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell, eds., The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (London: Routledge, 2014). 8 Alissa Mello, ‘Trans-embodiment: Embodied practice in puppet and material performance’, Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 49. 9 Agnès Limbos (Compagnie Gare centrale), Ô (2008). 10 Gyula Molnár, Tre piccoli suicidi (1979). 11 Hotel Modern, Garnalen Verhalen (Shrimp Tales) (2009). 12 Alice Laloy (Compagnie S’appelle reviens), D’états de femme (2004). 13 John E. Varey, Historia de los títeres en España (desde sur orígenes hasta mediados del siglo XVIII) (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957). 6D. PLASSARD figures of Christ that could be detached from the cross and have their arms folded to represent the entombment during Holy Week.14 Similarly, simple crosses which some Anglo-Saxon religious communities of the tenth century wrapped in a shroud, then placed in a sepulchre for the same cer emony, have been recently analysed as ‘puppets’.15 Elements for a Definition This book does not seek to determine what must or must not be referred to as a ‘puppet’, either in the past or in the present, and nor does it propose a general history of the puppetry arts for Western Europe. Rather, the aim of this study is to examine what puppets recount and how they recount it, which involves deciding upon a clear definition of the scope of analysis. The puppet, here, will be examined exclusively as a theatrical device. Other usages of puppets (fun, educational, therapeutic) are not considered, and nor are appearances of puppets in cinema, television, or the visual arts. The use of puppets for religious ceremonies, such as during the Holy Week celebrations, are also beyond the scope of this study. Moreover, the narrative dimension of puppet appearances in music hall acts, circuses, and cabarets is too embryonic to justify any attention. Given this focus, some precision concerning the very concept of theatre is required. Recent developments in semiology, which have renounced the text centrism of the 1970s in favour of focusing on the stage, can serve as a basis. As Eli Rozik states, theatre, whatever role language plays, is ‘fundamentally a non-verbal medium’.16 Its principal signifier is the iconic sign by way of a relationship of likeness between the world and the staging of it in the performance. By showing before telling, theatrical performances produce what Rozik calls ‘descriptions of worlds’.17 In other 14 See Kamil Kopania, Animated Sculptures of the Crucified Christ in the Religious Culture of the Latin Middle Ages (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2010). 15 Debra Hilborn, ‘Relating to the Cross: A Puppet Perspective on the Holy Week Ceremonies of the Regularis Concordia’, in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, ed. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell (London: Routledge, 2014), 164–75. 16 Eli Rozik, The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 20. 17 Ibid., 186–87. 1 INTRODUCTION 7 words, they represent ‘thinking in images’,18 elevated to possessing the power of a communication tool between individuals when it is ‘imprinted’ on the matter that becomes its ‘medium’, whether actor or puppet.19 If it can be considered, as Rozik does, that using an actor is ‘the imprinting of human images’ on ‘matter similar to the model of the image’,20 the same must be true for puppets, apart from the fact that the ‘matter’ receiving the ‘imprint’ belongs to another domain—that of objects. However, in both cases, considering theatrical performance as thinking in images r elies on the spectator’s acceptance of one or more cognitive contradictions,21 recalling the notions of a ‘fictional pact’ and a ‘puppetry pact’, briefly mentioned above, which I shall now develop further. As Rozik explains: The actors imprint on their own bodies images of indexes … which are meant to refer not to themselves but to other beings, real or fictional. As a result of this deflection of reference such iconic indexes are eventually attributed to characters that are supposed to produce them. During this process the actors remain themselves and are perceived both as actors, who inscribe descriptions on their own bodies, and as texts that describe characters.22 The fictional pact or the contract that the spectator adheres to when watching a theatrical performance resolves the contradiction that is born out of this double perception of the real person of the actor and the ‘text’ (the collection of signs) that they produce whilst attributing it to another. Presented in one and the same action and under the same type, these two series of information create amongst spectators what Jean-François Marmontel defined in the eighteenth century as a ‘half-illusion’: ‘the 18 Ibid., 250. 19 Ibid., 252. 20 Ibid. 21 See Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence Towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997). 22 Rozik, The Roots of Theatre, 73. 8D. PLASSARD continual and unrelenting error mixed with reflection that contradicts it, that way of being deceived and not being deceived’.23 In broad terms, the puppetry pact is no different in nature. Perception is again split between the object that one looks at—the puppet—and the ‘text’ of signs it produces, first and foremost that of an autonomous living being. This cognitive contradiction is so strong that it overshadows the fictional pact which is nevertheless present in puppet theatre. The strangeness of the support of these ‘imprints’, its belonging to the domain of inert matter, indifferent and without consciousness, constantly plays out in front of one’s eyes. Whilst the fictional pact requires no special effort as it only asks for compliance with the familiar codes of fiction, the puppetry pact must be continually re-activated. We are forced to admit that our senses are being misled by the puppeteer’s skills, by their ability to produce signs of a living being in something that belongs to another reality. Steve Tillis’s concept of a ‘double vision’ of the puppet, both as an inanimate object and as a living being, is therefore its fundamental characteristic.24 That is precisely what ‘makes a puppet’. As the puppeteer Hubert Jappelle explains: The movement of the puppet is t o be interpreted as the visible sign of an invisible thinking. The puppet does not appear to us as ‘living’ because it moves, but because it moves, it appears to be thinking. It seems that we are seeing its thinking act. The smallest of movements therefore will be perceived as the visible and expressive indication of its thought in action.25 Whilst any object might become a puppet, it cannot be done in any way or through any method of making it move. Pr oschan’s definition of puppets as ‘perform ing objects’ thus proves to be too broad: the ‘material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated 23 Jean-Baptiste Marmontel, ‘Illusion’, in Éléments de littérature (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, [1787] 2013), 635. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by Stacie Allan. 24 Steve Tillis, Towards an Æsthetics of the Puppet Theater (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992). 25 Hubert Jappelle, ‘L’interprétation du mouvement’, in Les Mains de lumière. Anthologie des écrits sur l’art de la marionette, ed. Didier Plassard (Charleville-Mézières: Éditions Institut International de la marionnette, 2004), 305. 1 INTRODUCTION 9 in narrative or dramatic performances’26 are not always puppets in the modern and Western meaning of the term. As such, it is not enough for the object conveying an image to be used or made to move. It is necessary—which is my criteria for the purposes of this study—that this movement indicates the presence of a conscient entity, and produces an effect of double vision. In other words, the object needs to be an instrument that produces a complete theatrical mimesis. What then will be considered here as a puppet is any element used in the context of a theatrical performance that is simultaneously perceived as it really is—for example, an object or a body part—and imagined as an autonomous subject with its own consciousness. Into Unknown Territory Very few studies have ventur ed into the territory of the dramaturgy of puppet shows. In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Magnin wrote that ‘one should rightly be astonished that no historian of our large or small theatres has undertaken a reconstruction of the puppet repertoire’.27 Almost a century and a half later, only Henryk Jurkowski has taken up this challenge.28 The number of works that he cites (around 500) gives some insight into the immense corpus assembled. However, this survey ends before the Second World War, so it does not address how the subsequent sociological, economic, and aesthetic transformations led to a fundamental reassessment of the puppetry arts and their dramaturgy in the second half of the century. Since Jurkowski’s investigation relies solely on works produced by writers, it only represents the tip of the iceberg: many more texts wer e written by puppeteers, a significant proportion of which remain in manuscript form. Since these works were actually performed on stage, they make up the ‘puppet repertoire’ properly speaking that Magnin would have liked to see reconstructed. Texts by 26 Frank Proschan, ‘The Semiotic Study of Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects’, Semiotica 47, nos. 1–4 (1983): 4. 27 Charles Magnin, Histoire des marionnettes en Europe, depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1852), 152. 28 Henryk Jurkowski, Écrivains et marionnettes. Quatre siècles de littérature dramatique en Europe (Charleville-Mézières: Institut International de la Marionnette, 1991). 10 D. PLASSARD writers often remained theatrical dreams: sometimes not realised, sometimes ultimately confided to actors, they tell us less about the history of puppets than how poets and playwrights viewed them. For a study of the textual structures for puppets in francophone Europe,29 Roger-Daniel Bensky analysed around a dozen of the plays performed, from Charles-Jacob Guillemain to Michel de Ghelderode, including comedies from the Lyon Guignol. Bensky identifies two opposing trends for puppet shows: ‘flight towards the supernatural world’ and ‘social caricature’. These two registers are very far from accounting for the diverse range of repertoires that were performed to respond to audience expectations: melodrama, historical drama, and vaudeville occupied a large place in puppeteers’ programmes. Bensky’s ultimately slim corpus of works examined demarcates the limitations of his survey. These examples reveal the practical difficulties of research in this area. To examine the repertoires of puppet theatres in all their diversity, it is necessary to consult thousands of manuscripts, brochures, and books published in very small print runs, scattered across libraries, museums, archives, and private collections. For each text, it is then necessary to identify the source of inspiration, the modes of development and transmission, the performance conditions, and the target audience. Therefore, the most decisive advances in knowledge were carried out on limited corpuses: regional traditions, baroque operas, Parisian fairground theatres, modernist or avant-garde experimentations. The research carried out by specialists in these areas has given visibility to the richness and variety of the works performed by puppets. Challenging Established Knowledge Though a lack of knowledge persists in some areas, the composite landscape o f puppet and marionette repertoires is beginning to be better understood. Critical anthologies have been compiled such as those 29 Roger-Daniel Bensky, Structures textuelles de la marionnette de langue française (Paris: Nizet, 1969), 9. 1 INTRODUCTION 11 by Roberto Leydi and Renata Mezzanotte-Leydi,30 Klaus Günzel,31 Manfred Nöbel,32 and Norbert Miller and Karl Riha.33 In Britain, Michael Byrom’s edition of different versions of the Punch and Judy Show allowed for them to be compared with one another.34 More recently, the texts of the Bonecos de Santo Aleixo have been collected together in Portugal,35 the vast cycle of the Drama for Fools dreamt up by Edward Gordon Craig has been published in its entirety,36 and a selection of puppet plays from the Parisian fairground theatres has appeared.37 Open access online resources supplement printed editions: for example, the Portail des Arts de la Marionnette digital library38 and the Theaville database.39 As part of the European research project PuppetPlays, whose findings this book presents, a database of a thousand references has been created, which readers can refer to for detailed overviews of the works examined in the following chapters and, in some cases, links to online editions.40 Critical reflections, in particular, are enriched by ambitious studies, opening up avenues to more nuanced understandings of works following 30 Roberto Leydi and Renata Mezzanotte-Leydi, eds., Marionette e burattini,Testi dal repertorio classico italiano dal teatro delle marionette e dei burattini (Milan: Gallo grande, 1958). 31 Klaus Günzel, ed., Alte deutsche Puppenspiele. Mit theatergeschichtlichen und literarischen Zeugnissen (Munich/Berlin: F. A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1971). 32 Manfred Nöbel, ed., Stücke für Puppentheater 1900–1945 (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1974). 33 Norbert Miller and Karl Riha, eds., Kasperletheater für Erwachsene (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1978). 34 Michael Byrom, ed., Punch and Judy, Its Origin & Evolution (London: Perpetua Press Limited, 1972). 35 Christine Zurbach, José Alberto Ferreira, and Paulo Seixas, eds., Autos, passos e bailinhos:os textos dos Bonecos de Santo Aleixo (Evora: Casa do Sul, 2007). 36 Edward Gordon Craig, Le Théâtre des fous/The Drama for fools, ed. Didier Plassard, Marion Chénetier-Alev, and Marc Duvillier, Montpellier: Éditions de l’Entretemps, 2012). 37 Françoise Rubellin, ed., Marionnettes du XVIII e siècle. Anthologie de textes rares (Montpellier: Espaces 34, 2022). 38 See https://lelab.artsdelamarionnette.eu. 39 See http://www.theaville.org. 40 See https://puppetplays.eu. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 19 Birth of a Repertoire (1): Chansons de geste and Chivalric Literature There is a significant disjuncture, as clear as but persisting for even longer than the one that affects the history of live theatre, between the rare traces of puppet acts in Antiquity and the first evidence of puppet performances in the twelfth century. None of the devices, occupations, or medieval usages of puppetry was inherited from Gr eece or Rome. String and rod marionettes, the only for ms for which there is evidence in Antiquity, only re-appeared during the Renaissance, while new processes of animation, such as glove puppets, jigging puppets, and tabletop puppetry were invented in the intervening period. The artists who operated them were no longer called puppeteers (‘nevrospast¯es’) as the aforementioned Potheinas was, which attested to the recognition of a specific skill. Instead, they were incorporated into the broad category of s leight-of-hand artists who performed different tricks and exhibited wild animals. Puppetry had to gain visibility before it could be attributed a name in its own right and serve as a medium to tell stories. In 1273, the Occitan troubadour Guiraut Riquier submitted a request to Alfonso X of Castile to establish a clear distinction between different types of minstrels (‘juglares’).6 The king’s r esponse was perfectly clear: troubadours, musicians, acrobats, and jesters were distinct occupations. Puppet (‘bavastelz’) players belonged to the lowest category of entertainers, along with tamers of monkeys, goats, and trained dogs. These b rutes (‘cazurros’)7 were pr ohibited from claiming the ‘name of minstrelsy’8 for their activities. This invisibility of the puppeteer’s occupation, incorporated into an indistinct assortment of entertainment forms, was common across the whole of medieval Europe. In some regions, this lack of distinction makes identifying precise refer ences to puppets in written sources particularly difficult. In France for example, the ‘jeux 6 In the Middle Ages, ‘minstrel’, as with ‘jongleur’ in French, referred to all performing artists from musicians and troubadours to acrobats and exhibitors of trained animals. 7 Henryk Jurkowski (A History of European Puppetry, 2 vols. [New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996–98], vol. 1, 55) interprets the choice of the word ‘cazurro’, referring to someone who speaks very little or uses crude language, by explaining that these exhibitors’ shows w ere silent. Perhaps, in the case of the ‘bavastelz’, it was only prose or improvised dialogues compared to the poetic compositions of ‘trovadores’ and ‘juglares’. 8 CitedinJohn E. Varey, Historia de los títeres en España (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957), 10. 20 D. PLASSARD de basteaux’ referred to both animating puppets and conjuring turns with cups or dice in the linguistic area of the langue d’oïl during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When this phrase appears in textual sources, it is not only impossible to determine the exact natur e of the objects moved, but it is also a useless endeavour: travelling sleight-ofhand artists likely combined puppet acts and tricks at the same time as they exhibited animals. The consequences of this lack of differentiation would persist long after the medieval period, with monkeys, cats, and dogs participating in glove puppet shows until the beginning of the twentieth century. The plurality of entertainment forms offered by minstrels might suggest that the use of puppets did not go beyond brief dance acts or knights in combat, such as those depicted in an illumination from the Hortus deliciarum (1159–75) by the abbess Herrad of Landsberg.9 Yet, from the thirteenth century onwards, several indications suggest that puppets were employed for more developed forms of performance. Flamenca, an anonymous Occitan romance composed in the second half of the thirteenth century, describes the festivities organised for the wedding of the Lord Archambaut and the beautiful Flamenca.10 A first list mentions all the ‘minstrels’—musicians, singers, storytellers—assembled to entertain guests, amongst whom figures ‘one [who] performed with marionettes’ (‘bavastelz’). A longer list then follows of the stories recounted or sung by these artists: episodes from the Trojan War, Greek mythology, the works of Ovid, the Old Testament, the Matter of Britain, adventures of Charlemagne’s paladins, or the reigns of Clovis and Pepin the Short. The fact that the puppeteer is mentioned before this second list suggests that puppets could be used to illustrate some of these tales. Combat scenes between knights, particularly assaults on castles, can be identified as the first seeds of a theatrical repertoire of puppets. In 1211, the Occitan troubadour Guiraut de Calanson advised the minstrel Fadet to join the court of Peter II of Aragon and recommended that he knew how to juggle well with knives and small metal balls, mimic bird song, and 9 Herrade de Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum (original destroyed). Image reproduced in Christian Moritz Engelhardt, Herrad von Landsperg, Aebtissin zu Hohenburg, oder St Odilien, im Elsass, im zwölften Jahrhundert und ihr Werk, Hortus deliciarum (1818), tab. v. 10 The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. E. D. Blodgett (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995), 32–39. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 21 act with ‘bavastelz’, ‘making them attack castles’.11 A miniature by Jehan de Grise in a manuscript of the Alexander Romance (1338–44) provides evidence of this practice: it depicts a group of men watching a glove puppet show. The puppet booth concealing the puppeteers has a series of crenels forming a rampart with two turrets, which gives it the appearance of a ‘small castle’—this detail can also be found on an even older miniature12 and explains why the word ‘castelet’ was traditionally used for puppet booths in France. Four figures in armour are visible: two knights are engaging in a swordfight and two guards holding maces observe them from the turrets.13 Other literary14 and iconographical15 sources portray the confrontation of armed horsemen positioned on either sides of a table and being either moved by direct manipulation16 or attached to strings held horizontally like the fighting knights in the Hortus deliciarum illumination. Artists using this technique would conceal themselves behind a set of curtains to stage small tournaments or horseback combat, as two descriptions fr om the Florentine jurist Accursius and his disciple Odofred from the middle of the thirteenth century suggest: The scena is a shaded space created using a curtain; it is set up in a private or public place, and it is called scena because of scenon, meaning ‘rope’, as the minstrels make the horses move with a rope as well as other similar things. (Accursius)17 11 See Guiraut de Calanson, ‘Sirventes-ensenhamen’, in Recherches sur les connaissances littéraires des troubadours occitans et catalans des XII e et XIII e siècles, ed. François Pirot (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 1972), 565. 12 On a page in a manuscript of Speculum doctrinale by Vincent de Beauvais (first half of the thirteenth century) held at the Bibliothèque de Bruges (Ms. 251). I thank Yanna Kor for drawing my attention to this image. 13 Li Romans du Bon Roi Alixandre, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 76r. 14 Hugo von Trimberg’s poem Der Renner (1290–1300) mentions puppets (‘Tatermänner’) of two knights fighting with lances. See Hans R. Purschke, Die Entwicklung des Puppenspiels in den klassischen Ursprungsländern Europas. Ein historischer Überblick (Frankfurt am Main: self-published, 1984), 19. 15 See notably Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s engraving (1514–16) of the romance Der Weisskunig. 16 Direct manipulation meaning to hold the object directly in the hand. 17 Cited in Dino Bigongiari, ‘Were There Theatres in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries?’, Romanic Review 37, no. 3 (1946): 201–24 (at 208). The etymology proposed for ‘scena’ is clearly fanciful. 22 D. PLASSARD The minstr els arrive and set u p their curtains somewhere; they have wooden horses, r emain inside the curtains and make the horses move using ropes. (Odofred)18 Since these citations suggest that a specific theatrical space was constructed for these shows, the battle scenes between ‘bavastelz’ cannot be reduced to the animation of a simple duel; rather, they produced a truly standalone performance. From the fourteenth century onwards, there is evidence in the ledgers of royal and aristocratic households19 of payments being made for theatrical puppet performances and, in the fifteenth century, notably in Spain and Portugal, assaults on castles were staged as interludes on the occasion of large festivities. The Valencian writer Jaume Roig makes reference to this practice in his romance Espill (1460). Other assaults were performed for the Duke of Calabria’s entrance into Barcelona in 1464,20 and in 1490 at Evora for the wedding of Afonso, hereditary Prince of Portugal and Isabella of Aragon, though it is unclear whether they featured puppets. Puppets were certainly used for Ferdinand I of Aragon’s coronation celebrations in Zaragoza in February 1414: the Archive of the Kingdom of Valencia contains a mention of the ‘large boxes where the puppets of the Moor minstrels will be’ from 17 January 1414,21 which seems linked to the preparations for the festivities. The description provided of these celebrations mentions the floats on which a model of a city was constructed with houses and roofs. At each side of the city was a castle in conflict with the other; knights energetically engaged in skirmishes, and bombards and war weaponry launched leather balls stuffed with tow.22 18 Ibid. These descriptions are also cited in Simon Gabay, L’Acteur au Moyen-Âge. L’histrion et ses avatars en Occident de saint Augustin à saint Thomas (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2015), 112. 19 In 1364 at Dordrecht, in the presence of Jean de Châtillon. In 1396, the owner of a ‘set of puppets’ (‘dockespil’) who came to perform in The Hague for Albert I, duke of Bavaria, r eceived five pieces of gold in compensation for damage to his equipment. See Wim Meilink, Doopceel van Jan Claeszen. Kroniek van het traditionele Poppenspel in Nederland (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1969), 12. 20 See Francisco Por ras, Titelles teatro popular (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1981), 86. 21 Cited in Porras, Titelles teatro popular, 86. 22 See the description of this performance published by Jerónimo de Blancas (Coronaciones de los serenissimos reyes de Aragon [Zaragoza, 1641]) and cited in Varey, Historia de los títeres en España, 20. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 23 The performance ended with a pact concluded between the masters of the two castles: the siege of the city of Balaguer in October 1413 and the victory of Ferdinand I against the revolt led by James II, Count of Urgell was thus re-created with puppets,23 just a few months after the real events, to celebrate the shoring up of the new royal power. Magnin cites another fifteenth-century source that suggests ‘bavastelz’ were used for actual theatrical performances on themes emerging from chivalric literature: the German translation of a Dutch poem Malegijs, which itself was derived from the chanson de geste Maugis d’Aigremont. Published in 1848 by the philologist Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen based on a manuscript held at the Heidelberg University Library, the episode mentioned by Magnin does not appear in the French version: The fairy Oriande de Rosefleur, who has been separated for fifteen years from her beloved pupil Malagis, arrives dressed as a minstrel at the Château d’Aigremont, where a marriage is being celebrated. She proposes a puppet show; it is accepted; she asks for a table to serve as a theatre, and places upon it two elegant dolls representing a male and a female magician. Into their mouths she puts stanzas which tell her story and lead Malagis to recognise her.24 These stanzas actually take the form of dialogue: the fairy Oriande ‘speaks both’25 the male and female magicians in the first person, which she takes care to warn the spectators about, as if this practice was still unusual. Although part of a work of fiction, it is the oldest theatrical dialogue created for puppets known to this day in Europe. It functions as an intervention: staging the recognition between the male and female puppet-magicians, doubles of Malagis and Oriande who are made to kiss on the improvised stage, causes Malagis to emerge from the audience and kiss the fairy. 23 The puppets must have been rather large (perhaps 80 cm or 1 m) as the balls fir ed by the bombards were as big as the head of a ten-year-old child. 24 Magnin, Histoire des marionnettes en Europe, 272–73. The text of this fragment was published under the title ‘Puppenspiel’ by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen in Germania, Neues Jahrbuch der Berlinischen Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache und Alterthumskunde,vol. 8 (Berlin: Hermann Schulze, 1848), 280–81. A modern critical edition has been produced by a team of researchers: Der deutsche Malagis (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009). The episode mentioned by Magnin is found in verses 22,197–291 (at 546–48). 25 Der deutsche Malagis, 546. 24 D. PLASSARD Birth of a Repertoire (2): The Comic Register In Cervantes’s Don Quixote (II, 26), Maese Pedro’s puppet show stages the liberation of Melisendra, imprisoned by the moors, by her husband Don Gaiferos. This performance attests to the fact that the thrilling stories from the chansons de geste and chivalric literature traditions continued to form part of puppeteers’ repertoires until the seventeenth century. From the sixteenth century onwards, the treatment of these adventures and the contexts in which they were performed considerably diversify. In Mondi celesti, terrestri et infernali (1583), the Italian writer Anton Francesco Doni defines what he calls ‘fraccuradi’: Fraccuradi is a specific form of entertainment for the carefree masses where the show is performed by puppets (fantocci), placed on the tips of fingers, who hit each other, joust, joke, kill each other, take castles from one another.26 This further r eference to combat, jousting, sieges, and the capturing of castles shows that these performances remained marked by the same pieces of bravery that the ‘bavastelz’ performed three centuries earlier. It attests to the persistence of a theatrical genre specific to puppetry that drew inspiration not from live theatre, but from chansons de geste and, more broadly, the oral compositions of troubadours and minstr els. Despite its brevity, Doni’s account offers several important details about these ‘fraccuradi’ performances. The first is that he refers to glove puppets, ‘placed on the tips of fingers’, like in Jehan de Grise’s miniature, and that the performance is given in the street since the ‘carefree masses’ are entertained by it: the practice thus moves out of the closed space of recitations and interludes in courtly s ociety towards a new urban and popular format of puppet shows. This practice had evidently already existed for several centuries since minstrels and sleight-of-hand artists would not have been able to make a living from performing in castles alone; they also had to earn their keep travelling and performing at fairgrounds, markets, communal halls rented for the occasion, and small villages. However, the puppet performances mentioned in Mondi celesti, 26 Anton Francesco Doni, Mondi celesti, terrestri et infernali, de gli academici pellegrini (Venezia: Nicolò Moretti, [1552] 1583), 91. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 25 terrestri et infernali are clearly identified as such; they are no longer indiscriminately thrown in with illusion acts and turns of skill, which was still the case, for example, in a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Illustration 2.1) wher e a glove puppeteer, a conjurer, acrobats, and contortionists are thrown together in a crowd of demons and monsters. Actors—in Doni’s case a woman playing the ‘fraccuradi’—began to take over from peddlers, facilitating the emergence of puppet acts from the domain of general entertainment and its integration into the theatrical activities of the first tr oupes of the Commedia dell’arte. Lastly, Doni’s description shows that the performance is comic in nature: the ‘fantocci’ ‘joke’ (‘scherzano’) and the puppeteer makes them tussle (‘li fa azzufare’) rather than fight each other. Whilst the ‘fraccuradi’ continued to draw on the subject of knightly combat, it can be concluded that it was treated Illustration 2.1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Magician,drawing, 1564. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rijksprentenkabinet 26 D. PLASSARD as parody, not to celebrate the values of epic poetry, but the opposite: to laugh. Another account from the same period leads to the same supposition. In the De subtilitate (1550), Gerolamo Cardano wrote: ‘Now if I were to relate how many and what sorts of small wooden statues they have— the people call them Magatelli—the day would fail me. For they play, they fight, they hunt, they dance, they play the trumpet, they practise the culinary art.’27 The heterogeneous nature of these actions suggests at least a partially comic usage for puppets, even if it perhaps refers to string-marionettes (the first mention of them since Antiquity) rather than glove puppets.28 The diverse families of animated figures did not only make spectators laugh through parodies of chivalric literature in the Middle Ages and, to a lesser extent, during the Renaissance. Glove puppets, i n particular, drew upon the repertoire of fabliaux, farces, and other entertaining sermons to perform complete plots and especially more trivial s ituations that would immediately get spectators laughing. A second miniature by Jehan de Grise in the same manuscript of the Alexander Romance, illuminated between 1338 and 1344, provides the proof: again, it shows a puppet booth, but this time, a man threatens a woman with a club.29 The exclusively feminine audience of this scene are left to guess the moralising intentions of the illustrator through his message of submission to masculine power. Yet it is impossible not to see the recurring theme of the quarrelling couple found in literature and theatre at the time also being extended to puppet shows. Undoubtedly the favoured motifs of farce circulating through touring puppet booths enriched the repertoire of itinerant puppeteers. Some historians even believe they can detect indications in medieval theatre texts that prove they were intended for puppets. George Speaight highlights the case of Interludium de clerico et puella (The interlude of the cleric and the girl), a fragment of dialogue written in thirteenth-century 27 Cited in Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 132. Translation by Philip A. Shaw. 28 Given that these puppets are ‘small wooden statues’, glove puppets can effectively be ruled out, but they could also be figures from mechanical raree show boxes. Hieronymi Cardani Mediolanensis, De subtilitate libri XXI (Lugdunum: apud Stephanum Michaelem, 1580), 634. 29 Li Romans du Bon Roi Alixandre, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 54v. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 27 English, undoubtedly inspired by the fabliau Dame Sirith.30 Speaight’s somewhat unsubstantiated claim essentially relies on the fact that the text never has more than two characters on stage at once (the cleric and the young girl; the cleric and an old woman), which would have allowed one glove puppeteer to perform it.31 Michel Rousse32 formulates the more convincing hypothesis that the fabliau Estormi by Hue Piaucelle (or Hugues Piaucele, who was active in the north of France at the end of the thirteenth century) may have been a r ewriting in narrative form of a farce for puppets. The story presents a penniless couple Yfame and Jean who lay a trap for three priests courting the young woman. Yfame arranges to meet all three priests the same night at three different times, suggesting to each of them that they bring all their money. Jean kills them one after the other with the whack of a club, robs them, and then goes to see his br other-in-law Estormi, whom he informs that he has killed a priest and asks for help burying him. Estormi leaves with the first body but, when he returns to Jean’s house, he is shown the second, making him believe the first has returned from the dead. Estormi leaves again to bury the second priest and then the third, believing it is still the first one. When he meets a fourth, very much alive, priest on the road, he believes the body has come back to life once again and kills him.33 The comedy of repetition, mur ders by the blow of a club, and the pile of accumulating bodies are reoccurring devices in popular glove puppet performances, and it is tempting to recognise in Estormi the traces of routines that foreshadow those of Punch and Pulcinella. However, these elements are not the indications that lead Rousse to discern ‘the imprint of the puppet booth’ in the fabliau. His argument draws on an odd detail: 30 See George Speaight, The Earliest English Puppet Play? The Interlude of the Cleric and the Girl (Bicester: Da Silva Puppet Books, 1997), and Wilhelm Heuser, ‘Das Interludium de clerico et puella und das Fabliau von Dame Siriz’, Anglia 30 (1907): 306–19. 31 In contrast, Ian Lancashire has shown that the mention of a theatre show called Ioly Walte and Malking, which reproduces the argument of Interludium de clerico et puella, in Grimsby (Lincolnshire) in 1431, undoubtedly refers to a puppet act. The text has not been preserved. See Ian Lancashire, ‘“Ioly Walte and Malkyng”: a Grimsby puppet play in 1431’, Records of Early English Drama 4, no. 2 (1979): 6–8. 32 Michel Rousse, ‘Estormi ou l’empreinte du castelet’, in La Scène et les tréteaux, Le Théâtre de la farce au Moyen-Âge (Orléans: Paradigme, 2004), 275–85. 33 Hugues Piaucelle, ‘D’Estormi’, in Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIII e et XIV e siècles, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1872), 198–219. 28 D. PLASSARD the fact that Jean, after having slain the priests, makes them stand up, and that Estormi also holds them upright before throwing them into the grave. Rousse sees the insistence on this strange postur e as the sign that the glove puppets of the three priests were undoubtedly hung on the ar ch or the vault of the puppet booth, which is visible on the two illuminations in the Alexander Romance. However, the connection to Pulcinella’s routine should not be discounted: Pulcinella repeatedly rests the body of his victim against the puppet booth as he struggles to drop it into the coffin. The comic play with empty coffins and lifeless bodies are constant features of these shows. Seeing these echoes as evidence of a direct relationship between a hypothetical farce for puppets dating from the thirteenth century and shows whose first traces do not pre-date the sixteenth century would be questionable. Yet, it does not seem excessive to consider that a language of proven comic gestures, created for a limited range of situations and interactions between characters, could be transmitted across the centuries by taking the form of routines. These practices were certainly subject to shifts, variations, and reconfigurations: a disjuncture in terms of vraisemblance separates, for example, Estormi, wher e only one slightly unsophisticated character believes that a body can leave its tomb to return to where it was taken from, and Pulcinella e il cane34 (Pulcinella and the dog) where the ‘guappo’ (yob), who is very much killed off, falls again and again down the side of the coffin that Pulcinella presents for him. The comedy of farce, based on the foolishness of one character hoodwinked by another who is cleverer than him, contrasts with the absurd, almost fantastic burlesque of a nuisance who persists in thwarting the hero’s endeavours even after his death. Whilst the perspectives and the type of laughter they provoke are different, the same m otif is employed: that of an obstinate corpse. No form acts out this theme better than a puppet show. In sum, the miniature from the Alexander Romance proves the existence of comic performances using glove puppets from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, and traces of dramatic action can hypothetically be connected to them. However, it was not until the sixteenth century that written accounts, such as that of Doni cited above, begin to describe these performances in more detail. In Ragionamenti (1534), 34 A classic sketch for Neapolitan guarattelle. See Bruno Leone, La guarattella. Burattini e burattinai a Napoli (Bologna: CLUEB, 1986). 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 35 of boxes, carried on the backs of travelling exhibitors, circulated widely on an international level. Initially called ‘boîtes de curiosité’ in France, ‘raree shows’ in England, ‘Himmelreich’ in German-speaking countries, and then ‘mundinovi’ or ‘tutilimundi’ almost everywher e in Europe, they were generally formed of two or three vertical panels that could be separated into different compartments that each showed a scene in miniature (Illustration 2.2). Sometimes in wood, but also in wax, clay, plaster, or papier-mâché, the figurines in these compartments could rotate on an axis or make simple gestures when the exhibitor turned a key to operate the mechanism whilst r ecounting or singing the story represented.55 In 1637, the Swede Peder Månsson, a young student, mentioned in his journal a travelling singer at a fairground who had ‘an instrument carried on his back, and within it, artfully and skilfully carved, were some little wooden people, who moved and walked about to demonstrate the Final Judgement, the Prodigal Son and the Fate of John the Baptist’.56 These boxes were generally associated with foreign exhibitors, such as Italians in England,57 but in Spain and France in particular, they wer e most often referred to as Savoyards. The mechanical pieces made in the Arve Valley from the sixteenth century onwards for the watchmakers of Geneva may have been used in their manufacture. The insistence on their foreign origin and the fact that they were presented by travelling exhibitors prove that the performances condemned by the Orihuela synod did not emerge in churches, but that attempts had been made to adopt them in a religious context. Martin Luther’s Table Talk (1529–46) appears to confirm this assertion when he explains that some Catholic priests, after observing their congr egations abandoning mass but rushing to puppet shows on market squares, began introducing these performances into their churches to convince ‘children and unlearned people’ to attend religious services.58 End of the 18th Century, ed. K. Kopania (Warsaw: The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art, 2017), 140–57. 55 The most extensive description of these devices is from the entry ‘Mundinovi’ in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1734). 56 Cited in Margareta Sörenson, ‘Sweden’, World Encyclopaedia of Puppetry Arts, https://wepa.unima.org/en/sweden/. The citation comes from Diarium Gyllenianum of Peder Månsson (Petrus Gyllenius), dated 7 March 1637. 57 Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre, 55–56. 58 Martin Luther, Colloquia mensalia (London: William Du Gard, 1652), 331. 36 D. PLASSARD Illustration 2.2 Willem van Mieris, The Raree-Show (‘t Fraay Curieus), 1718, oil painting. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum For a period of time, then, some travelling puppeteers were able to take advantage of their devices’ capacity to reproduce the appearance of sculpted or painted triptychs, like a moving illustration of episodes from the Bible or the miracles of saints, and tried to present them in religious buildings during festivals. However, these attempts were quickly abandoned. If such practices had truly been widespread, other synods or councils, and not just one provincial synod, would have denounced them, like all forms of performances given in churches were from the thirteenth century onwards.59 59 See the anthology compiled in ‘Sentiments de l’Église relativement au théâtre – 1: Canons des saints conciles’, in Dictionnaire des mystères, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1854), cols. 24–32. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 37 Birth of a Repertoire (3): Shows with Religious Subject Matter in Secular Spaces Until the seventeenth century, there are almost no indisputable traces of puppet shows, according to the previously established definition, within churches.60 A different picture emerges for performances of a r eligious repertoire within a secular context: for example, in private residences, public buildings, fairground huts, and educational institutions. The first known example relates to the Nativity: in 1362–63, the accounting ledgers for the Counts of Holland mention a payment made to a man who performed a Three Magi act61 : the literary historian Gerrit Kalff, who discovered this reference, interprets the fact that one single actor was remunerated as proof that it was a puppet show. From the end of the fifteenth century, verified evidence of performances exists,62 which shores up the hypothesis that puppets were not readily accepted as actors of sacred histories. Only the employment of specific devices, mechanical boxes, seems to have allowed for the use of animated figures (by definition suspect)63 to propagate the faith. The accounts of the town of Amboise in 1501 contain the trace of a payment owed to a minstrel who gave a single performance of the Passion. In 1510, a puppeteer from Burgundy asked the municipality of Nuremberg for permission to present another show of the Passion, ‘very certainly’ with the help of a box according to the historian Hans R. Purschke.64 Permission was not granted, but numerous sources attest 60 In 1677, the Discalced Augustinians of Rouen organised a performance of the Passion by large puppets in the church that had been entrusted to them, but this show was very badly received: an anonymous pamphlet in verse, Histoire de ce qui s’est passé dans la chapelle des Augustins Déchaussez du Faux-Bourg Martainville de Rouen (Orléans: Éléazar Bonne-Foy, 1678), denounces at length ‘this so dishonest and so frivolous machine’. The dimensions of the figures suggest semi-automata. 61 Cited in Meilink, Doopceel van Jan Claeszen, 12. 62 In 1472, the ledger of the Römer market in Frankfurt mentions expenses for the construction of several ‘himmelrichhütten’ (huts for the Himmelreich, a motion with religious subjects). Others would follow in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. See Kaus Wolf, Kommentar zur ‘Frankfurter Dirigierrolle’ und zum ‘Frankfurter Passionspiel’ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002), 284, 301, 325, in particular. 63 Puppeteers have sometimes been grouped together with wizar ds and necromancers and condemned as such. See Magnin, Histoire des marionnettes en Europe, 58–60. 64 Purschke, Die Entwicklung des Puppenspiels, 26. 38 D. PLASSARD to the growing spread of these performances in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although itinerant puppeteers moved from town to town, they were not vagabonds, and some even enjoyed a sizeable reputation. For example, the Swiss Heinrich Wirri was a renowned ‘Pritschenmeister’65 who performed his Passion Christi mit Figuren between 1557 and 1570 as far afield as Germany and Alsace. Another artist Jörg Wetzl asked the authorities in Nördlingen ( Bavaria) in 1583 for permission to perform the sacrifice of Isaac, the beheading of John the Baptist, and the principal episodes of the life of Jesus, from the Annunciation to the Resurrection.66 The same year, in the small Swiss town of Büren an der Aare near Biel/Bienne, travelling artists presented their different talents at the local hall. The description left by the pastor Johannes Hutmacher in the church register demonstrates the extent to which a story taken from the Gospels, such as the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, could inspire a comic interpretation, that a ‘Himmelreich’ could be followed by a farce performed by glove puppets, and, in particular, how puppet shows and technological wonders could be interspersed within the same performance: Sunday 11 June 1583, in a corner of the large room at the town hall … a peddler from Esslingen performed [the story of] the rich man and Lazarus with small images he showed from behind a curtain, and he made each character speak aloud with a deep or soft voice in a comic manner. He had an associate, a minstrel who stood next to the door of the room and so skilfully played a zither between acts. When the show was over, the minstrel placed the laid table in the middle [of the room] and, standing upon it, he skilfully juggled three Muscat cups, yarn, grain, flour, wine, a metal ring, a padlock, and other things for which he asked a Kreutzer from anyone who wanted to watch him. After that, everyone had an evening drink, and the first man played Meister Hämmerlin with a cooking grid while the other stood on a chair, stuffed a large handful of wärck[?] in his mouth and breathed out fire several times.67 65 Organiser of public festivals, master of ceremonies, and poet charged with composing the work to recount the event. 66 Hans R. Purschke, Die Anfänge der Puppenspielformen und ihre vermutlichen Ursprünge (Puppenspielkundliche Quellen und Forschungen) (Bochum: Deutsches Institut für Puppenspiel, 1979), 33. 67 Cited in Leif Rüdiger, ‘Spil im radthuss’, Figura 33 (2001): 4–6. Thanks to Lars Rebehn for having brought this source to my attention. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 39 Often these mechanical boxes were simply placed on a table, but they also existed in very large dimensions. The Saxon Andreas Rothe, whose activities can be traced from 1591 and 1599, had a box alongside which three actors performed and some parts had dialogue. The humanist Martin Crusius, who saw one of their performances in 1596 at the grain hall in Tübingen, spoke of ‘a comedy or rather a tragedy about the rich man and Lazarus’ (Luke 16) delivered in front of hundreds of spectators.68 In 1612, José de Valdivieso’s poem Ensaladilla del Retablo mentioned the performance of a raree show of the Nativity presented at the Corral de la Cruz in Madrid, which suggests that a large audience was present. A transition can thus be established between the shows given by travelling puppeteers and the performances of large puppets which, under the name of ‘máquina r eal’, would be delivered by professional companies in ‘corr ales’ (theatres) from 1632 until the start of the nineteenth century.69 The scarcity of detailed descriptions and the vagueness of denominations make it very difficult to interpret mentions relating to raree shows. The words ‘retablo’, ‘motion’, and ‘Himmelreich’ can be applied to very different performance devices ranging fr om small compartmentalised boxes that travelling sleight-of-hand artists transported on their backs to very large scenes, positioned horizontally and not vertically, with more imposing figures that invisible mechanics controlled from beneath, for which only rare iconographical traces have been found.70 On the border between puppet shows and theatre of automata, the performances given using these large boxes necessitated, like that of live theatre, permission from the local authorities. The requests submitted by the artists give information at the very least about the subjects performed—particularly popular were the Creation of the world, the Book of Jonah, the Nativity, the Passion, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and the Last Judgment. Some of these performances, using the terms ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, demonstrate the same literary or theatrical ambitions as those given by troupes of actors. In 1593, Andreas Heinrich asked the municipal councils 68 Purschke, Die Entwicklung des Puppenspiels, 26. 69 See Francisco J. Cornejo, ‘La máquina real. Teatro de títeres en los corrales de comedias españoles de los siglos XVII y XVIII’, Fantoche 0 (2006): 13–31. 70 An engraving in Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Emblemas morales (1610) shows two puppets positioned on a table and a lute player alongside them, without any visible control device. The simplicity of the drawing, however, limits its documentary value. 40 D. PLASSARD of Nördlingen and Ulm for permission to perform his ‘spiritual show or comedy of the prodigal son and the beheading of John the Baptist with splendidly beautiful artistic tableaus’. The decision of the Ulm council, which permitted him to perform but limited the admission charge to a pfennig per person, describes Heinrich as a ‘player of tragedies’.71 Another travelling artist Balthasar Klein had the text of one of his shows, an adaptation of the Book of Jonah, printed in Schweinfurt in 1582, which can be considered the oldest play for puppets ever published in Europe. This significant piece of work (five acts, 23 characters) was the result of a collaboration with the Latinist, translator, and playwright Simon Roth.72 There is evidence that the play was performed in several Bavarian towns between 1578 and 1582. Jonas is an adaptation of Roth’s Comedi von dem H. Propheten Jona (Comedy of the Prophet St Jonah) intended for live actors. Klein shortens certain lines, integrates passages from a play by Meistersinger Hans Sachs on the same subject,73 and, most significantly, develops the visual dimension of the performance: God is actually represented on stage, while in Roth’s version He only appears as an invisible voice; the episode of Jonah’s sea voyage during which the giant fish swallows him74 is performed and not simply recounted; and the miraculous growth of a squash plant to shelter the prophet’s head from the sun’s rays is also shown on stage. From this period onwards, puppet theatre seems to have been perceived as a theatrical medium suitable for portraying the supernatural. This intervention of non-humans in raree shows is also documented for smaller compartmentalised boxes, which generally performed a lay repertoire. Thomas Mür ner in his satirical work Narrenbeschwörung (Exorcism of Fools, 1512) describes the show given by a puppeteer with a ‘Himmelreich’. The puppeteer performed a succession of different episodes with 71 Hans R. Purschke, Die Puppenspieltraditionen Europas. Deutschsprachige Gebiete (Frankfurt: Puppen und Masken, 1986), 12. 72 Simon Roth and Balthasar Klein, Jonas. Ein lustigs, auch kurtzes, und nicht minder nutzes Spiel, von der Buszpredigt Jona des Propheten zu Ninive, und wie alles Volck der Stadt, seine wortenglaubt, und ernstliche Busz gethan habe. Durch Simon Rothen und Balthasar Klein in einfeltige Reime gestellet (1582). Long considered lost, the only known copy of this edition is now held at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. 73 Hans Sachs, Comedia mit 10 personen, der gantz prophet Jonas, und hat 5 actus (1551). 74 ‘Then the boat moves away, and the fish can still be seen a little. It then spits out Jonah.’ See Roth and Klein, Jonas. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 41 no connection between them, including one borrowed from the Roman de Renart cycle in which the wolf Ysengrin steals a roasted joint of meat. This example shows that the same word ‘Himmelreich’ referred to both large scenes that used semi-automata to perform dialogued plays of an essentially religious subject matter, in direct competition with live theatre, and small boxes, which could be transported on the back of a man or an animal, with religious or lay subjects whose animation was accompanied by spoken word or song. The words ‘retablo’ in Spain and Portugal and ‘motion’ in England also had the same multi-purpose usage. Whilst some boxes with compartmentalised scenes, which the peddler presented or revealed bit by bit, depicted disparate subjects, others, like that of Maese Pedro in the second book of Don Quixote (Chapter XXVI), presented differ ent episodes from the same story. In Cervantes’s novel, it is highly likely to be a vertical box and Maese Pedro successively animates each tableau (Don Gaiferos playing draughts, reprimanded by Carlomagno; Melisendra, prisoner in the tower, forcefully kissed by a Moor; the punishment of the Moor on the orders of Marsilio) as his assistant addresses the audience. However, it is difficult to imagine what the performances given with these boxes were like on the basis of these indirect sources, particularly as works of fiction only mention them in a satirical way. Writers mocked the pomposity of the speeches and the puppeteers’ anachronisms and incoherences. For example, Henry Chettle and John Day, in the play The Blind Beggar of Bednal-Green (1600), describe a motion in the following terms: ‘You shall likewise see the famous City of Norwitch, and the stabbing of Iulius Caesar in the French Capitol by a sort of Dutch Mesapotamians … Or if it please you shall see a stately combate betwixt Tamberlayn the Great, and the duke of Guyso the less, perform’d on the Olympick Hills in France.’75 Popular shows are a source of ridicule in literature: writers mock the ambition of staging the greats from ancient and modern history, and refuse to see anything other than a comical simulacrum in the animation of figures. The case is true for the religious repertoir e: Tomás Rodaja, the protagonist of The Glass Graduate, one of Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories, declares that puppet exhibitors ‘treated divine matters with 75 Henry Chettle and John Day, The blind-beggar of Bednal-green (London: R. Pollard and Tho. Dring, 1659), iv, 1. 42 D. PLASSARD an indecent lack of r espect, because they reduced worship to mockery in the figur es they paraded in their theatres’.76 At the end of the sixteenth and start of the seventeenth centuries, puppet performances, whose first appearances date from the medieval period, begin to be established as a standalone and clearly identified practice. Though tricks and animal taming continued to accompany puppeteers, and the primary source of their income from their activities, like those of travelling actors, remained the sale of charlatan remedies, their performances were most often organised around a main argument, either exhibited by a peddler or delivered by characters in action and conversing between themselves, in this case adhering to all the codes of a dramatic composition. Out of puppet shows, puppet theatres emerged with a tripartite repertoire—chivalric, comic, and religious—and reached a wide audience. 76 M. de Cervantes, ‘The Glass Graduate’, in Exemplary Stories, trans. Lesley Lipson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 124. 2 IMPRINTS AND TRACES 43 Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appr opriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified t he licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. CHAPTER 3 Street Theatres: Sketches of Humanity A Range of Different Devices Like the sleight-of-hand artists who preceded them and the actors with whom they were sometimes conflated, puppeteers long remained travelling performers. Yet this itinerance took very different forms depending on the type of show performed. To protect the mechanisms of their devices from the hazards of the outdoors and inclement weather, sixteenth and seventeenth-century peddlers who took to the r oads to exhibit their large ‘retablo’, ‘motion’, or ‘Himmelreich’ gave performances under the shelter of fairground huts, in public buildings, and private homes in towns and cities, or inns and barns in the countryside. The time required to set it up necessitated a stay of several days at each destination; the enclosed space meant that an entry fee could be charged. In certain urban areas, artists had to obtain written authorisation from the municipal authorities, resulting in documentary evidence that allows for their routes to be traced and for the titles of the works performed to be known. This requirement represents a small first step towar ds puppeteers being recognised by public powers. Less is known about the much more precarious and ephemeral work of street puppeteers—a few minutes on the corner of a side street or a market square could suffice to set up a puppet booth and perform a s ketch. Rather than requests for authorisation to perform, municipal archives contain decrees prohibiting puppeteers’ shows and expulsion orders issued against them. Nonetheless, since puppet shows contributed © The Author(s) 2026 D. Plassard, Puppetry and Dramaturgy, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05151-6_3 45 52 D. PLASSARD beminden binnen Ierusalem12 (The Pilgrimage of Duyfkens [Dove] and Willemynkens [Wilful] towards Their Beloved in Jerusalem) published in 1627 in Antwerp: a peddler on a stand calls out to a group of onlookers and points to the show featuring two glove puppets taking place on the first floor of a house. Similarly, in Valencia (Spain) in 1619, puppets performed a short far ce from inside a private residence on the occasion of a parade honouring St Dominic, which was quickly denounced by the Inquisition tribunal: Two puppets appeared at a window, one was dressed as a monk from the Dominican Order, the other as a secular priest. The Dominican had his cassock hitched up over his buttocks as the priest forcefully spanked him. Not far away, there was a third puppet that looked like a young girl, and once the monk was duly whipped, he went to woo her in the most tender way.13 The comedy of glove puppetry is very often bold. Closely linked to that of farce, it also prolongs the satirical dimension of the medieval fabliaux that mocked feudal lords, rich merchants, and members of the clergy. Actors and puppets could even act together in the same performance as a drawing by Abraham van Diepenbeecke in an emblem book from 1631 shows: two actors dance and sing in fr ont of a curtain from behind which two glove puppets emerge. The same character Matamore is portrayed twice, by an actor and by a puppet, illustrating the idea expressed in the emblem that audiences like to be deceived by ‘the double whisper of the actor’,14 just like young women who listen to the doublespeak of their seducers. This doubling of the actor and the puppet was motivated by economic reasons: until the end of the eighteenth century, theatre performed in the streets primarily served to promote the sale of miracle remedies or teeth pulling, the principal sources of income for these artists, and touring 12 Duyfkens ende Willemynkens pelgrimagie tot haren beminden binnen Ierusalem (Antwerpen: Hieronimus Verdussen, 1627). 13 Henri Mérimée, Spectacles et comédiens à Valencia (1580–1630) (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1913), 88. See also John E. Varey, Historia de los títeres en España (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957), 96–98, for the original citation from the Inquisition tribunal. 14 Antoine de Bourgogne, Linguae vitia et remedia expressa… (Antverpiae: apud Vidua Cnobbaert, [1631] 1652), 55. 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 53 companies often br ought together puppeteers and actors. It is thus unsurprising that several comic archetypes of farce appeared as both human and puppet. For example, the fool Jean des Vignes, a companion of Tabarin and Franc-à-Tripe, mentioned in Guillaume Bouchet’s Sérées (1588), was later revived under the form of a puppet: a mid-seventeenth-century engraving by Pierre Richer even depicts an actor playing him l ooking at his own puppet which gloves his right hand.15 Similarly, there is evidence of the characters Juan de las Viñas in Spain16 and Zan della Vigna in Venice17 being played as puppets. Another example is Burattino, second Zanni in the Compagnia dei Gelosi, whose stage name would later refer to the whole family of ‘burattini’, Italian glove puppets. Numerous comic figures thus emerged in Europe, circulating from one country to another and being reproduced from one actor to another, and who were common to all forms of burlesque shows improvised in the str eet, whether played by actors or by puppets. Some of these ‘lustige Figuren’ (comic characters), the term used by German-language researchers, can be traced back to their inventor: the Austrian actor Johann Valentin Petzold (1648– 1721) created Kilian Brustfleck, a gauche peasant who was later revived by Goethe in his farce sketch for puppets Hanswursts Hochzeit oder der Lauf der Welt (Hanswurst’s Wedding or the Way of the World). Yet, the origins of most lustige Figuren remain unknown, and their individual characteristics can be hard to detect: as J ohannes Minuth demonstrates, the character Meister Hämmerlein, who appeared in the sixteenth century and can be considered one of Kasperl’s predecessors, can take on the role of various figures, such as a Devil, a servant, a peasant, or even a fool.18 This circulation of characters between trestle stages and puppet booths in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries raises the question of whether actors and glove puppets performed the same repertoire. This does not seem to be the case for two reasons: first, as already noted, there is a 15 Engraving r eproduced in Victor Fournel, Les Rues du vieux Paris (Paris: FirminDidot, 1879), 475. 16 J. E. Varey, ‘Representaciones de títeres en teatros públicos y palaciegos’, Revista de filología española 38, no. 1/4 (1954): 178. 17 Tommaso Garzoni, La Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1585), cited in Massimo Cali, Burattini e marionette tra Cinque e Seicento in Italia (Azzano San Paolo: Edizioni Junior, 2002), 88. 18 Johannes Minuth, Das Kaspertheater und seine Entwicklungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Puppen & Masken, 1996), 25. 54 D. PLASSARD lack of consistency within these first comic archetypes. Beyond the actors who first invented them, Meister Hämmerlein, Pickelhering, Jean Potage, Hans Supp, and Knapkäse wer e, above all, just names: a basic costume with which artists, treading the boards or in puppet booths, cloaked their protagonists from undoubtedly pre-existing stories, giving new life to the Devil’s appearances in medieval mystery plays or carnival buffoonery. George Speaight, for example, highlights the role played by Vice, a character in sixteenth-century English morality plays, in the progressive development of the repertoire of popular puppets.19 Transmitted through oral traditions and copied from one troupe to another, the individual characterisation of these comic figures l ong remained subject to fluctuations. The changing appearance of Polichinelle in seventeenth-century France attests at once to the international cir culation of characters and the modifications introduced in the process of their transmission: r eplicating the white blouse of the Italian Pulcinella or wearing a red and yellow striped suit, with or without the half mask and its protruding nose, the white ruff, or the humpback and potbelly. As figureheads with a specific function—to make the audience laugh—the identities of these characters were still very malleable, so care must be taken not to essentialise them. Fr om one pop-up stage to another, from the theatre to the p uppet booth, the reoccurrence of a name does not lead to the conclusion that similarities existed either between these characters or their repertoires. The second reason why it is rather unlikely that glove puppets and actors performed identical or even comparable plays when they embodied the same characters relates to their physical pr oximity. Since actors shared the same stages with puppet booths, their performances could not have been reproduced with small figures; at most, puppets were an extension to their s hows by serving as an advertisement or an interlude to attract spectators and convince them to be patient whilst the live actors prepared, changed costume, or r ested. Instead of replicating live theatre, the first known traces of puppet shows in public spaces suggest that a particular type of performance was developed very early on, and it was distinct from the comedy of farce and the plots of the Commedia dell’arte, with a more markedly subversive dimension. 19 George Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre (New York: John De Graff, 1956), 45–47. 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 55 The Laughter of Vengeance The constraints of the puppet booth’s small opening and the staging of a pair of figures barely bigger than the hands animating them meant that glove puppet shows needed to follow a rhythmically rigorous construction to retain the spectators’ attention for long enough that they would throw a coin in the hat or plate presented to them. These shows also had to elicit surprise with the sudden appearance of characters, make the audience laugh through pleasantries or performing burlesque scenes, and extend the dramatic space through the shrill sound of the ‘swazzle’,20 which distorts the protagonist’s voice by giving it an unrealistic quality to signal it belongs to another world. Yet the comic impact of these performances was at its most powerful when it portrayed a temporary reversal of the world order—or, at least, that of society. Whilst this element prolonged the carnivalesque traditions analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin,21 the laughter the glove puppets provoked was loaded with a particularly critical dimension, which was linked to the status of the artists who were considered as vagabonds or charlatans. Moreover, the puppeteers playing in the streets long constituted a theatre of insolence, vengeance, and social revenge that the authorities sought to reprimand or shut down. In 1630, the local council in Bridport ordered a company of puppeteers to leave the county of Dorset as they ‘wander up and down the country with blasphemous shows and sights which they exercise by means of puppet-playing, not only by day but late in night … so that the townsmen cannot keep their children and servants in their houses’.22 In 1696, Bossuet, the Bishop of Meaux, wrote a letter to Louis-Roland de Vernon, the king’s prosecutor in the town: As you are taking so much care to repress the unconverted, I entreat you to keep a watchful eye on the education of Catholics as well, and to prevent puppets whose shameful performances, impure discourses, and even the 20 A ‘swazzle’ (‘sifflet pratique’ in French; ‘pivetta’ in Italian; ‘lengüeta’ in Spanish; ‘palheta’in Portuguese; ‘Zungenpfeife’ in German) is a small reed that is concealed in the mouth and, when it is positioned against the palette, gives a shrillness to the puppeteer’s voice. 21 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984). 22 Bridport Records and Ancient Manuscripts, cited in John Tucker Murray, English Dramatic Companies 1558–1642, vol. 2 (London: Constable and Co. Ltd, 1910), 206. 56 D. PLASSARD hour of their shows can bring no good. It vexes me that, as I endeavour to instruct the people in the best way I can, I am faced with such workers who destroy more in one single moment than I could ever teach through extensive effort.23 This recommendation was subsequently followed: a year later, the day after a performance that caused a new scandal, Bossuet was informed that an order had just been published ‘against some sleight-of-hand artists, tightr ope dancers, and puppet players, idle and lazy strangers’.24 It obliged them to leave the town within 24 hours or face a fine of 100 livres and a period of imprisonment. Further evidence of the subversive potential of puppets can be found in the ‘mazarinades’, satirical publications that vehemently attacked Cardinal Mazarin between 1648 and 1653, which include several references to Polichinelle. One of them, a letter from Polichinelle to Mazarin, is signed ‘I am POLICHINELLE / who acts as sentinel / at the Porte de Nesle’,25 undoubtedly an allusion to the puppeteer Pierre Brioché,26 as if the puppet itself is speaking in this lampoon. Whether they performed in the street, in a hut (‘loge’ in French),27 or even if they occasionally set up their puppet booth in a tennis court,28 travelling puppeteers amplified the emotions of the people and, as such, were always closely monitored. There were also legal attempts to restrict perfor mances in certain areas across Europe. In 1676, when the local superintendent wanted to prevent 23 Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, letter dated 18 November 1686, in Correspondance de Bossuet, vol. 3 (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 322. 24 Nicolas Payen, letter dated 24 November 1687, in ibid., 449. 25 Lettre de Polichinelle à Jule Mazarin, cited in Charles Magnin, Histoire des marionnettes en Europe, depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1852), 122. 26 The Brioché family lived at the Château-Gaillard, a small house with a corbelled tower on the Seine between the Pont-Neuf and the Porte de Nesle. Outside of the period of the Saint-Ger main Fair (from Shrovetide to Palm Sunday) where they had a hut, they gave performances in their neighbourhood. The family is also referred to under the name Datelin as Pierre, founder of this puppet dynasty, was originally from Atelin (‘d’Atelin’ in French) in the parish of Saint-Hilaire near to Rouen: see Françoise Rubellin, ed., Marionnettes du XVIII e siècle (Montpellier: Espaces 34, 2022), 90. 27 According to Antoine Furetière’s dictionary (1690), a ‘loge’ is a ‘small shop that is rented temporarily or for the duration of a fair’. 28 As was the case for the troupe expelled from Meaux on the orders of Nicolas Payen. 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 57 François Datelin (known as Fanchon Brioché) from playing in the street, Datelin appealed to King Louis XIV, who, perhaps remembering the performances given over several weeks at S aint-Germain-en-Laye in 1669 to entertain the dauphin, lifted this interdiction.29 In 1780, with the aim of ‘eliminating situations in which the people would waste their time unnecessarily and be deceived’, the Grand Duke Leopold I had an edict published that prohibited shows of travelling charlatans, acrobats, ‘cantastorie’, puppeteers, and jugglers across the whole of Tuscany. Offenders would be imprisoned and then banished in perpetuity.30 In 1793, Frederick Augustus III, Elector of Saxony, banned all puppet shows.31 In 1837, in Vienna, Chancellor Metternich reduced Hanswurst to silence: the puppeteers who had set up their booths in the Wurstelprater, an amusement park on the left bank of the Danube, were henceforth required to perform silently—a restriction that would be upheld until 1918.32 In addition to these severe interdictions and constraints, many puppeteers were confronted on a daily basis with the widespread risk of arrest and short detentions. Gaetano Santangelo (1782–1832) from Rome, nicknamed Ghetanaccio, was famous for improvised skits in which he lambasted the abuses and dishonesty of contemporary society. His favourite character Rugantino, who he often performed in dialogue with Pulcinella, was a familiar figure of the lower classes from Rome. Half swaggering soldier, half arrogant yob, the traits that Ghetanaccio lent to the character varied significantly if the accounts compiled by Filippo Chiappini ar e to be believed. Rugantino mocks the pope and laughs at the defeats of his army; he is victim but also oppressor. A chestnut seller recently turned judge, he threatens to jail a woman who recognises him and laughs at his ignorance; as a father of a poor family, he is threatened 29 Correspondance administrative sous le règne de Louis XIV , vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1851), 562. 30 Ranieri Giunti, Editto (Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi Stampatore Granducale, 1780). 31 John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27. 32 Lars Rebehn, ‘Die lustige Figur im Handpuppentheater: Kasper & Consorte. Eine Annäherung an ein europäisches Phänomenon’, in Theater der Dinge: Puppen-, Figurenund Objekttheater, ed. Markus Joss and Jӧrg Lehmann (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2016), 54. 58 D. PLASSARD with eviction by his landlord who, moved by his children’s cries, gives him an extension—but for a quarter of an hour only!—to pay the rent. In one of the anecdotes collected by Chiappini, Ghetanaccio, furious after having received bad service from a dishonest pork butcher, sets up his puppet booth in front of the shop. In the skit that he then improvises, Rugantino appears lamenting the fate that has befallen him. A spirit (a puppet with the wings of a chicken) asks him the reason for his despair. Rugantino responds a Romani predicted that, of his three childr en, the first would kill, the second would be killed, and the third would steal. The spirit advises him to make the first a doctor who would know how to bump off his patients without being suspected, the second a soldier because he would die for the fatherland and r eceive honours, and the third a pork butcher who would be able to quietly rob his clients. ‘That’s true!’, Rugantino exclaims, before recounting how that very morning the man watching the show from the step of his shop gave him two thin links of sausage for the price of two large pieces. Fearing the anger of the crowd assembled in front of the puppet booth, the butcher hastily closes up.33 Ghetanaccio’s shows, as pr esented in Chiappini’s descriptions, are evidently not representative of the ordinary repertoire of street puppeteers in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries: improvising a complete plot and dialogues was likely an exception. Yet, it helps explain why artists like Ghetanaccio were regularly imprisoned and had their shows banned. The use of informal and spontaneous speech peppered with swearing, bawdy pleasantries, and audible farts resulted in frequent reproaches for impropriety. On a deeper level, the powerful identification between the working-class audience and the characters and situations presented, when coupled with the unpredictability of improvised dialogues that made their shows a space of volatility and suspect emotions, was accused of endangering public order (Illustration 3.2). A European Repertoire The authorities’ close monitoring of puppeteers undoubtedly played a role in the formation of a first repertoire for glove puppets; not all puppeteers could have Ghetanaccio’s proverbial courage to have Pulcinella greet the Ambassador to France’s entrance with a fart during a 33 Filippo Chiappini, ‘Gaetanaccio, memorie per servire alla storia dei burattini’, in Il volgo di Roma, ed. Francesco Sabatini ( Rome: Ermanno Loescher & Co, 1890), 15–16. 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 59 Illustration 3.2 Bartolomeo Pinelli, A street puppet-show, Raccolta di cinquanta c ostumi pittoreschi incisi all’acqua forte, etching, 1809. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France performance given at his residence.34 Ghetanaccio would die in poverty, reduced to begging after Pope Leo XII used the year of the 1825 jubilee as a pretext to ban all shows from the str eets of Rome. In all likelihood, economic necessity drove street artists to draw upon an increasingly stable set of shows that were built around reoccurring situations and stage acts and in which improvisation only played an ancillary role—for example, prolonging a situation that the audience was especially enjoying or increasing allusions to the performance context. Having abandoned 34 See Luigi Zanazzi, Usi, costumi e pregiudizi del popolo di Roma (Torino: Società Tipografico-Editrice Nazionale, 1908), 107–8. 60 D. PLASSARD teeth pulling35 and the sale of orvietan in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the travelling puppeteers could only rely on what they made from their shows. Knowing how to offer an immediate response to current affairs, exploit an incident, and elaborate a chosen theme on the spot were qualities that provoked surprise and interest from audiences, but they would not retain them for long enough to open their wallets. A set of stories or at least dramatic situations was needed to prolong the performance. For shows given in private homes, which offered an additional source of income, prior agreement on the repertoire to be perfor med was also required, thereby, at least partially, setting it. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, glove puppet shows progressively separated from theatre on trestle stages, animal taming exhibitions, and the acts of jugglers, acrobats, and tightrope dancers. This process was accompanied by some decisive mutations: the declaration of a specific form of art, the development of reoccurring characters, negotiations for reserved spots on promenades, in parks, and on city s quares, and the introduction in some cases of regular hours (whose main function, as John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik highlight, was to facilitate police controls).36 Accordingly, traditions wer e gradually established and, with that, repertoires were defined, developed, and then transmitted to the next generation. Tracking the names of protagonists does not lead to discovering what these repertoires were or where and when they appeared: as I have shown, it is misleading to base hypotheses about what street puppeteers could recount using Pulcinella on the performances of live actors. The same applies to Polichinelle and Punch. The attempts of historians, like George Speaight37 and Domenico Scafoglio,38 who seek to show the coherence and permanency of these character archetypes across the centuries and different modes of performance, are confronted with the materiality of the 35 Laurent Mourguet (1769–1844), creator of Guignol, still offered teeth pulling and his first puppet shows staged in the walkways of the Petit-Tivoli gardens in Lyon served to attract clients. 36 McCormick and Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre, 26. 37 ‘The Punch show of the streets is the direct descendant of the Punch show of the fairs; Punch the glove puppet is the same person as Punch the marionette’: Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre, 182. 38 Domenico Scafoglio and Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, Pulcinella, il mito e la storia (Milan: Leonardo, 1992). 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 61 facts: no precise correspondence can be established between the iconographical and textual traces that document the work of street puppeteers and the performances in theatres of actors or rod-marionettes fitted with a ‘fil d’archal’39 in which Pulcinella, Polichinelle, and Punch appeared. Neither the complex plots of the ‘pulcinellate’ performed on stage in Rome and Naples40 nor the par odies at the annual Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent fairs in Paris, in which Polichinelle was one of the emblematic figures, or the Harlequinades of the London stage,41 shed the smallest amount of light on what the artists recounted at the end of their two outstretched arms as they performed outdoors, in squares, in the streets, and in public gardens. In contrast, a comparison of the different glove puppet shows across the whole of Western Europe reveals a series of r eoccurring episodes. Some of them have very early origins: the quarrelling couple, an obligatory part of the Punch and Judy Show which is also found in an 1838 transcription of Polichinelle42 (the wife here being Mère Michel), is clearly an extension, across the centuries of farces and carnivalesque acts, of the disputes fought with clubs by medieval puppets who appear in the illumination from the Alexander Romance pr eviously mentioned. Similarly, fights against the Devil and Death, two key moments for Punch, Pulcinella,43 Jan Klaassen, and Polichinelle, are inherited from fifteenthcentury morality plays. Both these two elements can still be found in 39 Until the mid-nineteenth century, most marionettes had a ‘fil d’archal’: a metal string or a triangle attached to the top of its head, which facilitated its control. Invented in Venice at the end of the eighteenth century, string marionettes would only slowly replace them. 40 The ‘pulcinellate’ are popular comedies from the Commedia dell’arte, performed in theatres and produced in large numbers in Rome and Naples from the seventeenth century onwards. 41 Between 1720 and 1780, Punch appears with Harlequin, Scaramouche, Pierrot, and Colombine as one of the recurring characters, for example, on the stages of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and Covent Garden Theatre. See The London Stage Database 1660–1800: https://www.eighteenthcenturydrama.amdigital. co.uk/LondonStage/Database. 42 Polichinelle, farce en trois actes pour amuser les petits enfants, ed. Jules Rémond (Paris: Delarue, 1828), 23–24. 43 The character of the Devil does not generally appear in the scenarios of Neapolitan guarattelle, but drawings and engravings by Bartolomeo and Achille Pinelli attest to its presence in Rome in the first third of the nineteenth century. 68 D. PLASSARD away his victim,64 would end up more frequently being killed as well. Indeed, it is the very radicality of the protagonists that gives them their theatrical force: their refusal to submit to any obligation, their destructive rage, at once irresistible and unmotivated. In the simplified and almost abstract world in which they live, the characters that they meet are only thin outlines and obstacles to overcome regardless of the level of threat, difficulty, or simply annoyance that they represent. From Oral to Written: The Pitfalls of Publishing Any attempt at an in-depth comparison of the different local traditions mentioned in this chapter struggles with the rarity, disparate nature, and the unreliability of sources. For Pulcinella, deemed to be the oldest show with the guarattellari performing it from the sixteenth century,65 the first detailed iconographical representations date from the eighteenth century and the first precise descriptions from the mid-nineteenth century.66 No previous transcriptions existed prior to those carried out by Bruno Leone based on the performances of Nunzio Zampella between 1979 and 1981.67 Similarly, whilst there is evidence of the work of travelling puppeteers in Portugal from the end of the eighteenth century, no texts of Dom Roberto would exist without Mestre António Dias having transmitted his repertoire to João Paulo Seara Cardoso and new generations of puppeteers in 1982.68 In Spain, where there is mention of ‘purchinelas’ 64 ‘You, Polichinelle, […] you will be invincible and, therefore, always triumphant. You, the Blind Man, you will let yourself be killed by him; you, Commissaire; you, the Swiss man with the moustache; you, Archers: you all, you will also be knocked out by him one after another, and the Devil will arrive to take you away’: Jean-Baptiste Gouriet, Personnages célèbres dans les rues de Paris depuis une haute antiquité jusqu’à nos jours,vol. 2 (Paris: Lerouge, 1811), 233. 65 See Leone, Pupi et guarattelle, 192–96. 66 Enrico Cossovich, ‘I teatri. Gli spettacoli popolari – Le bagattelle’, in Usi e costumi di Napoli e contorni descritti e dipinti, ed. Francesco De Bourcard, vol. 1 (Napoli: G. Nobile, 1857), 251–66. Another description appears in a novella published ten years earlier, but it is considered less reliable due to the fictional context: Nicola Connò, ‘La figliuola del bagattelliere’, in Napoli in miniatura. Ovvero il popolo di Napoli ed i suoi costume,ed. Mariano Lombardi (Napoli: Arturo Berisio, [1847] 1965), 311–59. 67 Leone, La guarattella, burattini e burattinai a Napoli. 68 See José Valbom Gil, Teatro Dom Roberto. O teatro tradicional itinerante português de marionetas (Lisbon: Museu da Marioneta/EGEAC, 2013). 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 69 shows in the Diario de Barcelona69 from 1798 onwards and of the presence of Don Cristóbal at the Seville Fair70 from 1847 onwards, almost nothing is known about the repertoire performed during these shows: their transmission was exclusively oral and no one was concerned about writing them down.71 The historian Johannes Emil Rabe discovered a reference to a Polichinelle show being played with glove puppets in Hamburg in 1794, yet he was unable to precisely date the oldest of the ‘scenes of Kasper from old Hamburg’ that he found: Der Feldhuszar (The Hussar).72 In this episode, a soldier returns to his country so exhausted from military campaigns that he falls asleep on the ground as Kasper incessantly torments him, first by tickling him, then lying on top of him and finally by fighting with him. This skit, as Rabe notes, is generally followed by the classic hanging scene,73 which confirms the predominance of routines based on the typification of characters in the first glove puppet repertoires: the protagonist of these shows performed in the streets of Hamburg would sometimes be called Polichinelle (or Putschenelle) and, other times, Kasper. The transcriptions of the Punch and Judy Show by John Payne Collier in 1828 or of the French Polichinelle by Jules Rémond,74 Eugénie Foa,75 and the anonymous author of Les Grotesques76 offer an unparalleled opportunity for historical study due to their age compared with other street puppet-booth traditions. The first written traces of glove puppet shows nevertheless present certain pitfalls that must be avoided. First, 69 See Francisco Porras, Titelles: teatro popular (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1981), 794. 70 Francisco J. Cornejo, ‘Títeres y titiriteros en el siglo XIX: Don Cristóbal y el Tío Juan Misa’, Fantoche 1 ( 2007): 13. 71 In the article previously cited, F. J. Cornejo nevertheless reproduces the description of a show performed at the 1882 Seville Fair with dialogue for one scene: Don Cristóbal fights against a parish priest who seeks to convince him to give all his assets to the Church. 72 ‘Der Feldhuszar’, in Rabe, Kasper Putschenelle, 133–37. 73 ‘Kasper soll gehängt wer den’, ibid., 138–42. 74 Polichinelle, farce en trois actes pour amuser les grands et les petits enfants, ed. Jules Rémond (Paris: Delarue, [1838]). 75 Eugénie Foa, Mémoires d’un polichinelle (Paris: Ébrard, 1840). 76 ‘Drame du Polichinelle français, écrit sous sa dictée aux Champs-Élysées’, in Les Grotesques, fragments de la vie nomade, recueillis par un archéologue, petit-fils de Turlupin (Paris: P. Baudouin, 1838), 19–30. 70 D. PLASSARD these transcriptions tend to establish a single outline for a theatrical reality that was necessarily fluid to continue to interest audiences. The most complete and reliable account available for Punch is that of the anonymous puppeteer interviewed by Mayhew, who stresses how he varied the register according to the circumstances of the performance: when invited to private homes, he performed more slowly for ‘these sentimental folks’ and removed the ghost, the coffin, and the Devil. On the street, his audiences above all expected comedy, which led him to prolong certain scenes—for example, the routines featuring the baby or the frying pan and the sausages stolen from an innkeeper by Joey and Punch. 77 The show this puppeteer presented to Mayhew also contains several transformations in comparison with Collier’s published transcription, in particular the addition of a Jim Crow puppet following Thomas D. Rice’s London tour in 1836 and the insertion of songs from Rice’s minstrel shows. These variations, like those found in an edition published in 1856 by Robert Barnabas Brough under the pseudonym Papernose Woodensconce Esq.,78 demonstrate that these shows, far from being fixed with an unchanging scenario, long remained material that was modifiable at leisure, a combination of situations that puppeteers freely arranged and updated. The conservatism with which the ‘Professors’79 of the Punch and Judy Show are reproached today is largely a result of capturing speech in writing through the numerous editions of the text compiled by Collier and George Cruikshank’s engravings that accompanied it. Second, the conversion of oral practices into published texts proves to be misleading due to the lack of fidelity in these publications. As popular s hows, the performances by street puppet booths might appear almost interchangeable from one country to another. Given the previously mentioned circulations, it is unsurprising to discover translated texts using differ ent names for the protagonists, even when it is not simply a case of plagiarism: the gap between local traditions was thought to be insignificant and the translation choices, which favoured ‘erasing alterity’80 and conformity to the cultural references of the target audience, only further 77 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 43. 78 Papernose Woodensconce Esq., The Wonderful Drama of Punch and Judy (London: James Blackwood, 1856). 79 Title given to performers of the Punch and Judy Show since the Victorian period. 80 Jean Delisle, Notions d’histoire de la traduction (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2021). 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 71 reinforce the confounding of different characters. For example, Carl Reinhardt’s series of illustrated plates published in the Münchener Bilderbogen (1852) presenting six classic episodes from the Kasperl story81 was reprinted a few years later for release in the Netherlands under the title De poppenkast: the dialogue accompanying Reinhardt’s drawings is a translation of the original text, but the protagonist becomes Jan Klaassen.82 Whilst Prince von Pückler-Muskau’s description of the Punch and Judy Show he saw two years before the publication of Collier’s text confirms its authenticity, the transcriber, who was no stranger to literary forgery,83 introduced a footnote into the second edition during a seduction scene between Punch and Pretty Polly. Directly inspired by the famous scene between Richard and Lady Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III (I, 2), this addition, which Collier assures us was ‘popular in 1795 and 1796’,84 is evidently apocryphal. The success of George Cruikshank’s 29 illustrations for this book, in particular, caught the attention of publishing houses abroad. In France, Olivier and Tanneguy de Penhoët published a translation of Collier’s text in 1836 under the title Polichinelle, without mentioning his name, and clumsily copied Cruikshank’s engravings.85 A year later in Stuttgart, the publisher Paul Neef made new copies of the same engravings and gave Johann Peter Lyser the paradoxical task of rewriting the accompanying text to make the story of the protagonist (here called Polichinell) acceptable from a moral point of view. The result is a strange ‘dramatic fairytale for well-behaved children, big and small’ in which the hero, who is fundamentally good, completes the whole series of Punch’s traditional misdeeds, as illustrated by Cruikshank, but with the mission of fighting against different incarnations of evil. The baby (falling 81 Kasperl als Rekrut in der Türkei (Kasperl, a recruit in Turkey), Don Juan, Frau Kasperl und die Köchin (Mrs Kasperl and the cook), Kasperl und der Teufel (Kasperl and the Devil), Das geheimnisvolle Tier (The mysterious animal), Kasperl und der Tod (Kasperl and death). 82 This series is part of the Tony Leininger collection at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 83 Notably his edition added a Sonnet to Punch attributed without substantiation to Lord Byron and an anonymous poem Punch’s Pranks from, as he would later acknowledge, his own hand. 84 J. P. Collier, Punch and Judy, 2nd ed. (London: S. Prowett, 1828), 113. 85 Polichinelle, drame en trois actes, ed. Olivier de Penhoët and Tanneguy de Penhoët (Paris: Bureaux de l’histoire pittoresque d’Angleterre, 1836). 72 D. PLASSARD accidently out of the window) becomes the little girl Unart (meaning naughtiness), her mother Bosheit (wickedness) takes the place of Judy, and so on. After having killed the Devil and all his accomplices, Polichinell can marry Princesse Miauline, whom he frees. A final transfor mation of Collier and Cruikshank’s book was published by Éditions Sansot in 1906 as Polichinelle (de Guignol), which was preceded by a study by Gustave Kahn. The publisher’s foreword presents the work: ‘M. Gustave Kahn has discovered an integral and faithful version of a heroic farce that you will surely recognise as one that could be hear d on the Champs-Élysées and elsewhere twenty years ago.’86 The appar ent reference to the puppet from Lyon in the title should not mislead; during this period, the name ‘Guignol’ was used to refer to all street puppet booths regardless of the protagonists in the stories performed. Yet, far from having ‘discovered’ this text, Kahn only copied word-for-word the translation of the Punch and Judy Show published in 1836 by Olivier and Tanneguy de Penhoët: his text is nothing but a wholesale plagiarism of a book released 70 years earlier. Benefiting from far more visibility than the publications by Jules Rémond and Eugénie Foa or Les Grotesques, Kahn’s book overshadowed actual transcriptions of Polichinelle by French glove puppeteers in research on the tradition, and thus comparisons between these texts and the Punch and Judy Show were not made. The conversion of a show from an oral tradition into a written and published text marks its modest entry into the domain of literature. Whilst the work itself may become fixed, this process also lays the foundations for a never-ending house of mirrors, made up of rewritings, translations, adaptations, and sometimes even plagiarisms. 86 Polichinelle (de Guignol), précédé d’une étude par Gustave Kahn (Paris: E. Sansot et Cie, 1906), 8. 3 STREET THEATRES: SKETCHES OF HUMANITY 73 Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appr opriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified t he licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. CHAPTER 4 Aristocratic Puppet Theatre: The World in Miniature From One Audience to Another In the austere or luxurious environments of palaces and private residences, far from the tumultuous streets, puppet shows were generally disdained. However, from the start of the seventeenth century onwards, there were some circumstances in which performances featuring different types of puppets could be given in aristocratic spaces. The first of these documented contexts is cases in which puppeteers were invited to perform for the sovereign’s children or aristocratic circles. The Journal de la vie active du roy Louis, exactement décrit (Journal of the Active Life of King Louis, Precisely Described), in which the doctor Jean Hér oard meticulously recorded the daily activities of Henri IV’s son, includes several mentions of performances given in the royal apartments at the Palais du Louvre. On 14 December 1610, for example, a nine-yearold future Louis XIII barely ate his supper ‘because of his impatience to watch the puppets’. His interest in these shows was so strong that performances often happened during supper, as the entries of the Jour nal from 22 February and 3 March 1611 reveal. On 3 November 1614, he watched another performance with his mother Marie de’ Medici whilst bedbound due to illness.1 1 See the edition published under the title Journal de Jean Héroard sur l’enfance et la jeunesse de Louis XIII, 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1868), vol. 1, 422, 423, 425; vol. 2, 42, 55, 166. © The Author(s) 2026 D. Plassard, Puppetry and Dramaturgy, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05151-6_4 75 76 D. PLASSARD Half a century later, Fanchon Brioché performed for the son of Louis XIV, Louis the ‘Grand Dauphin’ of France, every day at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye during the summer and autumn months of 1669. Distinguished puppeteers were awarded different forms of recognition: Brioché was designated an ‘or dinary performer of the Menus-Plaisirs du roi’ (department responsible for the ‘lesser pleasures of the King’) and the shadow theatre master Dominique Séraphin would be authorised to use the title ‘Show for the Royal Children of France’ in 1781 after having performed for the family of Louis X VI. Whilst no indication of the repertoire or the types of puppets used in the performances for the futur e Louis XIII and the older s on of Louis XIV can be ascertained, one key piece of information can be drawn from them: they are the first known examples of puppet shows given for childr en prior to the practice becoming widespread at the end of the eighteenth century. From the reign of Henri IV onwards, the awareness of a special relationship between puppets and childhood began to emerge. These types of performances were also given in the semi-private setting of court festivities. In 1772, for example, as part of the entertainment organised at the Château de Villers-Cotterêts following the coronation of Louis XV, temporary huts for market stalls, games, and stages were erected in the inner courtyard. Presented by actors from the Paris Opéra, these festivities recreated the atmosphere of a Parisian fair for the young sovereign and his circle. ‘Italian sketches’ from the Commedia dell’arte were performed at one of the huts, and another showed puppets, like those that could be seen at the Saint-Germain fair.2 In September 1757, a puppet show was set up in a grove of the Parc de Bagatelle in Paris for a festival given in honour of Stanisław Leszczy´nski, former King of Poland, who received a ‘compliment from Polichinelle’3 as he passed in front of the ephemeral theatre. Enlisting the Brioché family to perform, imitating fairgrounds, and the mention of Polichinelle suggest that the 2 ‘Dernière partie de la relation du Sacre et du Couronnement du Roy’, La Gazette,1 January 1722, 629–30. 3 Mémoires du duc de Luynes sur la Cour de Louis XV , vol. 16 (Paris: Firmin-Didot Frères, 1864), 164. A puppet show was also included in the official programme of festivities in Sorgues on 10 August 1714, on the occasion of Marie-Casimire-Louise de la Grange, widow of John III Sobieski, passing through the town. See Relation de ce qui s’est passé à l’occasion du passage de la Reine de Pologne dans l’État d’Avignon, le 10 Aoust 1714 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds Rondel, ms. Ra4 404). 4 ARISTOCRATIC PUPPET THEATRE: THE WORLD … 77 puppet shows given for members of the royal family were the same as those that puppeteers would perform for their usual audiences. On this basis, it would be reasonable to suggest that neither the theatrical devices, nor the animation techniques (likely stringand rod-marionettes) or the repertoire differed from the normal codes for this form of theatre, profanities included. This hypothesis is confirmed by the existence of two plays, which wer e created as private entertainment. The first, Polichinelle demandant une place dans l’Académie (Polichinelle Requests a Seat at the Académie), was performed ‘on several occasions by the Brioché puppets in the presence of the most esteemed individuals of the Court’,4 as the publisher of its first edition states. This short farce was created in December 1704 at the home of Nicolas de Malézieu in Châtenay for Louise de Bourbon-Condé, wife of the Duc du Maine, the legitimised son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. The Duc’s former tutor Malézieu organised lavish parties given by the duchesse for her family and close friends called the ‘Divertissements de Sceaux’, which would culminate in events in 1714 and 1715 under the name ‘Grandes Nuits de Sceaux’. For these occasions, Malézieu composed poems, songs, and different comedic sketches performed by and for the duchesse’s friends in society. Polichinelle demandant une place dans l’Académie draws inspiration from real-life events. Malézieu was named as a member of the Académie Française in 1701 and would play a decisive role in the dispute surrounding the Duc de Bourbon-Condé and the Duc du Maine’s wish to promote the candidacy of the Abbé de Chaulieu, part of the inner circle at Sceaux, for the chair at the Académie left vacant following Charles Perr ault’s death. The other members preferred Chrétien-François I de Lamoignon, then, after he refused, considered other candidates before agreeing on Armand-Gaston-Maximilien, Prince of Rohan and Bishop of Strasbourg. Malézieu composed this short play with its crude humour as an exercise in style to ridicule his fellow Académie members. Performed by one of Fanchon Brioché’s sons (either Charles Datelin, born in 1673, or Louis Jean-François, born in 1679), it centres on wordplay jokes that verge on the obscene: Polichinelle 4 ‘Polichinelle demandant une place dans l’Académie’, in Pièces échappées du feu,ed. Albert-Henri de Sallengre (Piacenza, 1717). 78 D. PLASSARD Hello Neighbour, do you know about the plan that pissed through my mind? The Neighbour Pissed? I think you mean passed. Polichinelle Bloody hell, it has not passed since it is still there. The Neighbour Ah well! What is this plan? Polichinelle It is that I want to request to be received at the Cas de ma Mie Françoise.5 When the Neighbour argues that to be admitted to the Académie française, one must know how to ‘make verses’ (‘faire des vers’ in French, with ‘vers’ also meaning worms), Polichinelle responds: ‘I might have made them without knowing it; but from now on, I will always closely watch my bowel movements, especially when I have a bad stomach.’ The Académie members themselves are mocked: alleged to have eaten the hay delivered for their horses and called ‘Mes chieurs’ (my pains-in-the-arses) instead of ‘Messieurs’, they are harangued in absentia in a speech that mocks their ambition to ‘putrifier’ (sully, from ‘pute’ meaning whore), rather than ‘purifier’ (purify), the French language. Circulating under the form of an anonymous handwritten copy, the provocative play was very quickly attributed to Malézieu and caused such an uproar that it inspired numerous outraged lambasts and responses.6 Nevertheless, it was highly successful amongst the friends of the D uc and Duchesse du Maine who had it performed several times during the winter of 1704–5. The second example of puppets performing for literary and aristocratic circles is Polichinelle lazziste, a comedy in three acts composed in 1732 by the Comte de Caylus and his secretary Charles-André Salley. The ‘Lazzistes’ were a small group of friends comprising, in addition to Caylus and Salley, the Comte de Maurepas (secretary of state for the king’s household and maritime minister), the Comte de Livry (lieutenant general of the army), Alexis Piron, and three actresses including Jeanne-Françoise Quinault, a member of the Comédie-Française. Each took it in turns to organise a supper accompanied by a ‘lazzi’, a surprise entertainment for the rest of the circle—for example, a ‘parade’ (a short comic sketch), a 5 Ibid. 6 See Regnier Desmarais, Relation de la querelle de Malezieu avec l’Académie française, ed. Ioana Galleron (Rennes: Licor n Publishing, 2017). 4 ARISTOCRATIC PUPPET THEATRE: THE WORLD … 85 written by the Pope using puppets would not have gone unnoticed. Yet, none of the reviews of the performances written by the Genoese correspondent Ferdinand Raggi23 mentions it. Raggi’s lengthy correspondence only makes one brief allusion to a performance given by the puppeteer Domenico Filippo Patriarca during Carnival for the sisters at the Santa Maria della Concezione convent alongside that of a revival of La comica del cielo performed for the same group of nuns. The ambiguous syntax of the sentence sheds no light on whether or not the puppet show and the revival were one and the same performance.24 Alessandro Ademollo’s25 suggestion, based entirely on this citation, of a reduced staging for Patriarca’s26 ‘burattini’ seems even less convincing given that Raggi praises, as he had previously done, Bernin’s costumes and scenery. Even if ‘burattini’ can be understood in the generic sense of puppets, it seems difficult to conceive that a miniature replica of the production at the Palazzo Rospigliosi was created. In all likelihood, two distinct shows were performed: Patriarca’s puppets on the one hand, and the revival of the Rospigliosi comedy on the other. However, La comica del cielo could take on a particular significance in puppet theatre, because the work, following a paradox characteristic of Baroque poetics, centres on the theme of condemning theatre within the drama itself. This argument was not original; it reproduces that of La gran comédia de la Baltasara, a Spanish ‘comédia’ by Luis Vélez de Guevara, Antonio Coello, and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, first produced in 1634 in Madrid and then published in 1652, which was inspired by the life of Francisca Baltasara de los Reyes. A very famous actress in the 23 An agent of the Republic of Genoa in Rome, Ferdinando Raggi is the author of an important diplomatic correspondence, the Avvisi di Roma. His reviews of the performances of La comica del cielo can be accessed online via the Giulio Rospigliosi database: http://www.nuovorinascimento.org/rosp-2000/opere/comica.htm. 24 ‘[The Princess of Rossano] had the famous Patriarca come after dinner with a puppet show at the door of the monastery where all the nuns ran to and there was performed a play called La Baldassara, the converted comedic actress, a famous work, composition by the Pope, good music, well-acted, extravagant costumes, beautiful and vague, curious and unpredictable appearances by virtue of The Bernin’s inventions’: Raggi, Avvisi di Roma, Carnevale 1668. 25 Alessandro Ademollo, Il teatro a Roma nel secolo diciasettesimo (Rome: L. Pasqualucci, 1888), 104–5. 26 See the entry on Patriarca in the PerformArt database: https://performart.humanum.fr/schede/P-022-100-145/. 86 D. PLASSARD early seventeenth century, notably for the roles in which she cross-dressed as a man, Francisca Baltasara de los Reyes reportedly renounced theatre in the middle of a performance after having experienced a divine revelation. Whilst it is unlikely that the work of Clement IX was performed by Patriarca’s puppets, La gran comédia de la Baltasara, its model, was presented in this way in 1635 for King Philip IV to respect the pr ohibition on actors appearing on stage during Lent: Bernardo Monanni, a secretary of the Tuscan embassy in Madrid, reports it in his correspondence.27 The technique of puppets with counterweights, whose invention Ottonelli attributes to Bartolomeo Neri, was adopted and perfected by Filippo Acciaiuoli (1637–1700), nicknamed ‘il Gran Burattinajo’ (the Great Puppeteer). Acciaiuoli’s technical fine-tuning commanded admiration from his contemporaries: the miniature theatre that he presented in the 1660 s to Ferdinando II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, included at least 24 changes of scenery and 124 figures, ‘all made with such artistry that he manages the work alone with his own hands, having no help other than with preparing the scenery and adjusting the figures on the runners’.28 A Knight of Malta who completed a tour of the world, Acciaiuoli came from an illustrious Flor entine family and his older brother was a cardinal who once aspired to be pope. He was a complete artist: as playwright, composer, and scenographer, he cr eated shows for both large aristocratic theatres and puppets. The ingenuity of his scenography productions culminated in these performances in which he was simultaneously the creator and the operator, the artist and the engineer. S uch a personal involvement in the material production of the perfor mance was clearly unique for this period. Paola Campanini suggests that it could have harmed the papal ambitions of Acciaiuoli’s br other, as many satirical writings alluded to.29 Exploring the dramatic works for puppets left by Acciaiuoli—Girello (1668), L’empio punito (The Punished Non-believer, 1669), Il novello Giasone (The New Jason, 1671), Damira placata (Damira Appeased, 1680), L’Ulisse in Feaccia (Odysseus in Phaeacia, 1681), and potentially Chi è cagion del suo mal pianga se stesso (Let He Who Caused His Ill-Will, 27 See Shirley B. Whitaker, ‘La Baltasara in performance 1634–1635. Reports from the Tuscan Embassy’, in Antigüedad y actualidad de Luis Vélez de Guevara, ed. George C. Peale (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1983), 204. 28 Notizie storiche degli Arcadi morti, vol. 1 (Rome: Antonio de Rossi, 1720), 359. 29 Campanini, Marionette barocche , 186. 4 ARISTOCRATIC PUPPET THEATRE: THE WORLD … 87 Weep for Himself , 1682)—unusual connections between private performances and public theatres on the one hand, and between live theatre and puppet theatre on the other emerge. The gaps in documentary traces and the uncertainties of historians significantly contribute to this impression: librettos from the period are rarely originals (Il novello Giasone abridges the plot of Giasone by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini and Francesco Cavalli created in 1649) and are generally published anonymously; the musical parts were sometimes rewritten by other composers and often lost; and, lastly, the way works cir culated was such that it is difficult to establish who their authors were and how they were performed. For these reasons, numerous doubts persist over performances of Acciaiuoli’s shows in Rome’s aristocratic palaces and some city theatres (Tordinona, Capranica) during the 1660 s and 1670 s, even if the interest in metamorphoses, as shown in Il noce di Benevento o il consiglio delle streghe (The Walnut Tree of Benevento or the Council of Witches)and L’Inferno (The Underworld) whose texts are now lost, would have certainly drawn on the technical p ossibilities that puppets offer. Crescimbeni, who described the huge success that these works enjoyed, mentions ‘infinite, unpredictable transformations from one thing to another’,30 which elicited admiration. Acciaiuoli’s perfor mances staged at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice between 1680 and 1682 (Girello, Damira placata, L’Ulisse in Feaccia) are better documented due to the publication of the texts. Out of his entire oeuvre, these plays are the ones that were unquestionably performed with puppets: ‘natural wooden figures with an extraordinary work of artifice’31 for Damira placata and wax figures for Girello and L’Ulisse in Feaccia. However, it cannot be ascertained whether these performances were open to a broad audience; they took place on a temporary stage because the theatre was about to be demolished to make way for private housing. Whilst Gran Burattinaio’s works may have been revived by live theatre, the choice to use puppets remains the result of a conscious decision. In an introductory poem to Damira placata, Acciaiuoli even goes so far as to claim that the audience must admit: ‘That in small figures / Art knows how to do what Nature does not do.’32 One 30 Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, Commentari di Gio. Mario de’ Crescimbeni sulla sua istoria della volgar poesia, vol. 1 (Rome: Antonio de Rossi, 1702), 211. 31 Giovanni Carlo Bonlini, Le glorie della poesia e della musica (Venice: C. Bonarigo, 1730), 91. 32 [Filippo Acciaiuoli], Damira placata (Venice: Niccolini, 1680), 3. 88 D. PLASSARD hundred and thirty years before Heinrich von Kleist’s essay on puppet theatre, this is the first example in a long series of comparisons between the live actor and their artificial double, to the benefit of the latter. ‘In Picciola Figura’ ‘In small figures’, Acciaiuoli’s puppet shows offer a condensed form, as in a reduced size on the level of theatre production, but not on that of dramatic writing, of the ‘dramma con musica’ during the Baroque age. The plays that he composed for performances at the Teatro San Moisè do not inherently differ from the rest of the production within this theatrical genre in the seventeenth century. All of them include the following visual elements: appearances of divinities on clouds, burlesque entrances on the back of an animal (a dolphin for Delfo, Ulisse’s hunchbacked servant in Ulisse in Feaccia), and quick changes of scenery in the middle of an act. The same applies to other theatrical elements—for example, the comic characters and erotic double entendres that are generally part of baroque theatricality as it developed in the second half of the seventeenth century through performances given in Rome’s aristocratic palaces.33 As a consequence, it would not be appropriate to search for the hallmarks of a dramatic writing specifically for puppets in Acciaiuoli’s works beyond some discreet mentions of the devices used.34 At most, the playwright may have increased the moments of pure spectacle—such as for L’empio punito with 11 changes of scenery, danced interludes, a shipwreck, a descent to Hell in several tableaux, and a statue that takes flight—which would suggest the performances given at the Teatro San Moisè were the culmination of his research, allowing him to bring together the movement of scenery and the movement of characters in one and the same theatrical machinery. At certain points across his corpus, the scenery and objects even become characters: statues start dancing 33 See Luca Ambrosio, Drammi, commedie e favole musicali all’ombra del Colosseo. Modi, forme e contesti dell’opera a Roma tra il 1668 e 1689 (Pavia: Università degli Studi di Pavia, 2017), 103. 34 Girello even says of himself ‘I remain a beautiful puppet’ just after a magician puts on the king’s clothes. See [Filippo Acciaiuoli], Girello (Ronciglione/Rome: Bartolomeo Lupardi, 1668), 34. 4 ARISTOCRATIC PUPPET THEATRE: THE WORLD … 89 (L’empio punito)35 ; a painting detaches from the wall and falls to the ground to demonstrate the anger of the wife portrayed in the portrait who was thought to be dead (Damira placata). The latter example offered Acciaiuoli an opportunity to reassert, through the voice of one of his characters and in a mode of pleasantries, the s uperiority of art over nature: ‘There is only one difference / Between you beautiful women and the painting / This alone is entirely art, and you nature.’36 The same concentration of visual effects from baroque theatricality can be found in Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni’s (1667–1740) musical dramas, which were performed in Rome at the Palazzo della Cancelleria: L’amor eroico tra pastori (Heroic Romance amongst Shepherds, 1696), Il Costantino pio (The Pious Constantine, 1710), Teodosio il giovane (The Yong Teodosio, 1711), and Il Ciro (Cyrus, 1712). The puppets created for these performances were four-foot high (around 1.20 m) and likely controlled using runners and counterweights. The most successful parts of these performances were the music, created by high-profile composers like Carlo Francesco Pollarolo and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the opulent scenery designed by the architect and scenographer Filippo Juvarra. Ottoboni’s librettos are generally criticised for lacking literary qualities and their intended Manichaeism. To a greater extent than the ‘pupazzi’ delivering the dramatic action of which almost nothing is known, these theatrical machines created for performances at the Cancelleria conveyed a puppet imaginary: celestial apparitions, objects in flight, and visible transformations that animate the matter, indicating life in what was thought to be only a piece of scenery. In Il Costantino pio, a triumphant chariot becomes eight gladiators who fight each other befor e the first act concludes with a ballet.37 In Teodosio il giovane, a fountain transforms into a gigantic female figure and then a group of Persian squires. At the end of the play’s second act, a chair in Teodosio’s library suddenly changes into a large bat that carries Eridione in the air, puts him back on the ground, then swiftly flees; six small tables become six nymphs inviting Eridione and Acrisia to dance with them. Objects and living beings blend with one another, culminating in 35 Although the plot is transposed onto a neoclassical Macedonia, L’empio punito is one of the first rewritings of Tirso de Molina’s Burlador de Sevilla e convidado de Piedra (1630); the theme of the statue that comes to life occupies a prominent role within it. 36 [Acciaiuoli], Damira placata, 17. 37 [Pietro Ottoboni], Il Costantino pio (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1710), 35. 90 D. PLASSARD a theatricality that rests less on the double play of the invisible voices of singers and the limited movements of puppets—a device seemingly similar to the one used for the oratorios at the Palazzo della Cancelleria where the singers were hidden as mechanical angels appear in flight38 —than on the unexpected transformation of pieces of scenery and props, between the r eign of matter and animated forms. More than that of metamorphosis, the motif of reduction progressively appeared in different ways in musical dramas for puppets from the s econd half of the seventeenth century onwards. It first took the form as symbolic reduction. What was referred to in Italian as ‘figure’, the ‘fantocci’ and the ‘burattini’ were increasingly often associated with childhood through the use of the word ‘bamboccio’, meaning child, and its derivatives: ‘bambocceria’, for example, was used for both a ‘fantocceria’ (a fantocci show) and a ‘cosa da bambocci’ (something for children, ‘puerilitas’ in Latin) according to the Accademia della Crusca’s dictionary.39 In Acciaiuoli’s L’empio punito, the animated statues are described as ‘strange bambocci’ and the statue of Tidemo’s ascent to the sky is r eported as the ‘story of the flying bamboccio’.40 The motif also appeared as material reduction: these musical dramas played with the visual effect of different scales by staging both gigantic figures (the fountain from Teodosio il giovane) and humanity in miniature through the mythological characters of the Pygmies, the elbow-high humans mentioned by Homer who were said to be perpetually threatened by cranes. Pier Jacopo Martello’s Lo starnuto di Ercole (The Sneeze of Hercules, 1717) uses the contrast between the puppets of Pygmies and the gigantic proportions of Ercole, who is only seen on stage as a head or a hand, to relate the dramatic action. The playwright presents the piece as a ‘bambocciata’: the ‘bambocci’, as he describes, could be set in movement either from above with strings or from below using springs (‘molle’). Having observed how much children enjoyed and applauded 38 See Teresa Chirico, ‘“Balconi dorati per i musici” – La prassi rappresentativa dell’oratorio alla corte del cardinale Ottoboni tra il 1690 e il 1708’, in Spectacles et performances artistiques à Rome (1644–1740), ed. Anne-Madeleine Goulet, José María Domínguez, and Élodie Oriol (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2021), 178–95. 39 See ‘Bamboccio: Bambino, Bambolo. Lat. Infans.’, in Compendio del vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, vol. 1 (Florence: Domenico Maria Manni, 1739), 292. 40 [Filippo Acciaiuoli], L’empio punito (Ronciglione/Rome: Bartolomeo Lupar di, 1669), 98, 104, 109. 4 ARISTOCRATIC PUPPET THEATRE: THE WORLD … 91 these performances, which he states were an invention of Italian engineers, he endorsed the pleasure of sitting with them to watch ‘their short fables, whether pleasant or serious’ for two or three hours at a modest price.41 Marked by his experience as a spectator—perhaps acquired in the puppet theatres of Piazza Navona in Rome as he was secretary of the ambassador of Bologna to the Holy See—Martello composed Lo starnuto di Ercole. Whilst nothing is known about the first performance in Rome in 1717, Carlo Goldoni recounts having himself s taged the play using an abandoned puppet theatre and having a giant puppet head made for a performance in Vipacco (present-day Vipava in Slovenia) at the home of Count Lantieri in 1726.42 As Martello stresses in the introduction to a publication of Lo starnuto di Ercole, the playful invention presents the theme of reduction in multiple ways. First, the subject matter is condensed: the Pygmies attempt to fight Ercole who has come to claim their king’s two daughters; smoke causes him to sneeze, which suddenly scatters them (Illustration 4.1). Moved by the courage of the Pygmies, Ercole renounces using his strength against them, abandons his plan, and allows the two daughters to marry. Second, most of the characters have short, monosyllabic names: Kom is the king, Nec and Has his daughters, and Vam his general. Only the hero Occe, Ercole’s rival for Nec’s heart, has a longer name. Third, the lines that the Pygmies speak are short: the playwright, who enjoyed playing with prosodic constraints (he invented the ‘martelliano’, a verse form imitating the French alexandrine), has them express themselves in verses half as long as those of Ercole. The first published edition of the play (1723) even presents this unequal sharing of roles on a typographical level: the Pygmies’ replies appear in two columns and in a body of text smaller than Ercole’s lines, which occupy the whole width of the page. A comparable fascination for the miniature appears in the operas performed during the festivities for the Venice Carnival from 1745 to 1748 at the Palazzo Labia. There, Angelo Maria Labia had constructed the Teatro San Girolamo, a miniature replica of the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo, including its scenography machinery. For an audience of 41 Pier Jacopo Martello, ‘Proemio’, in Lo starnuto di Ercole, Opere di Pierjacopo Martelli, vol. 5 (Bologna: Lelio dalla Volpe, 1723), 249. Note that the two spellings, Martelli and Martello, are both documented. 42 Carlo Goldoni, Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni, trans. John Black (Boston: Osgood, 1877), 97–98. 92 D. PLASSARD Illustration 4.1 Lo starnuto di Er cole, Seguito del teatro italiano di Pier Jacopo Martello, parte ultima. Bologna: Stamperia di Lelio dalla Volpe, 1723 invited guests, this ‘nuovo teatro di bambocci’43 successively presented abridged versions in three acts of the Lo starnuto di Ercole (1745), Girolamo Zanetti and Adolf Hasse’s Eurimedonte e Timocleone (1746), Antonio Gori and Ferdinando Bertoni’s Il cajetto (1747), Didone abbandonata (Dido abandoned) by Apostolo Zeno (after Metastasio) and Ferdinando Bertoni (1747 and 1748), and finally Apostolo Zeno and Geminiano Giacomello’s Gianguir (1748). As a souvenir from these extravagant performances, the spectators were given a libretto specially printed in the minuscule in-24 format. Instead of the actors’ names, those who played the different roles appear as Signor Antonio 43 Name given to the Teatro San Girolamo on the title page of its edition of Lo starnuto di Ercole (1745). 4 ARISTOCRATIC PUPPET THEATRE: THE WORLD … 93 Bamboccio, Signor Alessandro Burattini, Signor Francesco Figurina, Signora Maddalena Statuina, Signora Margherita Pua, and so on.44 Forty years before Martello, the classical myth of the Pygmies had already pr ovided the material for a puppet show in France. Dominique de Normandin, known as Sieur de La Grille, received authorisation from Louis XIV in 1675 to create a ‘Troupe Royale des Pygmées’, which, he argued, ‘will not be only of an extraordinary grandeur but it will even perform comedies with curious scenery and machines, imitate dancing, singing and the human voice perfectly, and do all the arts studied in the Académies’.45 The preface to the summary of the troupe’s first show Les Pygmées provides some valuable information on the performances that took place in 1676. The ‘extraordinary grandeur’ of the performers was only in comparison to the usual dimensions of puppet shows: Never seen before until now, there will be lavishly dressed, four-foothigh human figures in very large numbers in a vast and superb Theatre performing plays in five acts, featuring Music, Ballet, newly invented flying Machines, and Scenery changes. They will recite, walk, and act like living people without being suspended.46 This final detail reveals that the figures were controlled from below, like those in use in Italy, and they were the same size (1.20 m) as the puppets that Cardinal Ottoboni would make in the subsequent decades. With his Troupe Royale d es Pygmées, La Grille was likely attempting to introduce to France puppets using a runner and counterweight system that Filippo Acciaiuoli had been developing for some time with comparable devices.47 The scenography and theatrical elements of the performance are also similar to those used in ‘dramma con musica’ in Italy. The theme of Les Pygmées is based on a conventional plot of thwarted romances involving 44 [Antonio Gori], Il cajetto (Venice: Luigi Pavini, 1747). ‘Pua’ is Venetian for ‘bambola’ (doll) or ‘fantoccio’ (puppet). 45 Registres du Parlement, cited in Émile Campardon, Les Spectacles de la Foire,vol.2 (Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1877), 287. 46 [Dominique de Normandin, Sieur de La Grille], ‘Sujet général des Pygmées’, in Les Pygmées (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1676), 5–6. 47 An English engraving from 1644 shows puppets controlled from below from a board of the stage, but the drawing is too simplistic to draw any precise information from it. See Edmund Kerchever Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 281. 94 D. PLASSARD the two daughters of the Pygmies’ king—Parvulie believes her fiancé to be dead and refuses a new one; out of her two suitors, Pichonine fears having to marry the one she does not love—set against the classic imagery of their people’s war against the cranes. This offers the pr etext for different visual effects: a chariot carrying two messengers and drawn by four eagles flies from one wing to another; four characters enter the stage carried by cranes in flight; a battle sees the Pygmies and the cranes fight; triumphant entrances and ballets celebrate the victory; Mars, Mercury, the Sun, and Jupiter appear in celestial splendour, each in turn praising France and Louis XIV, who granted permission for the creation of the show. The names of the characters are also a nod to their small size: Microton, Parvulie, Pichonine, Sémiandre, Picolus, and Homoncius. However, this depiction of humanity in miniature is not to be laughed at. On the contrary, the emotions that inspire the Pygmies’ action and the virtues that they cultivate attest to an elevated spirit equal to any tragic hero. From what can be gleaned from the text published by the playwright (a detailed summary of the action accompanied by the lyrics of the main sung arias), no parodic dimension can be discerned in the performance of Les Pygmées, which respects theatrical conventions throughout, attributing noble acts and lofty sentiments to the tragic hero and comic accidents and trivial thoughts to the servants. La Grille and Troupe Royale des Pygmées’ second show Les Amours de Microton ou les charmes d’Orcan (Microton’s Romance or the Spells of Orcan), performed in November 1676, similarly adheres to these rules. Presented as a ‘cheerful tragedy, mixing unique and entertaining effects’, the work, which no longer mentions the Pygmies myth, presents the same theme of thwarted romance, but combines it with s ome comedic subject matter (the tutor acts as the obstacle to his pupil’s romantic idyll because he wants to marry her himself) and elements from the pastoral genre.48 Microton is not the advisor to the Pygmie king, but an old man who attempts to impede the romance between the shepherdess Philis and the young Silvandre. To do so, he seeks the help of potions from the magician Orcan who is persuaded to do the opposite and makes his desire for Philis 48 The cover of the copy held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and available online via Gallica, displays the handwritten correction ‘pastorelle’ next to the printed description ‘tragédie enjouée’. See [La Grille], Les Amours de Microton ou les charmes d’Orcan (Paris: Hostel des Pigmées). 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 101 accorded to the Comédie-Française, which was monitored to varying degrees depending on the year. The lowly Troupe de tous les plaisirs, which incorporated a comedy combining actors and puppets into the middle of their show at the 1681 Saint-Germain fair, was one of the first victims of the war that privileged institutions waged against private entrepreneurs. On behalf of the Comédie-Française, La Grange had an official report of the performance written up, tore down a poster as proof of the infraction committed, and then requested the lieutenant general of police ban the troupe from performing comedies, have their theatre demolished (or authorisation for its destruction be granted), and fine and imprison its director Languicher (or Languichard). The report drawn up at La Grange’s request offers an insight into the hybrid nature of shows at the fair during the seventeenth century. It recounts how, after having danced on a tightrope, Languichard and two other actors performed ‘a sort of farce’: then they brought on stage three Bamboches with a young girl dressed as Actrice. They, Actrice, Gilles, with the Bamboches performed a sort of comedy. The comedy was apparently L’Âne de Lucien, having brought on stage a donkey. This so-called comedy was interspersed with dance, perilous leaps, and a voice.6 The show’s poster includes the incriminating work’s complete title: L’Âne de Lucien ou le Voyageur ridicule (Lucien’s Ass or the Ridiculous Traveller), ‘a new comedy accompanied by many scenery changes and surprising machines’. It promised that spectators would see ‘leaps as perilous as the extraordinary poses, with a Gigue worthy of admiration from the whole of Paris’.7 Recalling an argument going back to Antiquity with the mentions of tightrope dancing, acrobatics, puppets, changes of scenery, machines, and animal taming, the marvellous spectacle of Italian theatre is combined with the ancient skills of minstrels, showing the extent to which popular traditions and elite theatrical forms could coexist. 6 Report by Anne Lemaistre, superintendent at Châtelet, Archives de la ComédieFrançaise, https://www.theatrales.uqam.ca/foires/mss_cf02.html. 7 See https://www.theatrales.uqam.ca/foires/languich.html#poster. For the letter to the lieutenant general of police, see https://www.theatrales.uqam.ca/foires/mss_cf03. html#titre. 102 D. PLASSARD In response, the Comédie-Française fought to have their privilege respected by imposing a compartmentalisation of these two modes of representation—live actors and puppets—that artists did not necessarily practise. Puppets, which were originally only a theatrical device added onto a composite performance, became a substitute for actors in the companies that clashed with the privileged theatre monopolies. As Françoise Rubellin8 has shown, some works initially written for actors were ultimately perfor med by puppets. For example, Pierrot Romulus ou le Ravisseur poli (Pierrot Romulus or the Courteous Kidnapper), a parody of Romulus by Houdar de la Motte, that Fuzelier, Lesage, and d’Orneval had originally written for Opéra-Comique, was performed by La Place’s Marionnettes Étrangères at the Saint-Germain fair in 1722. Conversely, a work created for puppets, Le Mariage de Momus ou la Gigantomachie (The Marriage of Momus or the Gigantomachy) by Alexis Piron, was granted authorisation to be played by actors for its final performances at Francisque’s hut at the Saint-Germain fair. The Comédie-Française’s multiple submissions against the Parisian fair theatres caused such uncertainty that it led to a blurring of the respective repertoires of actors and puppets. Therefore, it is sometimes difficult to identify whether a work belongs to one or the other.9 The Birth of a Literary Puppet Theatre The situation was very different in Spain, where a relatively large network of venues, the ‘corrales de comedias’, provided the opportunity for theatre companies to tour their pr oductions around the major cities from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. Some of these companies specialised in puppet shows and used the stages o f the corrales to present what they initially continued to refer to as their ‘retablo’.10 These companies progressively broke with the vertical terracing of action in the repertoire of the Golden Age. The puppets were usually operated by rods or strings, 8 Rubellin, Marionnettes du XVIII e siècle. 9 See Françoise Rubellin’s introduction to the anthology Marionnettes du XVIIIe siècle, 12. 10 José de Valdivieso’s poem ‘Ensaladilla del retablo’ (Romancero espiritual, 1612) offers an account from this intermediary period: it describes the performance of a retablo, La entrada del Rey pobre,atCorraldelaCruzinMadrid. 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 103 but sometimes from below, and required the construction of a temporary Italian-style scenery box, which needed to be reconstructed in each new venue.11 From around 1630 onwards, this device took the name of ‘máquina real’ and was used until the first decades of the nineteenth century.12 Two major characteristics distinguish the ‘máquina r eal’ companies from those of live theatre: first, their theatrical performances, in the seventeenth century at least, were combined with acrobatic numbers and tightrope dancing, like the troupes of puppeteers and ‘sauteurs’ in Paris. Second, only ‘máquina real’ companies were permitted to continue their theatrical activities in Lent (from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday), a period during which the Church banned actors from treading the boards. There is evidence that some actors moved to other troupes to become puppeteers and ensure a more regular income, which led to the emergence of specialised companies that were active for the whole year. Transferring between troupes was no issue since the máquina real shared the same repertoire as the rest of theatrical activity in Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Francisco J. Cornejo’s research has shown, performances followed the same structur e: ‘loa’ (prologue), ‘comedia’ in three ‘jornadas’ (acts) separated by ‘entremeses’ (interludes) or ‘bailetes’ (ballets), and, to conclude, a brief pr esentation (‘escena festiva’, ‘mojiganga’) or a ‘baile’ (dance). The distribution between the different genres performed was also comparable and reflected the changing tastes of audiences: until 1750, ‘comedias de santos’ (comedy of saints) far outnumbered ‘comedias de capa y espada’ (cloak and sword drama); from 1750 to 1840, the preference was for comedic ‘sainetes’ (one act farces), ‘comedia de magía’ (comedy of magic), and adaptations of foreign plays, with the continued presence of other genres, such as ‘comedias bíblicas’, ‘comedias evangélicas’, and ‘comedias históricas’. The choice of subject matter is unsurprising because, as John 11 See the reconstitution suggested by Francisco J. Cornejo, ‘El repertorio de la máquina real’, in La máquina real y el teatro de títeres de repertorio en Europa y América, ed. Francisco J. Cornejo (Madrid: UNIMA Federación España, 2017), 43–97. 12 See Adolfo Ayuso, ‘Disolución y muerte de la máquina real: los automátas Narbón’, in La máquina real y el teatro de títeres de repertorio en Europa y América, ed. Francisco J. Cornejo (Madrid: UNIMA Federación España, 2017), 219–61. 104 D. PLASSARD E. Varey explains,13 the ‘comedia de santos’ and ‘comedia de magía’ were characterised by a strong visual dimension, with appearances from the Devil and angels, metamorphoses, objects in flight, and changes of scenery. These types of effects were also used by actors, but puppeteers could achieve them much more easily from inside their stage boxes. In Las tentaciones de San Antonio Abad (The Temptations of Anthony the Great) by Antonio Enríquez Gómez (known as Fernando de Zarate), a play performed in 1694 in Valladolid by José de Loaisa’s ‘máquina real’, a crow swiftly arrives to feed the hermit saint a piece of bread, then the comic valet (‘gracioso’) makes his entrance on a flying dragon. In Los encantos de Medea (The Charms of Medea, 1645) by Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, performed in 1717 in Valence by Manuel de Fresneda (Pesoa), the sor ceress similarly flies in on a dragon who breathes fire.14 The works themselves were also common to puppets and live actors, which suggests that the ‘máquina real’ shows were the first performances in Europe of a literary theatre for puppets. For example, the puppet repertoire included: Lope de Vega’s El mejor alcalde, el Rey (The Best Alcalde Is the King), La creacion del mundo (The Creation of the World), and La vuelta de Egipto (The Return to Egypt); and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La hija del aire (The Daughter of the Air), La Sibila del Oriente yGranReina de Sabá (Sibyl of the East and the Great Queen of Sheba), and El Tetrarca (The Tetrarch). Companies also performed foreign works such as Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor in Spite of Himself ), Carlo Goldoni’s La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn), and even La Andrómaca (Andromache), likely, as Francisco J. Cornejo suggests, that of Euripides, adapted in 1700 by Luciano Francisco Comella. No ‘comedia’ written s pecifically for the ‘máquina real’ has ever been identified, so it is unlikely that any actually existed. Established works that had already been performed by actors brought puppeteers the most success. For example, the ‘comedia de santos’ El esclavo del demonio (The Devil’s Slave) by Antonio Mira de Amescua (1612) was revived by different companies in 1692, 1694, 1723, and 1735. The play recounts how a wise and religious man Don Gil and a young girl Lisarda were led down the wrong path, both accumulating 13 John E. Var ey, Historia de los títeres en España (Desde sus orígenes hasta mediados del siglo XVIII) (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957), 180–87. 14 Ibid., 182. 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 105 sins until they eventually sign a pact with the Devil. In the end, the two characters are saved: Lisarda by paying penance as a slave, and Don Gil after triumphing with his guardian angel in a duel against the Devil. The ‘comedias de santos’ were undoubtedly edifying and moralising in nature, but the focus on the transgression of taboos and the protagonists’ trials and tribulations in this tale of fall and r edemption contributed greatly to its success amongst audiences. Whilst the repertoires of the companies of actors and ‘máquina real’ may have been almost identical, they did not develop synchronously. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the puppeteers continued to draw on a Baroque r epertoire from the Golden Age, whilst live theatre performed on new ‘Italian-style’ illusionist stages and adopted neoclassical rules. The description, cited by Charles Magnin, of a performance of La Mort de Sénèque (Seneca’s Death) watched by François Arago in 1808 in Valencia, attests to how performance modes derived from medieval theatre were s till in use through ‘máquina real’ shows: … this famous philosopher, the honour of Córdoba, ended his life, like in history, by opening his veins in a bath on Nero’s orders. The streams of blood that gushed from his two arms were imitated quite well by the movement of a red ribbon. The drama ends with a very unexpected miracle. Upon the noise of a firework, the wise non-believer was carried off to the sky in a glory, from the top of which he expresses with gravitas a profession of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ to everyone’s satisfaction.15 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, such flights of fancy had long been banished from the live theatre. Seeking to carry out fundamental reforms to Spanish society, King Fernando VI (1746–59) and King Carlos III (1759–88) fought against what they saw as the immoral mixing of sacred stories, romance plots, and supernatural elements, which led to the ‘comedias des santos’ and the ‘autos sacramentales’ being banned. Thereafter, only the máquina real companies could continue to draw upon repertoires based on religious subjects. The corrales de comedias were progressively transformed into or replaced by Italian-style theatres, and puppeteers were invited to perform Nativity plays in private residences. 15 Charles Magnin, Histoire des marionnettes en Europe, depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1852), 106. 106 D. PLASSARD As in many other European countries, puppetry began being used for forms of popular religiosity that no longer had a place in theatres. Metamorphoses and Metatheatricality Even closer links between literary writing and puppet theatre were forged by António José da Silva (1705–39), undisputedly considered as the great Portuguese playwright of the eighteenth century, and one of the major figures in the history of the country’s theatre. In 1744—five years after his d eath on one of the Inquisition’s last pyres for being a Marrano— eight plays were published anonymously, which are generally attributed to him: Vida do grande D. Quixote de la Mancha e do gordo Sancho Pança (Life of the Great Don Quixote and the Large Sancho Panza), Esopaida ou vida de Esopo (Esopaida or the Life of Esope), Os Encantos de Medeia (The Charms of Medea), Anfitrião ou Júpiter e Alcmena (Amphitryon or Jupiter and Alcmene), Labyrintho de Creta (The Cretan Labyrinth), As Variedades de Proteu (The Metamorphoses of Proteus), Guerras do Alecrim edaManjerona (Wars of Rosemary and Marjoram), and Precipicio de Faetonte (The Fall of Phaethon).16 All these plays were performed at the Teatro do Bairro Alto in Lisbon between 1733 and 1738 by puppets of which little is known apart from they were quite large in size and made from cork. Some of the stage directions and special effects would have required that they were controlled from above with r ods or strings, but that does not exclude, like for the ‘máquina real’, operation from below also being used. The Teatro do Bairro Alto, also called the Casa dos Bonecos (House of Puppets), attracted a socially mixed audience: aristocratic, bourgeois, and working class.17 Until the earthquake that devastated the city in 1755, it presented minimalist forms of opera (no dancers, a small number of singers) that were more accessible than the costly performances of Italian works. In contrast to the plays by Spanish companies whose tours still made up most of Lisbon’s theatrical offering, they were performed in Portuguese. Like the great repertoires of the Elizabethan period or the Golden Age, António José da Silva’s oeuvr e addressed two audiences, elite 16 To this list, a play in Spanish should be added, El Prodigio de Amarante (Amarante’s Prodigy), as well as several others that have been lost. 17 See Ana Rita Palma Mira Delagado Martins’s doctoral thesis, ‘A Fábrica do Teatro do Bairro Alto (1761–1775)’ (Universidade de Lisboa, 2017), 31–37. 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 107 and popular, which afforded him the freedom to simultaneously present borrowings from classic culture and macaronic Latin, the elegance of a prized lyricism and its burlesque parody, multiple changes of scenery and apparitions, mirrored plots, and the gaffes of the comic valet, the ‘gracioso’ or ‘tonto’. In addition, the playwright systematically drew attention to the puppet ( ‘boneco’, ‘bonifrate’) through direct refer ences in his plays. In Esopaida, for example, Esopo complains to his master Xanto that he is called upon day and night as if he was ‘some cork puppet’ (II, 7); in Anfitrião, the servant Cornucópia, wife of Saramago, complains to Mercúrio, who she believes to be her husband, that he scorns her, which he would not do if she was ‘one of those small painted dolls’ (I, 2); and Saramago, unaware he is facing his double, asks Mercúrio in reference to himself: ‘And your Grace, was she not convinced by this figure and this puppet as well?’ (II, 3). Sancho Pança, who is made to believe that he disillusioned Dulcineia, is congratulated for this action ‘worthy of being imprinted on cork with white lead’18 (Vida do grande D. Quixote, I, 7). In Dog Latin, Caranguejo, Proteu’s servant, comments on Proteu’s relationship with his brother Nereo: ‘Quando fratres sunt boni, sunt bonifrates’ (As Variedades de Proteu, III, 2). In contrast to the ad hoc mentions to ‘bambocci’ in Filippo Acciaiuoli’s works, António José da Silva’s wordplay with ‘boneco’, ‘cortiça’ (cork), and ‘bonifrate’ are not isolated instances, but part of a general poetics of representation characterised by a strong metatheatrical component. Two strands appear within these poetics: first, a series of equivalences established between reality and simulacrum, living being and object; and, second, an astonishingly ‘modern’ demonstration of theatrical fiction and its workings. The examples of the first type, equivalences, are particularly striking in Anfitrião in which, following Júpiter’s decision to adopt the appearance of Anfitrião to enjoy the favours of his wife Alcmena, the motif of substituting identities is multiplied. Amongst the characters, Juno, who endeavours to identify which of the two Anfitriãos is her husband Júpiter, introduces herself as Princess Flérida, herself concealed under the name of Felizarda; Iris, who accompanies her, passes herself off as another mortal named Corriola. In a more tr oubling way, this substitution also 18 Pigment used for actors’ make-up and likely for painting puppets’ heads. 108 D. PLASSARD occurs between living beings and their representations. It is not Cúpido in person, but his ‘simulacro’ (simulacrum, statue) who, as Júpiter affirms, made him infatuated with Alcmena. Júpiter’s first action is also to destroy a statue of the god of love (I, 1). Taking him for the Theban general, Tirésias triumphantly welcomes him to the Senate by announcing not that they will erect a statue to him, but that he himself will also become a new ‘simulacro’ in the temple of the god Marte (I, 7). When Juno descends to earth to search for Júpiter, she speaks not with Iris, but with the painted image of her on a cloud (I, 4). Convinced that he does not exist, Saramago asks Mercúrio if he is at least a thing and receives the response: ‘You are something, but an artificial and fake thing’ (II, 3). In other plays, the characters ar e described as objects. When the knight Montesinos enters the stage, Sancho Pança declares: ‘This Montesinos appears as a piece of animated felt and a living brush’ (Vida do grande D. Quixote, I, 7). Conversely, objects almost become living. Periandro confides to some garden statues, which are positioned in such a way so as to repeat an echo of human speech, the task of having to listen to his romantic lament as if it was a puppet show (Esopaida, II, 9). Non-human characters are even involved in the theatrical action: trees move from one side of the stage to another (Precipicio, II, 2); a dog enters on stage and its barks are interspersed with an aria that Saramago sings (Anfitrião,I, 3). The second strand of metatheatrical poetics in António José da Silva’s opera librettos, shifts between inanimate object and living being, is, of course, a founding principle of the puppetry arts. Here, da Silva expands its effect to the extent that it deconstructs the fiction. Like the repeated illusions to the artificial nature of the cork figures, the dialogue plays upon different short circuits between the dramatic space and the place of performances. Esopo declares: ‘My whole life has always been prodigious; in the way that it has already been recounted in books across the world; and now I’m told it is performed at the Bairro Alto’, alluding to the area of Lisbon in which the theatre was located (Esopaida,I,1). Theseeffects are multiplied in the Vida do grande D. Quixote (II, 1), which emphasises the contrast between the hero’s fanciful visions and the sceptical and disillusioned views of his squir e: Don Quixote Do you know where we are? Sancho 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 109 I know exactly where we are. Don Quixote Where then? Sancho We are at the Teatro do Bairro Alto. As they descend into the Cave of Montesinos, Don Quixote is overwhelmed by what he sees as a palace decorated in jasper, whilst Sancho perceives only the theatre scenery and observes: ‘It seems like all this is painted on planks of pine’ (I, 7). Then, when they get into a boat, Don Quixote’s enthusiasm for the speed with which they have covered an enormous distance in a few instances clashes with the s cepticism of Sancho, who asks: ‘How can it be that we haven’t cover ed so much as two fathoms, and we can still see my donkey and your Rocinante from here?’ (II, 1). These disconnections from upholding the fiction in the dialogue are closely linked to the dramaturgy. They reinforce the dramatic situation (the blurring of identities in the story of Anfitrião, the world of illusions in which Don Quixote lives), all the while establishing a sense of complicity with the audience. The metatheatrical dimension then contributes to the manifestation, at once lyrical (through the game of equivalences) and ironic (through ruptures in tone), of the ‘joco-sério’ (humorous-serious) genre of which António José da Silva’s works are part.19 The playwright also plays with the specific qualities of the puppet on the level of stage action. He draws upon the puppet’s reduced dimensions and ability to achieve feats that would put an actor in danger to enhance the visual effects of baroque machinery (objects in flight, clouds, visual changes of scenery)—for example, when Jason and Medeia are carried on a cloud ( Os Encantos de Medeia, I, 4), or when Jason, mounted on the winged horse Pégaso, approaches the fire-breathing dragon that guards the Golden Fleece (I, 5). Further examples include: in Labyrintho de Creta,Esfuziote, Tezeo’s ‘gracioso’ valet, flying in with a pair of wings (II, 7); in Vida do grande D. Quixote, the horse transporting Don Quixote and Sancho Pança through the air crashing to the ground (II, 7); and in Precipicio de 19 See Carlos Junior Gontijo Rosa, ‘A tragicomédia espanhola como modelo: a ópera joco-séria de António José da Silva como tentativo de superaça¯o’, Desassossego 6 (2011): 4–15. 110 D. PLASSARD Faetonte, the flight and fall of a chariot driven by the son of the Sun God (II, 3). The metamorphoses, a central process in baroque poetics as Jean Rousset20 has shown, are particularly complex and numerous. Like Filippo Acciaiuoli and Pietro Ottoboni some years earlier, António José da Silva expands the range of transformations well beyond the animal kingdom to plants, objects, and even elements of the landscape. In As Variedades de Proteu, the ‘gracioso’ Carenguejo is changed into a pig (I, 3), but also a chair (II, 2), whilst his master Proteu takes the form of a mountain (I, 3), a clock (II, 2), and a king (III, 2). Both of them are also transformed into flower bushes (III, 1). In Anfitrião, Mercúrio changes Saramago into an olive tr ee, which he and Cornucópia hit with a stick to make the olives drop; Anfitrião, who engraves a ten-line love poem to his wife Alcmena on its bark, is surprised when the point of his dagger causes blood to drip from the trunk (II, 4). Moreover, several spectacular transformations are made possible by using puppets: whilst singing, Carenguejo transforms into a giant and then a gnome (III, 3); the nose of Chichisbeo grows and becomes monstrously deformed (Precipicio,I,2); Cornucópia’s head turns on her neck to reveal another face (Anfitrião, II, 5); after being slapped by Arpia, Sacatrapo’s head detaches from his body and swings in the air before hitting Arpia in return (Os Encantos, I, 4). These examples show how much António José da Silva drew upon the expressive potential of the device: by extending baroque poetics of metamorphosis, the performance techniques he created prefigure the marvellous burlesque of the féerie genre. From ‘Dramma in Musica’ to ‘Opera Buffa’ In comparison to the exceptional density of ‘puppetry’ effects employed in António José da Silva’s theatrical writings, little distinguishes the works composed during the same period performed by rodand stringmarionettes in Italian public theatres from other dramatic productions. Of the small number of texts that have been preserved, most do not include any stage actions that could not also be done by actors, and, very often, actors and puppets performed them in the same way. 20 Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l’âge baroque en France: Circé et le paon (Paris: Corti, 1954). 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 117 Illustration 5.1 ‘As in Puppet playes or other motions under neath guides all’. The Arch-Cheate, or the Cheat of Cheat, 1644. Courtesy of British Library 118 D. PLASSARD the rapidity and crudity of the dialogue, the disputes, and the punchups may suggest glove puppet comedy, it is far more likely that this play within the play used rodand string-marionettes or marotte-style puppets controlled from below the stage, as shown in the 1644 engraving. Regardless of the device Ben Jonson actually imagined, Act 5 of Bartholomew Fair warrants a close reading for the information it contains about the puppet shows in London at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Most references included in the play can be corroborated by sources from the period37 : for example, the titles of plays cited by Leatherhead (Niniveh, [The Destruction of] Jerusalem,and The Gunpowder Plot) or the name of the puppeteer he identifies as his master, Captain Pod (V, 1).38 In contrast, the subject of John Little-W it’s play The Ancient Modern History of Hero and Leander, is a departure from the repertoires of the time, which centred on episodes from the Bible (the Creation, the Flood, Jonah, and Nineveh) or history from Antiquity (the assassination of Julius Caesar) or more recent times (the Gunpowder Plot). Only a century later would puppeteers like Martin Powell draw inspiration from Ovid and classical literature more generally.39 As Leatherhead explains, he will not be performing the story of Hero and Leander ‘according to the printed book’ since ‘that is too learned and too poetical for our audience’. For this reason, he calls upon LittleWit, whohas writtenanadaptationthatis‘alittleeasy, andmodern for the times’: rather than the banks of Hellespont, he sets the action on those of the Thames; Leander becomes the son of a dyer and Hero a wench from Bank-Side; Cupid, transformed into a drawer at a tavern, makes Hero fall in love by striking her with a pint of sherry; finally, the two friends Damon and Pythias, from Valerius Maximus’s Factorum et dictorum memorabilium and not Ovid’s Heroides, suddenly appear at the tavern. 37 In particular, see the pr ecious inventory compiled by Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642 – A Catalogue, vols. 4–5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014–15). 38 See Scott Cutler Shershow, ‘“The Mouth of’hem All”: Ben Jonson, Authorship, and the Performing Object’, Theatre Journal 46, no. 2 (1994), 200. 39 One of Ben Jonson’s publishers, William Gifford, suggested that in Bartholomew Fair the playwright drew upon and added the text of a play he had written earlier for puppets. See Shershow, ‘“The Mouth of’hem All”: Ben Jonson, Authorship, and the Performing Object’, 198. 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 119 These transfor mations can be read on at least two levels.40 First, the puppet show provides the means for Jonson to mock the works of his contemporaries: Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander continued by George Chapman (1598), Richar d Edwards’s play Daemon and Pythias (around 1564, printed in 1571), and potentially Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599).41 This play within a play would then be the first example of using puppets for parodic means in theatre history. To illustrate his audience’s difficulties of understanding elite culture and justify asking Little-Wit to undertake a rewriting, Leatherhead cites several expressions taken from the first verses of Marlowe’s poem.42 He wonders: ‘What do they know what Hellespont is, guilty of true love’s blood? or what Abydos is? or the other, Sestos hight?’ (V, 3). Second, Little-Wit’s transposition of the tragic story of the two lovers onto working-class London passes through an abrupt change of register. With obscenities, exchanges of insults, and some fisticuffs, the realist details and burlesque rhymes are not the only elements that provoke laughter. There is also the general triviality within the dialogues and situations: ‘O Leander, Leander, my dear, my dear Leander’, whispers a groggy Hero after having drunk three pints of sherry, ‘I’ll for ever be thy goose, so thou’lt be my gander’ (V, 5). After being interrupted by Damon and Pythias’s untimely entrance into the tavern, the r omantic babbling leads to a kiss at which Damon exclaims ‘Mistress Hero is a whore’; a furious Hero responds ‘Kiss the whore o’ the arse’, and it comes to blows. In Bartholomew Fair, the parodies of elite culture and trivialisation are directly linked to the inclusion of the puppet show, which opens up an avenue that is still so frequently taken that it sometimes entirely overlaps with puppetry, as if the simple choice of puppets de facto leads to the register of parody. A closer reading of Jonson’s text nevertheless reveals another structuring dimension of the puppet comedy: Leatherhead breaking with the performance and his narrative position as he makes his 40 Another reading could be a network of allusions to the scandal emerging from the request to annul the marriage of Frances Howard and Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex. See James E. Savage, ‘Some antecedents of the puppet-play in Bartholomew Fair’, Studies in English 7 ( 1966). 41 See ibid. 42 ‘On Hellespont, guilty of true love’s blood, / In view and opposite two cities stood, / Sea-borderers, disjoin’d by Neptune’s might: / The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight’: Christopher Marlowe, continued by George Chapman, Hero and Leander (I, 1–4). 120 D. PLASSARD puppets act. Positioned in front of the stage, in the intermediate space between the puppet show and the audience, Leatherhead assumes the role of interpreter, the spokesperson who addresses the spectators, introduces the subject of the story, and presents the characters. He is thus in the role of an omniscient narrator, overseeing the dramatic action, explaining and commenting on its conclusions, and, if necessary, responding to questions directed to him. Yet, from the moment Hero enters the stage, he begins to converse with the puppets, asking them about their intentions. Leatherhead enters into a relationship with them on an equal footing: he receives a blow to the head from Cole, the owner of the boat transporting Hero, because he does not understand his responses, and is treated as a liar before being knocked over by Damon and Pythias. Act 5 of Bartholomew Fair therefore marks the entry into literature of a key element of p uppet dramaturgy, the reversal of the relationship of domination between puppets and humans. Parodies and Satires As Speaight has shown, puppet shows performed inside huts constructed at fairs, markets, and some open spaces in London (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Charing Cross) were pr esented by companies that also toured the rest of the country. These companies would progressively diversify their repertoire at the end of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries by increasingly drawing on live theatre productions. In addition to the traditional subjects from the Bible, these plays recounted historical episodes borrowed from Marlowe (Tamburlaine, Massacre at Paris) and even Shakespeare (Julius Caesar), as well as edifying stories that had been made famous by popular ballads and colporteur literature such as Patient Grisell, Arden of Faversham,and Dick Whittington and His Cat. Confined to temporary structures, fairgr ound huts or cabins, puppet shows were pushed to the margins of the theatrical landscape, but this peripheral positioning meant that puppeteers could continue their activities during the English Civil War and the puritan Commonwealth of England established by Oliver Cromwell when theatres were ordered to close between 1642 and 1660. When the monarchy was r estored, theatrical activities were quickly reestablished and further developed with the granting of royal privileges to the King’s Men and the Duke’s Men, the construction of several venues, the introduction of a new generation of comedians, and a growing interest 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 121 in ‘spectaculars’ imitating Italian and French baroque operas. Popular shows also underwent a revival following the arrival of foreign troupes, including, as already mentioned, the puppeteer Pietro Aggimondi or Gimonde, known as Bologna, who introduced London audiences to ‘Pollicinella’. The diarist Samuel Pepys saw his show in Covent Garden in May 1662. These shows were so successful that King Charles II invited Bologna to perform at the Palace of Whitehall in October that year, for which a 20 × 18-ft stage (around 6 × 5.50 m) was constructed. The stage was relatively high with a side door inserted under it,43 which suggests manipulation from below. Other Italian companies soon followed and performed their own versions of ‘Polichinello’. Whilst nothing is known about the repertoire performed, Pepys stresses the variety of these shows which pr ovided ‘an extraordinary good entertainment’.44 In 1672, one of these artists, ‘Antonio di Voto, punchenello’, who had been renting a hut for the five previous years in Charing Cross for his puppet shows, attempted to stage John Dryden’s tragedy Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants which had recently been performed by the King’s Men at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. Twicedaily performances were planned, followed by farces ‘acted by men and women’,45 but the show was quickly banned by the Lord Chamberlain, who defended the royal privilege granted to the King’s Men.46 Antonio di Voto’s show was certainly not a parody: the mention of the Amboyna massacre (1623) and the torture of the prisoners committed by the Dutch was no laughing matter in the context of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74). Yet this incident shows the extent to which puppeteers in London, just like in Paris, were not content playing their own repertoires and started looking for new inspiration in live theatre, likely beginning with their immediate competitors at markets and fairs, but also, as this example shows, sometimes taking the risk of coming into conflict with the monopoly of privileged theatr es.47 43 See Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre, 77. 44 See ibid., 73–76. 45 Ibid., 76. 46 See Joseph F. Stephenson, ‘Redefining the Dutch: Dryden’s a ppropriation of national images from Renaissance Drama in Amboyna’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 38, no. 2 (2014): 63–81. 47 On the progressive evolution of the repertoires of British puppeteers in the eighteenth century, see David A. Brewer, ‘Rethinking Fictionality in the Eighteenth-Century 122 D. PLASSARD The reverse is also true: seeing the success of Punchinello, whose name was soon shortened to Punch, actors performing in fairgrounds theatres did not hesitate to employ the character themselves. In 1673, for example, Francis Kirkman published the second volume of the collection The Wits, or Sport upon Sport,48 in which he br ought together short comedic plays (farces and drolls) by different authors performed by travelling troupes of actors. He includes Œnone, a pastoral taken from Actaeon & Diana with a Pastoral Storie of the Nimph Œnone by the actor Robert Cox (d. 1655), all the while adding a scene in which the characters Punch and Margery appear. In the interlude of Cox’s original play, secretly perfor med around 1650,49 two shepherds Amintas and Dorilas, who ar e in love with Œnone, mock the pretensions of a third shepherd Hobbinall, who believes that the nymph prefers him. They spy on Hobbinall reading aloud to himself a poem dedicated to Œnone for her birthday; then, after some discussions with the nymph, the shepherds dance a Morris and finally the god Pan appears followed by satyrs who, in turn, also begin to dance. Staged just before Pan’s entrance, the added scene in the version published by Kirkman creates a play within a play of the pastoral: Punch and Hobbinall compete for Margery’s heart, Hobbinall reads a second poem which is even more ridiculous than the first, and the two pretenders dance a Morris. The episode seems out of place due to the abrupt change in the register: the burlesque of farce emerges in the middle of the bucolic romances between the shepherds and the nymph. The effect of introducing Punch to Œnone, a clearly parodic act, breaks with the ethereal sentimentalism of the pastoral through the lexicon of bodily humour: Puppet Theatre’, in The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ed. Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr ess, 2015), 180–81. An interesting piece of evidence is the poster printed by John Harris around 1700 with details of the programme of shows he performed at Bartholomew Fair (Harvard Theatre Collection, TS 555.1). It included two plays: one is the story of the Fair Rosamund (d. 1176), mistress of Henry II, with ‘the merry humours of Punchinello’ and the Pendle witches (trial in 1612); the second is an adaptation of The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the comedy by Robert Greene (c. 1590). 48 [Francis Kirkman, ed.], The Wits, or Sport upon Sport (London, 1673). I thank Cécile Decaix for drawing my attention to this work. 49 Robert Cox, Acteon & Diana with a pastoral storie of the nimph Œnone (London: Edward Archer, 1656). The text was performed at the Red Bull Theatre, a tavern in Clerkenwell that sometimes defied the ban on theatres under Cr omwell. 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 123 Punch I will justifie that a man had better have the Devil ride through his guts with a brambill of briars at his arse then to be in love; but, as the Devil will have it, here she comes t hat is the cause of it. Enter Margery. Whither so fast, fair Margery? Margery To meet you. Punch O happy day: pox on’t, here’s Hobbiball too.50 Though the rarity of available sources for English puppet theatres in the second half of the seventeenth century means that prudence must be applied, it might legitimately be supposed that Punch was included in other performances in similar ways. In all likelihood, puppeteers adopted this new character as an added-on element, a trivial interlude without any connection to the main plot or necessarily a clear idea of what r ole to give him: until then, the ‘comical humours’ advertised in the show titles appear to have been limited to a burlesque dance. Joseph Addison’s Latin poem Machinae gesticulantes, Anglice a Puppet-Show (1698) confirms this hypothesis by emphasising Punch’s physical attributes, that his enormous potbelly and humpback (taken from the Fr ench Polichinelle) makes him appear as a giant amongst Pygmies. The crudeness of his language and clumsiness of his uncouth movements always creates a break with the dramatic action, no matter how serious it is: E’en when some serious action is displayed And solemn pomp in long procession made, He uncontrolable, of humour rude, Must with unseasonable mirth intrude.51 This desacralising function of the character Punch, enacted simply through his appearance on stage, is corroborated by some eighteenthcentury plays for puppets in which he features. These shows were no longer performed in temporary huts at fairs and markets, but were 50 Œnone,apastoral,in[Kirkman], The Wits, or Sport upon Sport, 16. 51 Joseph Addison, ‘Machinae gesticulantes’, in Poems on Several Occasions (London: E. Curli, 1719), 64. Translation by Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre, 89. 124 D. PLASSARD productions that progressively became integrated into the heart of London’s theatr e life. Puppeteers began performing in more comfortable venues,52 and irony and satire were increasingly appreciated by audiences at established theatres. In Venus and Adonis, or the Triumphs of Love by Martin Powell (d.1729), performed at Punch’s Theatre in Covent Garden in 1713, Cupid hits Punch with his arrows so he falls in love with Proserpina, laments seeing her disappear to the underworld, then finds her again thanks to Jupiter who transforms him into Mars. The couple formed by Punch and Proserpina (who, accor ding to Powell, was performed by ‘a monkey lately dead’)53 is the burlesque and incoherent reflection of the couple Venus and Adonis, with their storylines alternating throughout the play. Whilst the subject matter is treated comically, the lines of the mythological characters retain something of their tragic grandiloquence; Punch, in contrast, ridicules the romantic lyrics of the great sung arias and reproduces his diatribe from Kirkman’s version of Œnone almost word for word, which is further proof of the porosity between live theatre and puppet theatre. Whatever the mode of performance, mentions of viscera and their natural orifices seem to have become central to the role: Punch I will justify, that a man had better have the Devil ride through his guts with a bundle of thorns at his bre[e]ch, than to be in love; and as the Devil would have it, with Proserpine. Sure I was in a woundy heat when I went to hell to choose a mistress: it was the other day that I was railing against love and poetry; and now I think of nothing else, speak of nothing else, and eat nothing but poetry, and now it wombles to come forth. See, she comes.54 Martin Powell’s other plays, of which only the titles and some mentions in the press have been preserved, seem to have been composed using a similar model: Punch’s facetiae add comic relief to a well-known story without changing its sequence of events or developing his role. In this mould, Punch dances with his wife on Noah’s Ark in The Creation 52 See Brewer, ‘Rethinking Fictionality in the Eighteenth-Century Puppet Theatr e’, 176–77. 53 Martin Powell, ‘Dramatis personae’, in A Mock Opera, call’d Venus and Adonis; or, The triumphs of love (London: G. Parker, 1713). Jupiter is played by a ‘mischievous monkey’. 54 Powell, A Mock Opera, call’d Venus and Adonis,4. 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 125 of the World (1709), and he appears as Jupiter in The False Triumph, or the Destruction of Troy (1712). Representing the gods of Mount Olympus through techniques used in comic theatr e is a recurring process in English parodies from this period, whether performed by actors or puppets: a performance of the dramatic entertainment The Royal Chace, or Merlin’s Cave (1736) at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden included the ‘grotesque pantomime’ Jupiter and Europa in which Jupiter appears ‘in the character of’ Harlequin, Pluto as Punch, Neptune as Pantaloon, Pan as Scaramouch, Hercules as Brigella (sic), Apollo as Mezzetin, and Mars as Leander’.55 Double characterisation also featured in shows at the Théâtres de la Foire in Paris (Illustration 5.2). In the anonymous play Apollon Polichinelle (1734), a parody of the heroic pastoral Issé by André Cardinal Destouches and Antoine Houdar de la Motte, the role of Philémon is given to Polichinelle, Pan’s to the Compère, Hylas’s to Pierrot, and Doris’s to Dame Gigogne. In Denis Carolet’s La Noce interrompue (The Interrupted Nuptials, 1734), a parody of the musical tragedy Pirithoüs by Jean-Joseph Mouret after Jean Puget de la Serre, the puppet of Polichinelle appears in the titular role and that of Dame Gigogne as Hippodamie, whilst Pier rot is Thésée and Arlequin is Eurite. This device was not specific to puppet shows; it was also used, for example, in Alain-René Lesage’s play Arlequin Thétis (1713), a par ody played on the ‘écriteaux’56 of the musical tragedy Thétis et Pélée by Pascal Collasse and Fontenelle: Arlequin is Thétis, Colombine is Doris, Mezzetin is Jupiter, Pierrot is Mercure, and Léandre is Pélée, whilst three mermaids are played by Scaramouche and two Gilles.57 A successor to the Commedia dell’arte’s mask play, double characterisation was a formidably impressive weapon in the parodic r egister, since it had the effect of making the audience see, under the dignity of great figures from classical cultur e, their trivial r eflections from popular trestle stages. 55 A New Dramatic Entertainment Called the Royal Chace, or Merlin’s Cave (London: T. Wood, 1736), 6. 56 To circumvent the privilege of lyrical art granted to the Opéra, actors at the Théâtres de la Foire used signs called ‘écriteaux’ to show spectators the words of the arias to sing. 57 Transcriptions of these texts are available on the Theaville database created by the CETHEFI (Centre d’Études des Théâtres de la Foir e et de la Comédie-Italienne) at the Université de Nantes, which is available online: http://www.theaville.org/kitesite/ind ex.php. 126 D. PLASSARD Illustration 5.2 Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe, A marionette theatre at the Foire Saint-Germain, Paris, miniature painting on a tobacco-box, 1763. MET Museum, New York The phenomenon of double characterisation also reached puppet shows where the parodic inspiration directed against elite culture and its institutional representatives (theatres and operas protected by r oyal patent) is expanded to a critique of society. This satirical vein was particularly developed on the English stage in the eighteenth century, with the puppet itself being one of its favoured devices. In 1707, for example, Martin Powell had The Town Rake, or Punch Turned Quaker staged, seemingly at the request of the government.58 In 1721, Thomas Sheridan wrote the prologue of a farce entitled Punch Turned Schoolmaster.In 1736, in a short anonymous play, Burlesque upon Magistracy, or Punch out of Humour, Punch plays the son of a ridiculous judge.59 In 1738 at her Punch’s Theatre, Charlotte Charke recorded Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor after Le Médecin malgré lui by Molière in the r epertoire, giving the role of Gregory (Sganarelle) to the Punch puppet. As she explains in her autobiography, she had the heads of her puppets sculpted to resemble 58 Speaight, The History of the English Puppet Theatre, 101. 59 Burlesque upon Magistracy; or, Punch out of Humour (London/Dublin, 1736). 5 THE FIRST PERFORMANCES IN PUBLIC THEATRES: FROM … 133 A twofold distancing device is introduced between the action staged in The Pleasures of the Town and its real and fictional spectators. First, several reminders that the characters should have been played by puppets are issued in the interventions of Punch and Joan, whose first appearance follows the outline of what appears to have become their classic scene: a dispute ending up in a comic dance. Second, Luckless reveals that all the characters are in fact dead and only appear as ghosts after having paid the toll to Charon to cross the Styx. At the end of the play, the intervention of the Presbyterian Murder-text, who believes that ‘a puppet-show is the Devil’s house’79 and thus wants to burn down the theatre, introduces a first breach in this device. After having reproached Luckless for having overindulged in excessive nonsense, Murder-text and the accompanying Constable themselves shift the action into the absurd: they are seduced by Mrs Novel and start singing and dancing, thus participating in the show that they had come to interrupt. Yet, it is the untimely arrival of characters from the first two acts—Mrs Moneywood, Luckless’s landlady, her daughter Harriot whom he is in love with, and his friend Witmore, accompanied by an envoy from the kingdom of Bantam—that definitively breaks the partitioning between the two levels of fiction, that of the frame-play and that of the play within the play. A cascade of revelations reveals the respective royal lineages of Luckless and Harriot, then that of Punch, who discovers he is the son of Mrs Moneywood, queen of Old Brentford, and the brother of Harriot. The show ends with the ‘triumph of the king of Bantam’80 Luckless, who inherits the crown from his conveniently dying father. Starting as a satire of London theatre life, Fielding’s comedy goes far beyond simply having actors perform a text supposedly written for puppets as a play within a play. It also incorporates direct references to Punch and Joan’s actions in puppet shows, producing a collage effect, and transposes the eclecticism of their performances onto the stage of the Haymarket Theatre. As Marc Martinez explains, The Author’s Farce ‘reproduces the structure of fairground puppet plays, which, through employing the burlesque mode, brought together high and low cultur e, the sublime of the mythological underworld and the grotesque of the exchanges between Punch and Joan’.81 As such, Fielding, with 79 Ibid., 52. 80 The Daily Post, 3 April 1730. 81 Martinez, ‘Satire et théâtralité dans les spectacles de marionnettes de Henry Fielding et Samuel Foote (1730–1773)’, forthcoming. 134 D. PLASSARD astounding freedom for his time, pre-empts the implementation of a model of popular artistic forms that writers and artists would only begin developing some decades later. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appr opriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified t he licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. CHAPTER 6 The Theatre of the People The Golden Age of Puppetry Puppet theatre in Western Europe underwent some of its most significant developments in the long nineteenth century, from the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War. During this period, puppet shows became deeply rooted in social life, reaching the most modest audiences and those furthest from urban centres. These developments were part of a broader context of incr easing activity within the field of the performing arts, but puppet theatre’s closer connection to the lower classes makes it a unique case. This relationship can notably be seen in the creation of heroes who were supposed to represent this section of society, the recurring use of local dialects and manners of speaking, financial precarity, which affected almost all artists, and the p uppeteers’ basic level of education. This proximity was viewed with suspicion. Some authorities refused to allow new venues to open, others simply banned puppets or attempted to restrict them to the category of ‘spectacles de curiosité’ (curiosity shows),1 and many had their activities closely watched. In Lyon under the Second Empire, such surveillance was justified by the argument that ‘these establishments are generally only frequented by the most repugnant 1 In France, the Décret concernant les théâtres of 8 June 1806 (Article 15) classified puppets as ‘spectacles de curiosité’, which prohibited them from using the appellation ‘theatre’ and, consequently, from performing the dramatic repertoire. © The Author(s) 2026 D. Plassard, Puppetry and Dramaturgy, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05151-6_6 135 136 D. PLASSARD individuals from the working class’ and that ‘the scenes they perform are composed of the most detestable rhapsodies and rarely does the play end without advocating for rape and murder’.2 Yet these accusations, which reveal more about the dominant classes’ prejudices than the reality of the shows performed, did not succeed in dampening popular enthusiasm for puppets, which, after all, was simply an enthusiasm for theatr e in and of itself, but made more accessible due to its low cost. As with large theatres, spectators flocked to puppet shows for the stories they recounted, the characters appearing on s tage, and the technical skills and the artistic power they presented. It would be impossible to establish a common chronology for all the regional contexts studied her e. For example, as John McCorm ick and Bennie Pratasik have rightly highlighted, this ‘golden age’ continued until the 1950s in Sicily.3 However, at the very least, evidence proves that the numbers of artists and performance venues almost everywhere continued to grow across the whole of the nineteenth century and reached their peak around 1900. Itinerant companies also developed considerable levels of activity: in Saxony, for example, 150 travelling string-marionette theatres were active at the turn of the century, reaching a combined total of around two million spectators each year, primarily in towns and villages.4 During the same period, Liège (157,000 inhabitants) had 65 performance spaces for puppets5 ; Lille (210,000 inhabitants) had around 506 ;and in Amiens (between 83,000 and 91,000 inhabitants), as many as 19 were operating simultaneously between 1891 and 1900. Performances were given in ground floor shops, cellars, and sometimes even the bedrooms 2 Extracts from assessments submitted concerning requests for authorisation to open a Guignol show, cited in Paul Fournel, Guignol – Les Mourguet (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 42–44. 3 John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4. 4 Olf Bernstengel and Lars Rebehn, Volkstheater an Fäden. Vom Massenmedium zum musealen Objekt – sächsisches Marionettentheater im 20. Jahrhundert (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2007), 11. 5 Rodolphe de Warsage [Edmond Schoonbroodt], ‘Conférence faite à la Soupente par M. de Warsage, le 17 novembre 1927’, transcription, Fonds Léopold Dor, Musée des Arts de la Marionnette – Musée Gadagne, Lyon. 6 Joan Gross, Speaking in Other Voices. An Ethnography of Walloon Puppet T heaters (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), 49. 6 THE THEATRE OF THE PEOPLE 137 of private homes7 for an admission fee, which was often less than the price ofahalfpintofbeer. Whilst many street puppeteers were now performing on squares and promenades, in public gardens, in front of chairs and benches reserved for paying spectators, others took up residence for entire seasons in city theatres and even managed some of these establishments. The old division between glove puppets mainly performing in the open air and stringand rod-marionettes in enclosed spaces began to blur. From 1838 onwards, the Guignol tradition in Lyon was developed in cafes; it also found a home in the living rooms of private individuals and, in the 1880s, even the ornate rococo-style constr uction of the Théâtre du Gymnase which Pierre Rousset had acquired. These new performance conditions radically transformed the experience of watching puppet shows, which henceforth were longer and had a more complex construction. The number of spectators also increased. Fairground string-marionette companies used transportable theatres that could be assembled in each town: one constructed for Émile-Isidore Pitou in 1891 could accommodate up to 400 spectators.8 In addition to the growing numbers of performance spaces, audiences, and professional and semi-professional artists, the texts within repertoires also incr eased. In northern Italy in particular, where ‘famiglie d’arte’ passed down ‘copioni’ (manuscripts) from one generation to the next, some dynasties accumulated collections whose size represents a challenge today for both archival institutions and researchers. From his small puppet booth on Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, the ‘burattinaio’ Angelo Cuccoli (1834–1905) performed a different show every night for four months (15 May to 15 September): his repertoire, held at the city’s Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio,9 includes more than 300 ‘canovacci’ (scenarios). The travelling puppeteer Christian Heinrich Niedermeier (1836–1913), 7 ‘I saw a performance in a shop where the shutters were closed on an evening, others performed in a cellar; I saw some in a bedroom where we had to stand, but those who paid the most could sit on the bed; the children were put in the wardrobe’: de Warsage, ‘Conférence faite à la Soupente’, 2. 8 L’Indépendant du Cher, 31 May 1891, cited in Yanna Kor, ‘Émile Pitou’s Memorandum. The life of a French traveling puppeteer at the turn of the 19th Century’, EASTAP Journal 2 (2020): 594–605. 9 Albano Sorbelli, ‘Angelo Cuccoli e le sue commedie’, L’Archiginnasio 4, no. 6 (1909): 233. 138 D. PLASSARD who was active in the Ore Mountains, left a collection of 200 handwritten plays. In Sicily, the ‘opranti’10 wrote down in notebooks the summaries of the adventures of Charlemagne and his knights, which were performed across dozens of daily episodes, sometimes stretching out over a year.11 At Brussels’s Théâtre Toone, the same approach was used for the novels of Paul Féval and Michel Zévaco, each providing the material for theatrical series lasting several months. The repertoires themselves were astonishingly diverse: from melodrama to vaudeville, farce to dramas based on current affairs, the lives of saints to those of highwaymen. Edmondo de Amicis’s article from the end of the nineteenth century about the Lupi family of string-marionette puppeteers, who had been active in Turin since 1818, offers insight into this diversity: You asked about the composition of their repertoire. That’s a daunting question. To respond, I would need to write an entire volume. Between dramas, comedies, farces, revues, ballets, and fantasies, the repertoir e encompasses the universe across space and time; fr om the great flood to the siege of Mekelle,12 including myths, national histories and local news stories; it extends from China to California, fr om Kaffraria to Gr eenland, from the heavens to the bottom of the ocean, from the spheres of paradise to the circles of Hell. It is made up of the old commedie dell’arte, dramas cobbled together from all literatures, ballets by Pratesi and Manzotti, operas by Meyerbeer and Verdi, all the great pages of the nation’s military history from the Battle of Goito to the occupation of Rome,13 then all the congresses, earthquakes, epidemics, floods, coronations, exhibitions, and great d iscoveries that followed one another across the two continents in the last fifty years. All the sovereigns, all the great statemen, generals and heroes, all the Italians famous in whichever field or for whatever they have done, from 1821 to our days, have appeared on stage, not only mentioned by name but as effigies, carefully sculpted with 10 Name given to puppeteers from the Opera dei pupi. 11 Anna Leone has been able to identify up to 370 episodes in the version by Peppino Celano, ‘oprante’ and ‘cuntista’ from Palermo active in 1950s, which was copied by his pupil Mimmo Cuticchio who holds it in his archives. Anna Leone, ‘Il repertorio non cavalleresco della famiglia Cuticchio e le serate speciali: dai canovacci ricopiati e tramandati ai testi d’autore’ (forthcoming). 12 A city in Ethiopia where the Italian army were defeated in a battle in 1896. 13 The Battle of Goito (30 May 1848) and the taking of Rome by the French troops (July 1849) who came to fight the short-lived Roman Republic and re-establish power to Pope Pius IX within the Papal States. 6 THE THEATRE OF THE PEOPLE 139 an incredible likeness, dressed as they were dressed, reproducing where possible their mannerisms and their voices, presenting the most important acts of their public lives and the most well-known details of their private lives.14 Evidently, in some contexts, puppet theatre was not simply a cheaper rival to live theatre; it also became a repository that combined cultural memory and artistic life, the great pages from recent history and current politics, scientific discoveries and human-inter est stories. Taking into account the subjects covered and the social diversity of audiences, puppet shows were mass media ahead of their time, as Olf Bernstengel and Lars Rebehn have quite rightly described.15 Not all centres of puppetry activity covered such a broad scope. Many with more limited staging means specialised in smaller repertoires, but what is evident is a vast diversity in the activities of artists and companies who needed to offer spectators much more than the simple imitation of an ordinary evening at the theatre. In practice, this meant supplementing the usual combination of one long form (drama, melodrama, vaudeville, comedy) and one short form (farce, one act) with brief entertainment acts such as songs, ballets, mechanical figurine shows, and shadow play. Whilst divisions between differ ent animation techniques remained the general rule, some overlap did begin to occur when some companies switched from one type to another (for example, the Sales-Belloni in Turin traded gloves for strings in the mid-nineteenth century to target a more sophisticated audience)16 and techniques were combined within the same show to maintain interest. Shadow play and marionettes were often employed one after the other: at the end of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Geisselbrecht progressively introduced rodand stringmarionettes into the middle of his shadow puppet and pyrotechnics shows (smoke and fireworks accompanying the apparition of a bust of Albrecht Dürer, for example) for which he obtained authorisation from the city of 14 Edmondo de Amicis, ‘Un piccolo teatro celebre’, in La vita italiana, book 3, vol. 1 (1896–97), reprinted in Ricordi d’infanzia e di scuola (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1913), 210–11. 15 Bernstengel and Rebehn, Volkstheater an Fäden, passim. 16 Roberto Leydi, ‘Il repertorio e le marionette’, in Eroi, mostri e maschere. Il repertorio tradizionale nel teatro di animazione Italiano, ed. Antonio Pasqualino and Janne Vibek (Florence: Artificio, 1990), 24. 140 D. PLASSARD Nuremberg.17 In the 1850s, the Guignol puppeteers Louis Josserand and Victor-Napoléon Vuillerme-Dunand began their perfor mances at the Café Condamin with a shadow puppet act, which allowed them to prolong the evening’s entertainment until 11.30 pm, whereas their competitors generally finished at 9 pm.18 Across all the techniques that puppeteers employed, two constant characteristics emerge from the relationship to their respective repertoires. First, they always maintained a distance to the text performed, which was a general rule on Eur opean stages during the nineteenth century: the actor had no qualms about modifying their role and, having generally only rehearsed for a week beforehand, held the audience’s attention more through their dynamic acting style than by its precision. One of the first battles in the modern ‘mise-en-scène’ would be to impose a stricter conformity to the dramatic work. However, these liberties are hardly comparable with those used by puppeteers who were largely still working from memory alone, either because they avoided writing down their repertoires through fear of plagiarism or they lacked the writing skills which prevented them from doing so. Moreover, those who possessed manuscripts did not necessarily consult them for their performances—for example, a puppeteer like Niedermeier, who, as previously mentioned, had a large collection of manuscripts, knew by heart the 20 or so plays he usually performed.19 Written text, even when it was copied in legible handwriting and available to puppeteers during the performance (as evidenced by the worn condition of the notebooks and the darkening of their page corners that had been turned hundreds of times), only served as a backup: r ather than pinning down the details of the performance in advance, ink and paper recorded an outline of what had to be done to reproduce it. In cases where a complete copy and not a simple scenario exists, the text written down by nineteenth-century puppeteers, like those of medieval minstrels, is not a finalised theatrical work; it is ‘a crystallisation suspended between 17 Gerd Eversberg, Das Marionettenspiel vom Doktor Faust. Georg Geisselbrecht und seine Faust-Version um 1800 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), 28–32. 18 Fournel, Guignol, 37. 19 See Lars Rebehn, ‘La bonne mémorisation’, Séminaires PuppetPlays 1 (2020): https://nakala.fr/10.34847/nkl.f55bzz17. 6 THE THEATRE OF THE PEOPLE 141 two oralities’,20 the trace left by a series of performances, rather than the materialisation of a project of dramatic writing. These texts must also be read with much caution, bearing in mind their performance for an often-restless audience,21 which involved some improvisation each time. Only from the end of the nineteenth century onwar ds and in increasingly less popular contexts, such as the theatres of Guignol and Kasperl, were puppeteers’ plays recorded in a definitive written form: some of them desired literary recognition as the increasing number of texts published, the growing use of versified forms, and even the admittance into writers’ societies22 attest. The second constant in the relationship between puppeteers and their repertoires is a disregard for the original authors. Across all linguistic and cultural ar eas, the majority of plays that have been preserved are anonymous. Seeking to identify who wrote them is an impossible task: when names do appear on the manuscripts, they belong to the owner or the transcriber of the copy. Rather than an ‘original work’ as understood through the modern concept of copyright, those who produced texts for puppets considered them a material object to be inherited or sold, and which would need to be copied again when it was too worn out through use. For the manuscripts submitted to the censor’s office in the second half of the nineteenth century, the names included are either that of the theatre manager or the most educated member of the troupe who had written up the text to obtain authorisation to perform it. Only long-established families of operators endeavour ed to preserve the memory of works produced by prominent members of the dynasty. Once again, these members were not necessarily the authors of the works, and this memento was created especially for plays that had ceased being revived after their passing. Crossing out, additions, and corrections reveal that the texts of shows still being performed were regularly modified by 20 Taku Kuroiwa, Xavier Leroux, and Darwin Smith, ‘De l’oral à l’oral: réflexions sur la transmission écrite des textes dramatiques au Moyen Âge’, Médiévales 59 (2010): 38. 21 The tradition of installing a thin metal railing or a net between the stage and the room potentially emerged, as is generally affirmed, from the desir e to hide the rods and strings from the eyes of the public. Moreover, it provided protection for the puppets against schoolchildren and students a musing themselves by throwing objects. 22 Gaston Cony, who managed a Guignol theatre in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, was accepted as a member of the Société des Auteurs, Société des Gens de Lettres, and the Société des Poètes Français at the end of the First World War. 142 D. PLASSARD successive artists. As works without authors, plays for puppets are without authority: others remodelled them or rewrote them at will to adapt to new audiences as a review of the Guignol shows in La Gazette de Lyon attests: There is still the house move scene, that of the donkey milk, the poodle, and so many others as their number continues to grow, or rather they ar e being modified, transformed according to the events and customs of the day.23 The continual updating of works did not stop puppeteers from sometimes foregrounding the age of a text as seen in a handwritten copy of the féerie Le Voyage de Guignol dans la Lune (Guignol’s travel to the Mond) held in the Fonds Léopold Dor archive at the Musée Gadagne in Lyon.24 The name of Louis Josserand père (1796–1855) and the date ‘1852– 1854’ appear on the cover25 ; but another Guignol puppeteer Joanny Durafour (1853–1938) reveals in the notebook’s last pages that it was actually copied by his own hand in 1905. This copy is a rare example of scrupulous documentation with Durafour identifying in his comments the elements introduced in the half century since the play was created: an interlude of ‘mechanised dancers’ (likely articulated silhouettes) brought from Paris by Louis Josserand père who saw them being used at Théâtre des Pantagoniens where he worked during the Directory26 ; a procession of animals accompanying Guignol’s balloon voyage, an invention by his two sons Laurent and Louis Josserand; several versified passages inserted in 1889 during the last performances in Lyon given by Henry Delisle; ‘La Lune à un mètre’, a tableau that Durafour himself added for a revival in Marseille in 1903, and clearly inspired by Georges Méliès’s film ATrip to the Moon (1902); and, lastly, different versions of a ‘grand finale’. 23 M. de V., ‘Lyon et ses monuments’, La Gazette de Lyon, 25 December 1847. 24 Louis Josserand père, Le Voyage de Guignol dans la Lune (1852–54), Fonds Léopold Dor, D88, Musée des Arts de la Marionnette – Musée Gadagne, Lyon. 25 Another copy of this play includes the handwritten detail ‘Mourguet, 1830’, which would make it the oldest dated Guignol text, but it seems very unlikely. 26 The Théâtre des Pantagoniens, managed by Claude-François-Maurice Maffey, was a puppet show famous for its mechanical figurines. See Émeline Rotolo, ‘Stratégies et réseaux d’entrepreneurs de spectacles de marionnettes, les Maffey (1793–1845): approches économique, terminologique et prosopographique’, in Spectacles et artistes forains XVII e– XIX e siècles, ed. Pauline Beaucé, Bertrand Porot, and Cyril Triolaire (Reims: Épure, 2004), 357–79. 7 THE THEATRE FOR FAMILIES AND CHILDREN 245 the audience, who are called upon numerous times throughout the show, Kasper obtains justice for the peasant, Dollarmann is thrown in prison, and the machine is placed under the management of the MaschinenAusleih-Station (MAS), the borrowing station for agricultural materials set up by the East German authorities. Other plays for puppets written in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the same period also criticised attempts at individual wealth accumulation and promoted the need for the collective management of resources. For example, in Der Schatz im Walde (TheTreasureinthe Forest) by Elsbeth Schulz127 (1908–2001), the inhabitants dig up the whole forest in search of the treasure buried there before realising that it is not a chest filled with silver and gold as they had imagined, but a spring with miraculous medicinal properties. An innkeeper wants to buy it so that he can make a profit on it, but Kasper is opposed and, warned by the animals of the forest, decides that the water from the spring will be divided in two: a stream will continue to be accessible to the animals, and another will serve the inhabitants of the village. The shunned innkeeper leaves without further ado. Kasper invites the children in the audience (aged 6–12), who are addressed at several points during the performance, to draw the suggested division of the spring, and to give him their drawings at the end of the show. Reimagining the World or Understanding It Differently With its allegorical meaning, use of animals, audience participation, and peaceful resolution to the conflict, the example of Der Schatz im Walde shows how, beyond the question of indoctrinating young spectators through puppet theatre, artists began to create the elements of a dramaturgy specific to children’s theatre from the 1950s onwards. This dramaturgy would be developed further in the following decades by companies and institutions dedicated to this new sector in most European countries: drama centres for young people, specific departments within large institutions, culture centres, national and international festivals. In both Eastern and Western Europe, a new branch of the performing 127 Elsbeth Schulz, Der Schatz im Walde. Ein Puppenspiel (Berlin: Deutscher Zentralverlag, 1951). 246 D. PLASSARD arts gained visibility, a professional structure, and recognition by public powers. Despite the tense context of the Cold War, various actors came together from 1965 onwards as part of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People (ASSITEJ). With the expansion and the growing dynamism of this sector, the puppetry arts found the keys to economic development and institutional support in theatre for young audiences, which would lead the two to overlap entirely for several decades, a situation that persists in certain countries. Space constraints do not permit me to give an account of the richness of artistic pr oductions that emerged in this context, or even to outline the resulting developments. In the remainder of this chapter, then, I will focus solely on identifying what puppetry brought to children’s theatre and which of its expressive potentialities wer e explored. The first of these potentialities is a simplified representation of conflicts. Since everything happens through gestures (Marcel Temporal has described the puppet as ‘a synthesis by way of expression’),128 using puppets allows for situations and behaviours to be depicted with a significant economy of means and in a way that is immediately accessible to an audience of children or adolescents. The simplified ‘description of the world’, to cite Eli Rozik’s expression,129 that is produced increases readability: the oppositions staged are made starker in the construction of the figures and the interplay of colours, shapes, and materials. For this reason, beyond the subversions it led to under totalitarian regimes, puppet theatre for children continued and still continues today to be used for educational and activist ends. Whether it addresses big or small causes—pacifism, antiglobalisation, feminism, ecology, minorities, biodiversity, the situation of refugees, the fight against bullying in schools—puppet theatre for young audiences very often delivers an unequivocal message of interest to all; in many ways, a moral or at least civic lesson. The most radical version of this simplified representation employs techniques fro m activist theatr e which r educe everything to the extreme.130 128 Marcel Temporal, ‘Marottes et marionnettes. Propos à l’usage des éducateurs’, La Vie active 5 (1950): 3. 129 Eli Rozik, The Roots of Theatre. Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 186–87. 130 See Le Théâtre d’intervention depuis 1968, 2 vols. (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 1983); Olivier Neveux, Théâtres en lutte. Le théâtre militant en France des années 1960 à aujourd’hui (Paris: La Découverte, 2007). 7 THE THEATRE FOR FAMILIES AND CHILDREN 247 Pour la planète (For the Planet), based on a proposal by François Lazar o, Guillaume Lecamus, and Aurelia Ivan (Clastic Théâtre, 2009), brings together several three-to-ten-minute sketches performed in the street, schools, third places, and in homes, that seek to raise awareness of the dangers of climate change amongst the young spectators. Advertised for children aged nine and above, this ‘series of short shows with puppets and reclaimed objects’ explicitly aims to ‘open our eyes, change our habits, and promote sustainable development’ while the quick succession of brief and very diverse forms avoids cr eating a sense of defeatism and despondency amongst the children. For half an hour or an hour depending on the circumstances, several micro-fables follow on from one another, such as Marie Hebert’s ‘Chacun ses raisons’ (‘Everyone wanders around a field of magnificent flowers and picks whatever they like, all with their good reasons at hand … until the field disappears’, four minutes) and Pierre Gatineau’s ‘L’état de la Terre’ (‘Holding a ball of paper representing the Earth in his hands, an actor tells the story of the planet. Little by little, the ball of paper begins to sink in water and disappears’, four minutes). Elzbieta Jeznach’s five-minute sketch ‘Nouvelles du monde’ (News from the World) uses ‘talking newspapers’ from agitprop by adapting them to the format of a TV news programme: ‘Three short gag-sequences that briefly parody the 8 o’clock news. At the pole, bears and ice banks are disappearing, and bees are taking refuge … in cities.’131 The simplified representation produced by using puppets or animated objects also serves as a structuring principle for shows in larger dimensions. The systems of opposition are used either between two antagonistic groups or worlds, as the puppeteers in the former GDR practised for ideological purposes during the Cold War,132 or between two key moments of dramatic action, that of crisis and resolution. História da Praia Grande (Story of the Great Beach, 2003), written and directed by João Paulo Seara Cardoso ( 1956–2010) and performed at the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto, illustrates this principle. At the Great B each, a line of black 131 All these citations are taken from the show’s programme: Pour la planète, marionnettes d’intervention pour un développement durable, created by Clastic Théâtre/ Laboratoire Clastic, Clichy-la-Garenne (2009). I thank François Lazaro for having sent me this document. 132 In Inge Borde-Klein, Trombis Erdenreise [Journey on the Trombi Planet] (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1963), for example, the Martian Tr ombi first arrives in the Federal Republic of Germany (FGR), where he finds a sad, grey, and excessively militarised context, then he goes to the GDR where he makes friends in a joyous and bright country. 248 D. PLASSARD rocks separates a colony of penguins and a colony of pelicans, two groups that mutually hate each other but are for ced into cohabitation. Matias, a young penguin, strikes up a friendship with a pelican called Gabriel, who has been banished from his community after falling in love with a tern. One day, the wind blows a pelican in flight into penguin territory and he defaecates on the head of their chief, the Emperor-Penguin. War breaks out between the two populations. Assisted by an old sailor, Matias and Gabriel leave in search of a golden-headed fish who explains to them using an enigma how to bring an end to the fighting: warned that all the fish will disappear for seven days, they present this temporary disappearance as a punishment ordered by the King of the Sea for the war, which obliges the two sides to reconcile. Inspired by the shock at the outbreak of the Iraq War in March 2003, História da Praia Grande conveys a pacifist message that is immediately understandable to a young audience.133 The show plays on children’s familiarity with the environment of the beach, the comedic acting of the two groups of birds represented by puppets and actors, and, in particular, the broad accessibility of the action whose lesson is made even mor e effective by using a parable. As Jean-Pierre Sarrazac observes, ‘driven by the parable, the dramatic form becomes less dramatic’,134 namely that it is more readily accepted by the young spectators who do not see two peoples killing each other, but two colonies of rather ridiculous large birds clumsily throwing themselves at each other. The rise of reciprocal intolerance, the futility of the conflict’s pr etext, the inability for the fighters to find the means to get out of it themselves, the fact that the beach is evidently big enough and there are enough resources for everyone to live in peace, and the joy produced by reconciliation: on a child-friendly level, all is said about the deadly chains of events and the senselessness of war. Therein lies puppet theatre’s second contribution to the dramaturgy for young audiences: since it gives an evident presence to the representation of non-human characters—whether for the purposes of addressing very human issues through an animal fable, as in História da Praia Grande, or not—it is an easy way to animate all sorts of real or imaginary creatures and depict the interactions between different kinds of living beings. In addition, tales of friendship between children and animals, an 133 The show is advertised as suitable for those aged four and above. 134 Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, La Parabole ou l’enfance du théâtre (Belval: Circé, 2002), 12. 7 THE THEATRE FOR FAMILIES AND CHILDREN 249 inexhaustible sour ce of inspiration for stories, picture books, and films, found a suitable theatrical form with puppets that plunges audiences straight into the fable, whichever r egister is chosen. It could be, for example, the super natural world of fairy stories. In Laura Poli’s Il Gatto Mammone (The Big Tom Cat—Pupi di Stac, 1987), based on popular Tuscan tales,135 a large cat living in a glass house offers splendid gifts to the young Marietta who obeys his every word, but he staples a donkey’s tail to the forehead of her half-sister Mariaccia who has been misbehaving; his kittens then evade a trap set by Mariaccia’s mother, thereby allowing the prince to marry Marietta. In Nadja’s Chien bleu 136 (Blue dog), an adaptation of a picture book for shadow theatre by Fabrizio Montecchi (Teatro Gioco Vita, 2010), a little girl befriends a big blue dog who saves her life. The dog spends one whole night fighting the Spirit of the Woods who, transformed into a panther, has come to devour the girl. In a more dreamlike vision, Eddy Pallaro’s Le Rêve d’Anna 137 (Anna’s dream), directed by Bérangère Vantusso (Compagnie troissix-trente, 2014), offers opposing depictions of the dreams of two little girls: one who sees a big white horse and the other a menacing bull, incarnations of confidence in the future and a fear of unemployment respectively. In many other registers beyond fantasy or supernatural tales, the puppet confers the same visual presence onto the staging of animal characters. It could even be applied to absurd humour as in Manuel Molins’s138 Rosegó, el rodamón (Rosegó the Vagabond), directed by Rosa María Navarro i Calvo (compagnie Lluerna Teatre) in 2008. Lluc picks up a stray dog and tries to teach him to play football and do some circus tricks, while the animal wants his new owner to learn to bark and raise a paw. At the other end of the spectrum is the poignant dramatization of War Horse, the theatrical adaptation by Nick Stafford of Michael Morpurgo’s novel,139 in which the young Albert crosses the First World 135 Laura Poli, Il gatto Mammone (1987), which is an unpublished transcription. I thank Enrico Spinelli for having given me a copy of this text. 136 Nadja, Chien bleu (Paris: L’École des loisirs, 1989). 137 Eddy Pallaro, Le Rêve d’Anna (Arles: Actes Sud-Papiers/Heyoka Jeunesse, 2012). 138 Manuel Molins, Rosegó, el rodamón (Alzira: Bromera, Micalet Teatre, 2001). 139 Michael Morpurgo, War Horse (London: Kaye & Warde, 1982); Nick Stafford, War Horse (Oxford: Oxford University Press/National Theatre Playscripts, 2018). 250 D. PLASSARD War battlefields in search of his pure-bred Joey. Directed by Tom Morris and Marianne Elliott for the National Theatre in London with life-size horses from the Handspring Puppet Theatre (2007), the production shows the extent to which the puppeteers, trained by the South African company,140 combined with the exact reproduction of the anatomy and the smallest movements of the animals, can give life, at once powerfully realistic and clearly artificial due the partially visible skeletal structure, to the puppets. Its international success across all generations demonstrates how War Horse not only surpassed the confines of the young audience that Morpurgo’s novel was initially intended for, but also afforded the theatre of animated objects the means of production and distribution that had until then been inaccessible. Original expressive possibilities, in particular, emerge from the ease with which the puppet portrays non-human characters in shows for young children. Animals, plants, and natural elements are animated and speak, transforming the stage into an enchanted world. In the rewriting of Petit Poucet for the Pajot-Walton’s string-marionettes created at the Théâtre de l’Étoile in 1924, the French poet Pier re Albert-Birot (1876–1967) involves a cast of non-human characters in the action and has them converse: Bird, Wind, Wolf, Cow, Imaginary Beast, Big Cloud and Little Pink Cloud, Moon, Good Star, Bottles, and Beef ‘ready for the spit’.141 Some decades later, the puppeteer Marcel Temporal (1881–1964) brought together several texts that could be performed in schools in the collection Textes et animatextes pour marottes et marionnettes à gaine. Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, le Loup et le Petit Lapin Agile (Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf, and the Little Nimble Rabbit), for example, rewrites the encounter scene in the forest in Charles Perrault’s tale. The Wolf, locked in a cage, manages to convince Little Red Riding Hood to free him so that he can quench his thirst. It is, of course, only a trap. As the Wolf is about to devour Little Red Riding Hood, the little girl accuses him of having taken advantage of her naivety. He protests setting out his case and accepts her request for arbitration: ‘We will pose the question of whether I have the right to eat you to the first three living beings we meet on the road.’ 140 The Handspring Puppet Company was established in 1981 in Cape Town by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones. 141 Pierre Albert-Birot, Le Petit Poucet, Théâtre, vol. 6 (Mortemart: Rougerie, 1980), 8. 7 THE THEATRE FOR FAMILIES AND CHILDREN 251 The first of these ‘living beings’ is a butterfly who reminds the little girl of her cruelty, when she pinned members of its family to a cork and pulled off their wings. The second judge is a flower who reminds her of the flower ‘massacres’ she commits when strolling in nature: both conclude that the wolf can eat her. Fortunately for Little Red Riding Hood, the third living being they question is the Little Nimble Rabbit, who endeavours to save her despite the fact that she has often eaten the meat of his peers. In a similar way to how Polichinelle asks the executioner to show him how to put his head in the noose hanging from the gallows, the Little Nimble Rabbit pretends not to understand how the Wolf was locked in the cage and convinces him to return inside.142 Although this play dates from the immediate post-war period, the idea of a continuum of living beings, which has since become commonplace, is explicitly expressed. Undoubtedly that is one of the main contributions of puppet theatre to the dramaturgy for young audiences: since a puppet can take any form of existence, it confers the same quality of presence onto all beings and treats them all equally, offering fertile ground for experimenting with ‘disanthropocentric’ representations..143 As Julie Sermon has shown, the ecopoetic considerations, which emerged within literary studies, are now extending to the performing arts,144 and the puppet clearly offers the most immediate translation of it: the miniature stage can easily become the representation of an ecosystem where animals of all sizes, humans, plants, and natural elements cohabit. Julie Aminthe’s Notre vallée, directed by Émilie Flacher (compagnie Arnica, 2023) offers a case in point: it reveals how all the beings living in a valley, as well as the forests, the streams, and the rocks, contributed to creating the landscape over a 30-year period. Another text resulting from a commission from the same company, /T(e)r:::r/ie:::r (Terrier)by Gwendoline Soublin (2020), interweaves the perspectives of a badger, a water shrew, and a barn owl who share the same sett. The animals speak 142 Marcel Temporal, ‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, le Loup et le Petit Lapin Agile’, in Textes et animatextes pour marottes et marionnettes (Paris: Les Presses d’Île-de-France, 1952), 62–63. 143 Emma Merabet, ‘Décentrer l’humain sur les scènes contemporaines. Mutations dramaturgiques et perspectives écopoétiques’ (PhD diss., Lumière University of Lyon 2, 2024). 144 Julie Sermon, Morts ou vifs. Contribution à une écologie pratique, théorique et sensible des arts vivants (Paris: Éditions B42, 2021). 252 D. PLASSARD in a language that, far from anthropomorphism, reflects their individual viewpoints, rhythms, movements, and sensorial explorations of the environment. The badger, for example, examines his sett not by using his poor eyesight, but through smell and taste: (breathe) here (breathe) wheat (breathe) hmm wheat (breathe) I chew this wheat (breathe) lemon urine here a deer (breathe) oh a worm (breathe) rubber smell here there he is there this delicious worm I chew sticky I swallow (breathe) (breathe) (breathe) (breathe) droppings acid droppings are they my droppings? are they your droppings? (breathe) no his droppings his elder seeds not mine, who lives there? his house? their house?145 The technique of having animals or things speak, first seen in the old féeries, is now part of the current dramaturgical perspectives that emerged within the context of increasing concerns over the ecological and climate crises. It is not a case of simply creating new supernatural representations of the world, but reinventing the modes understanding it and living within it, and especially for the youngest generations. Learning to Play Since the puppet is first of all something we look at, an artefact with a fluid identity, it can represent beings in the process of becoming, constructed or modified before the audience’s eyes. For example, inert objects may suddenly take human form, such as the large pillows in Sue Buckmaster’s Sleep Tight (Theatre-Rites, 2000–1) that transfor m into menacing faces with just a few small folds. In Rubbish (2013), another production fr om the same company, the most improbable creatures assembled from different pieces of rubbish emerge from bin bags: a large lightbulb becomes the head of a human figure, while a milk churn and other cleaned tins are arranged to form a duck. In puppet theatre, the most ordinary materials shapeshift: large sheets of crumpled, twisted, and knotted paper create a dancer-puppet in Krafff by Joanny Bert and Yan Raballand (Théâtre de Romette, 2007); toilet paper becomes flowers, birds, and human silhouettes in Barbara Mélois’s Petite histoire à l’eau de 145 Gwendoline Soublin, /T(e)r:::r/ie:::r (2020), which is an unpublished electronic text. I thank Émilie Flacher for sending me a copy of this work. 7 THE THEATRE FOR FAMILIES AND CHILDREN 253 rose (Little Sentimental Story, 2008), and in her Diaphanie ou les mémoires d’une fée (Diaphania or a fairy’s memoirs, 2007), Cinderella’s sumptuous carr iage emerges as if by magic from a folded sheet of cellophane. The visible staging of appearances and disappearances, the transformations of one being into another, and the shift from the formless to form, or conversely from for m to formless, became from the end of the twentieth century the main scenes of shows that interweave the narr ative thread and modifications to the theatrical matter, linking pr eliminary sketches, accidents, incomplete attempts, and spectacular successes. Grimm—I guardiani del pozzo (Grimm—The Guardians of the Well, 2013) from the Italian company Riserva Canini offers an illustrative example of this artistic orientation. In it, the two actor-directors Mar co Ferro and Valeria Sacco extract from a well a large ball of crumpled paper that seems to autonomously rise to the surface, like a brain emerging from a skull. They grab it, smooth it out, scrunch it up again, hide under it like a sheet, rip it into small pieces that take flight like birds, and are engulfed by it. From it, the heads of animals, a flower, and little characters emerge. The large sheet of paper is held up to create a screen on which a shadow show inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tales is projected. It gives birth to a second, smaller sheet of paper, then is folded and modelled to become the puppet of a large wolf. The two artists’ sometimes comic, sometimes worrying disagreements with this simultaneously soft and bulky, protective and menacing material from the depths of the well not only form the main narrative thread of the show; ar ound the incidents staged, they open up a rich range of sensations and associations of ideas produced by the material and manipulating it: relationship to books and memory, images of protection or submersion, domination or submission, scenes of giving birth or games of hide and seek. Since the theatrical fiction is reinforced through this additional level of fiction produced by the transformation of an object into a living being, the puppetry arts are based on conventions whose origins lie in playful childhood activities. Undoubtedly their main contribution to theatre for young audiences is simply the fact of pr esenting adults on stage acting like children who explore and recount the world through games. To a greater extent than the shows like Riserva Canini’s that stage the expressive potentialities of the materials, more radical productions from the theatre of objects openly assume this dimension. Through the literal or subverted use of everyday objects including mass-produced toys, the disregard for cultural hierarchies and aesthetic categories, and in how the 254 D. PLASSARD dexterity of animation is renounced and childlike codes (objects grabbed with the whole hand, making noises with the mouth to imitate a motor) are adopted, the shows of these companies, even when they address a multi-generational audience, appear as the elevation of a game for children. The youngest spectators will witness adults imitating them; the oldest will rediscover long-forgotten gestures. In Odissea—epopea dell’eroe tornato in patria (Odyssey—An Epic of a Hero Returning to the Fatherland), an adaptation of Homer’s poem by the Italian company Assondelli e Stecchettoni (1988), Luì Angelini as Ulisse plays in a bath with a small plastic boat while Paola Serafini, in the role of Penelope, washes his hair and body. The storms unleashed by Poseidone emerge from the shower’s water jet, Ulisse’s companions hiding as sheep in Cyclope’s cave are played by small bars of soap that slide away to escape, and Cariddi and Scilla are two rubber gloves into which Ulisse slips his feet and waves them to create their deadly whirlpools. Finally, Penelope wears a garland of balloons around her neck—the suitors—that the two of them burst. The fragments of the story of Ulisse performed by Luì Angelini still retain their epic tone, which accentuates the contrast between the triviality of the situation depicted on stage and the heroic grandeur of the story recounted. The ever-present playful dimension in object theatre is based on very differ ent configurations. Comedy can emerge from the most improbable instances of subversion: in Cappuccetti rossi (Little Red Riding Hood, 1994), again from Assondelli e Stecchettoni, the two puppeteers have been deprived of their equipment after one of them, rebelling against the tradition, split the puppet booth in two with a hedge trimmer. They endeavour to recount Perrault’s fairy tale using different metaphors by inserting plastic bowls of different sizes and colours into one another or by moving foldable tape measures. In contrast, Christian Car rignon, in his Théâtre d’objets – Mode d’emploi (Théâtre de Cuisine, 2011), an anthology of successive scenes borrowed from the founding companies of object theatre, uses toys that are the miniature yet literal image of what they represent: an Action Man depicting a climber scaling Mont Blanc, a miniature truck skidding in a suitcase of sand to re-create a scene from Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Wages of Fear, a small plastic house and a plastic stag (‘cerf’ in French) singing a gory version of the nursery rhyme Dans sa maison un grand cerf . The theatrical dimension here comes from placing children’s toys in parodic contexts enhanced 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 261 The Puppet and Witz The phenomenon of writing plays for puppets without a direct connection with puppeteers first appeared in Germany. Writers like Johann Friedrich Schink (1755–1835) initially drew on the discredited image of the puppet to ridicule the theatrical productions of their time. Schink’s two plays published under the title Marionettentheater (1778)12 were not intended for the stage, but to be virulent pastiches of the pr e-Romantic movement, the Sturm und Drang. The first, Hanswurst von Salzburg mit dem hölzernen Gat (Hanswurst of Salzburg with the Wooden Ass), parodies the title of Goethe’s historical drama Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 1773). In the characters’ lines and scathing annotations at the bottom of the page, Schink explicitly mocks Goethe’s work as well as Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Die Soldaten (The Soldiers, 1776) and Heinrich Leopold Wagner’s Die Kindermörderin (The Infanticide, 1776), the main targets of his criticism. The action of Hanswurst von Salzburg seeks to make the reader laugh through provocations and absurdity: Hanswurst’s newborn daughter offers to recount some episodes from Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) that she heard in the womb. In the last act, all the characters die from poisoning after reading some literary almanacs. Schink justifies these obscenities, incoherences, and improbabilities by comparing them to the liberties taken by his contemporaries in the name of creative genius, the core principle of Sturm und Drang. The action of Schink’s second play Der Staupbesen (The Dustbroom) begins in Utopia where streams of champagne flow and roasted pigeons fly in the sky. Yet, Merkurius comes to warn Apollo that the new geniuses of literature, naked and dishevelled, surviving on tobacco and coffee, have transformed Mount Parnassus into an open-air brothel. Upon arriving there, they discover Minerva in ripped clothing, hitting herself on the forehead with her slipper until her brains spill out and about to hang herself. Like a witches’ sabbath, the geniuses ride pigs and brooms. The gods condemn the muses, who have been led astray by literature, and their followers to being transformed into donkeys, spittoons, and bins. The puppet is no longer only the symbol of the artificial, inauthentic theatricality that Henry Fielding mocked in The Author’s Farce (1730). 12 Johann Friedrich Schink, Marionettentheater (V ienna/Berlin/Weimar, 1778). 262 D. PLASSARD Nor does it reinforce the comedy of the characters and the unlikely s ituations as it did between the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries in society theatre plays for so-called ‘living puppets’, actors who imitated the rigidity of puppets.13 Schink’s choice to publish these two plays under the fanciful title of ‘marionette theatre’ opens up an unbound space, giving free rein to these fantasies. With the pretext of outdoing the excesses of Sturm und Drang, the author pushes the rejection of decorum and the transgression of public morals to the point of caricature. Referencing Wagner’s Die Kindermörderin in which a young girl is raped off-stage, Hanswurst von Salzburg goes a step further by bringing the sexual act to the stage and, a few moments later, the birth. Time is so compressed that Hanswurst and Frau Knips’s newborn son leaves to explore the bridge of the ship taking them to Turkey, whilst his twin sister demands to join the Sultan’s harem because she ‘really wants to sleep with a man’.14 Two decades after the publication of Marionettentheater, Schink published Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark, a rewriting of Shakespeare’s tragedy once again presented as a ‘play for marionettes’.15 This text, however, presents a mor e complex relationship with puppet shows. Schink’s parody, which largely follows the original plot, is a distorted reflection with abrupt shifts in register. Familiar expressions, trivial actions, and incongruous details cause interruptions in the tragic action: the ghost of the assassinated king appears on the ramparts, wearing a dressing gown, a nightcap under his crown, and yellow slippers; Hamlet, who is no less terrified, calls him ‘papa’ and offers him some snuff, which makes him sneeze. Schink borrows a common technique from parody, 13 Several plays from this period were designated as such. For example, Alfarazambul oder die Marionetten (Alfarazambul or The Marionettes, 1790), attributed to Johann Georg Jacobi; August von Kotzebue’s Der Graf von Gleichen (The Count of Gleichen, 1808); Friedrich August Schulze’s Die Kuhpocken oder der Ehrenschnurrbart (Cowpox or the Mustache of Honour, 1803); and even the purported ‘Greek tragedy’ inserted into the fourth act of Simon Lämchen oder Hannswurst und seine Familie (Simon Lämchen or Hannswurst and his Family, 1803) by Siegfried August Mahlmann. See Jean Boutan’s talk, ‘Plays for Living Puppets around 1800’, which is available online at https://nakala. fr/10.34847/nkl.2c8782ac. 14 Johann Friedrich Schink, Hanswurst von Salzburg mit dem hölzernen Gat,in Marionettentheater, 42. 15 Johann Friedrich Schink, Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark. Ein Marionettenspiel (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Himburg, 1799). 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 263 with numerous contemporary allusions: the prince reads and comments on the works of Kant and Fichte, and hums Papageno’s aria in The Magic Flute for Ophelia. Yet, the play goes beyond par ody’s usual limits to develop a playwithin-a-play of puppet theatre that warrants close examination. Schink substitutes the troupe of actors that arrive at Elsinore Castle for a travelling puppeteer. This puppeteer first performs the tragic monologue of a bare-chested, pale, and thin woman with a glove puppet for Hamlet: an allegory of the German Constitution, sick with ‘the French disease’ syphilis, and the amputation of the left bank of the Rhine, which became the Cisrhenian Republic in 1797. The play that Hamlet then asks the puppeteer to perform for the king and queen is Die Morgen-Schokolate (The Morning Chocolate), an allusion to the beverage that poisoned the King of Denmark. Performed this time with string-marionettes16 as the frame play, it starts with a pantomime between Pantalon (the old king), Colombine (the queen), and Pierrot (Claudius); then, again following the composition of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the murder is replayed in the form of a long, dialogued scene between the same three people, stripped of their transposition onto masks from the Commedia dell’arte. Aside from replacing the poison poured into the ear of the sleeping victim with the more trivial detail of poisoned chocolate, this second scene of ‘puppet theatre within puppet theatre’ in Act 4 of Hamlet, Prinz von Dännemark shows the ambivalence of Schink’s own feelings: the original work is at once admired and mocked due to its cult status amongst writers of the time.17 These scenes also reveal precise attention being paid to, and perhaps even a fascination with, puppets. In the same way that Shakespeare’s Hamlet addressing the actors seems to convey the playwright’s thoughts, Schink’s Hamlet appears to speak in the author’s name when he expresses the emotions he felt in front of the puppet booth. This new Hamlet is not fascinated with the emotion of the actor playing Hécube,18 but the feeling produced by looking at this ‘piece of painted wood’.19 Thereafter, under the mask of paradox, it becomes impossible to decide 16 Schink, Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark, 74. 17 See Jean Boutan, ‘In the peep box of satire: Johann Friedrich Schink’s Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark’, Cahiers élisabéthains 116, no. 1 (2025): 11–24. 18 ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?’, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, 2, 561–62. 19 Schink, Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark, 81. 264 D. PLASSARD what falls within the bouffon or the serious in the advice that he dispenses to the puppeteer: Never match the gesture to your words. If you speak of the Sky, point to the Earth, And if you speak about reason, the hand shows the chin. The gesture must not be attached to the words That they depict. So, when you say, ‘I’m flying’, Stretch out the arms of your puppets Far fr om their bodies, spreading the fingers; The feet paddle to give the impr ession of swimming; And let the head lift up in the air. If you say ‘I’m trembling’, shake every body part, So not one muscle remains still. Let the first law of your art be: Banish nature! Look out for a tender pain and fool the tyrants.20 Whilst loyal to the spirit of the Enlightenment, Schink virulently opposed the poetics of Sturm und Drang and thereafter Romanticism. However, the direction to ‘banish nature’ shows that he saw the puppet like most of his contemporaries who drew a parallel with automata, even wax figures, as the symbol of a fake life: it no longer represented humanity in miniature, but the mysterious power of an artefact.21 The puppet also provoked a contradictory discourse, very close to ‘Witz’ (sometimes translated as wit) or Romantic irony as theorised by Friedrich Schlegel in fragments of Lyceum,22 before its full, detailed formulation in the jour nal Athenaeum23 published between 1798 and 1800. Given that the puppet itself is an ambivalent object, oscillating between r eal and fake, life and death, it can only be spoken about in an indeterminate way, by shifting from one point of view to another, allowing Schink’s Hamlet to be heard. Another type of ambivalence is found in the collection MarionettenTheater (1806) by Siegfried August Mahlmann (1771–1826): rather than 20 Ibid., 87. 21 See Bernhild Boie, L’Homme et ses simulacres. Essai sur le romantisme allemand (Paris: José Corti, 1979). 22 See Marie de Gandt, ‘Schlegel et le Witz: l’ironie romantique contre l’esprit du XVIIIe siècle’, Texte 37–38 (2005): 47–62. 23 See Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 265 the puppet and the values attached to it, it is based on the theatrical genres that these works are part of and their limitations.24 Whilst Die neue Gurli oder die Prophezeiung (The New Gurli, or the Prophecy)and Harlekin, der Eheflicker (Harlequin the Household Mender) reproduce traditional comic plot outlines (the tutor wanting to mar ry his pupil raised away from the world; the couple arguing over choosing a son-in-law) without any perceptible innovation, the collection’s two other plays introduce elements of black humour,25 leading to disconcerting ruptures in tone. The one-act tragedy König Violion und Prinzessin Clarinette (King Violin and Princess Clarinet) parodies the tragic genre as evidenced in the introduction of informal language and French expressions into the rhyming verse. Yet it ends with a series of suicides for the three protagonists (the princess, the king who wants to marry her, and the rival prince and son of the king): notably, the princess plants a fork in her heart. In the three-act farce Der bezauberte Prinz, oder des Doktor Pandolfo Begräbnis und Auferstehung (The Bewitched Prince, or Doctor Pandolfo’s Burial and Resurrection), a character needs to be buried alive to break the spell that has changed the prince into a canary. These unexpected manifestations of cruelty create a dissociative effect, which can be classified as Witz. Commenting on Novalis’s formula that ‘Wit, as the principle of affinities, is at the same time menstruum universal [universal solvent]’,26 Serge Meitinger writes: Witz is foremost a solvent, the instantaneous capacity to break down a situation, a fact, a character, or an area of experience, a figure of thought into its constitutive elements, to undo all that was, until then, indissolubly linked, to split, to make h eterogeneous what was homogeneous.27 Mahlmann was also the first writer to justify the choice of the puppet by criticising the live theatre of his time. The German stage, he affirmed in his preface, was confined to serious subjects: historical dramas that 24 Siegfried August Mahlmann, Marionetten-Theater, oder Sammlung lustiger und kur zweiliger Actionen für kleine und grosse Puppen (Leipzig: Georg Boss, 1806). 25 See André Breton, ed., Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). 26 Novalis, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University New York Press, 1997), 32. 27 Serge Meitinger, ‘Idéalisme et poétique’, in Romantisme 45 (1984): 3–24 (at 5). 266 D. PLASSARD required spectators to possess an in-depth knowledge of global history, tragedies that necessitated prior study of Antiquity, and plays that demanded a familiarity with aristocratic court life and elegant society. Mahlmann contrasted the boredom that these productions generated with the light-heartedness of Italian, Spanish, and French theatre,28 their freedom in defining character traits, their taste for the caricature and creating plots. He used these models in his own plays, which seemed to him better suited to puppets than his country’s actors who were incapable of assuming a comedic acting style. Some years before Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay on marionette theatre,29 Mahlmann sketches another perspective from an entirely different point of view: the puppet’s s uperiority over live actors, an idea that already seemed paradoxical as it ran counter to public opinion. Whilst Schink and Mahlmann maintained a distance from Romanticism, the relationship between puppet theatres and Witz became even closer within the movement through the work of Ludwig Tieck (1773– 1853). In addition to his first novels, Tieck wrote a farce for puppets, Hanswurst als Emigrant (Hanswurst Émigré, 1795), which would only be published posthumously.30 In the play, Hanswurst has a double identity: he is at once a French émigré fleeing the Revolution and Hanswurst, the historical lustige Figur making his return after having been banished from live theatre half a century earlier by Johann Christoph Gottsched and Caroline Neuber. From the very first lines, the fictional pact is broken: the young amorous Leander addresses the servant Lisette with nine successive verses rhyming on ‘-acht’ (‘Nacht’, ‘Pracht’, ‘angefacht’), but is rebuffed and she shows she is as capable as him. Leander claims to be able to perform the exposition scene so that neither the spectators nor the playwright are lost. Lisette gets annoyed, declares that the performance would only ever be ‘a pitiful puppet play’, and predicts that the spectators will be bored since it was not written by Iffland. The pair then take it in turns to attempt a new way of expressing themselves: a grandiose lyricism intended to be incomprehensible. When the dramatic 28 Mahlmann cites the Théâtre du Vaudeville and the Théâtre Montansier in Paris. See Mahlmann, Marionetten-Theater, iii. 29 Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, trans. Thomas G. Neumiller, TDR: The Drama Review 16, no. 3 (1972): 22–26. 30 Ludwig Tieck, Hanswurst als Emigrant. Nachgelassene Schriften,vol.1(Leipzig:F. A. Brockhaus, 1855), 75–126. 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 267 action finally begins, the conventions of the comic genre are mishandled. Leander’s love for Rosalie, the daughter of the innkeeper Ubaldo, is not reciprocated: she does not even know him and, when awoken in the middle of the night by his dawn serenade, threatens to call a servant to beat him up. A little later, Hanswurst’s entrance astride on his valet, whom he presents as his horse and treats as such, shifts the dialogue into the absurd. Pr etending to be the Prince of Artois, Hanswurst orders extravagant meals and declares he wants to marry Rosalie, but her mother rejects his request in a violent dispute that forces him to hide behind the innkeeper. Witz appears in the buffooneries and incoherences as well as numerous metatheatrical elements: characters referring to themselves as marionettes; Hanswurst seamlessly interrupting himself in the middle of a conversation to address the spectators and advise them not to make the play a failure by being too critical; and finally, in the last act, he reveals his true identity and denounces his banishment. This farce for puppets, which remained in manuscript form, appears as a prototype for the disassembled, heterogeneous dramaturgy that would achieve its full potential two years later in Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots, 1797), an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s tale. The play, with its burlesque prologue, interlude, and epilogue staging the reactions of a fictitious audience, does not contain any references to puppets: the deconstruction takes place in the context of live theatre which is pushed beyond its performance limits, notably through the pr esence of animal characters and the visual transformation of Popanz (meaning both bogeyman and puppet) in Act 3, who takes the role of the Ogre in Perrault’s version. Puppets would explicitly return to Tieck’s works for an instance of theatre-within-theatre in the six-act play Prinz Zerbino, oder die Reise nach dem guten Geschmack (Prince Zerbino or the Jour ney towards Good Taste, 1799). In Scene 8 of Act 4, Jeremias, servant of the magician Polykomikus, sees a crowd of people rushing towards him to seek advice from his master who lives in a cave in the middle of a desert. Believing, like Schiller,31 that theatrical perfor mances have a beneficial effect on society, Jeremias sets up ‘a small moral theatre to correct humanity’s 31 Friedrich von Schiller, ‘Theater Considered as A Moral Institution’, in Poet of Freedom, trans. John Sigerson and John Chambless, vol. 1 ( New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985), 209–20. 268 D. PLASSARD weaknesses’.32 He begins by performing a tragedy with marionettes: a king and a queen are worried that the people prefer drinking and smoking over defending the city. When a messenger announces the enemy’s arrival, the king leaves to fight, risking his life. A spectator then interrupts the performance which, accor ding to him, lacks naturalness because the play is in verse. To satisfy him, Jeremias introduces two new puppets on stage for a ‘bourgeoise tragedy’, this time in prose: a woman reproaches her husband for having opened the city gates for the enemy who destr oyed it. When she declares that the only thing left is to die, the husband attempts to kill her and then himself. The audience once again shows their dissatisfaction as they do not feel moved enough. Jeremias agrees to introduce yet more naturalness: the third scene s hows a man reproaching his son for having stayed out all night. The son advises his father to calm down because, having already lost his mother, he does not want this anger to endanger his father’s health. The father is touched, takes his son in his arms, and reiterates his advice but, after he leaves, the young man declares that he will not follow it because he is in love. Several spectators begin to cry. Jeremias seizes the puppet and asks the audience if they should accept the son’s refusal to change his behaviour. The puppet protests that it must be allowed to perform until the end as the son’s character completely transforms in Act 5, but Jeremias refuses to wait so long. The puppet reproaches Jeremias for not having listened closely enough to the essayists and critics of theatre: if the son’s behaviour immediately changed, this transformation would lack naturalness and not follow the laws of aesthetics. Jeremias gets rid of the puppet by tossing it outside the theatre to the laugher of the spectators; it decides to leave for the town and throw itself into the first available wood-burning stove. At the end of a new scene that picks up the story of the city taken by the enemies and shows the victors’ triumphant parade, a puppet of the magician Polykomikus appears in the little theatre, followed by a long procession at the same time as the real Polykomikus enters on stage and is angered at the show given by Jeremias. The furious servant throws puppets and musical instruments at his head. Polykomikus hits him and Jeremias attempts to push him away with his broom before leaving with Satan who has slipped into the audience. 32 Ludwig Tieck, Prinz Zerbino, oder die Reise nach dem guten Geschmack (Leipzig/ Iena: Friedrich Frommann, 1799), 224. 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 269 After the theatre-within-theatre created by the introduction of the puppet show, the dissociation of the character Polykomikus between the actor that plays him and his miniaturised double on the puppet stage (an ‘act of high treason’33 protests the magician), the corr osive action of Witz crosses a new threshold in Act 5 by giving speech to objects. Entering the Garden of Poetry, Nestor, the servant of Prince Zerbino, sees the forest, gigantic flowers, bushes, and even the blue of the sky coming to converse with him. In the following scene, the fur niture of a bedroom, musical instruments, even wine and food speak to him to offer him their services. The prince himself then hears the voices of the natural elements, sources, mountain streams, and storms. Like in Der gestiefelte Kater, which ends with Hanswurst’s speech to tell the audience about the emotion felt by the scenery that had been applauded in its own right and asks them to excuse the tears that obliged it to exit the stage, leaving the set empty and the walls bare, Prinz Zerbino, by giving a place to non-human characters, shows that the choice of the puppet for Tieck was only a halfway stage in the pr ocess of dissolving theatrical performance. Approaches from Popular Culture Using the image of puppets to convey the poetics of Witz through multiple acts of dissociation and heterogeneity was confined to an imaginary theatre on paper without any aspirations to stage performances. However, the role that the puppet played in literary creation from this period, and especially within German Romanticism, evidently was not limited to this emancipation from the credible or the rational, demonstrating the all-powerful creative spirit within the world it forged, or to the multiple variations of the theme of the effigy and artificial life in narrative literature or philosophical speculation.34 Poets and writers also developed a real fascination for puppet shows, which had essentially remained a popular practice in the German-speaking lands: they watched their performances, conversed with the artists, and s ometimes considered writing for them. Since the puppeteers’ repertoire preserved the heritage of medieval comic traditions and a collection of ancient legends, the most famous 33 Tieck, Prinz Zerbino, 238. 34 Boie, L’Homme et ses simulacres. 270 D. PLASSARD being Faust, the German Romantics saw in it the traces of a national art orally transmitted: the theatrical equivalent of the popular tales and songs in which Johann Gottfried Herder and the authors of Stur m und Drang had begun taking an interest, and which Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano compiled in the three volumes of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1806–8). Tieck, for example, wrote in his Briefe über Shakespeare (Letters on Shakespeare): What I have just argued regarding folk legends, I have always found it proven even more so for puppeteers, who own a certain amount of old plays that, precisely due to their age, cannot completely become outdated, and stem from the work of true poets because, though they are disdained, they form our true German theatre.35 Despite this clear interest, authors were still hesitant to write for puppeteers. Brentano, for example, met Johann Georg Geisselbrecht in 1800 at the Frankfurt Fair and was enthusiastic about his Hanswurst. In a letter to Friedrich Carl von Savigny in September 1801, he stated he wished to write a play for puppets and to be publicly known as a ‘poet for puppets’,36 but this declaration was not followed up. Goethe’s short sketch Hanswursts Hochzeit oder der Lauf der Welt—ein mikrokosmisches Drama (Hanswurst’s Wedding or the Way of the World— A Microcosmic Drama, 1775), from a quarter of a century earlier, only remained in fragments: character lists and the start of a dialogue of scatological humour in which Kilian Brustfleck, a traditional peasant character, worr ies about the bad manners of his pupil Hanswurst, who is about to marry.37 Goethe also published a small volume entitled Neueröfnetes moralisches politisches Puppenspiel (Newly Opened Moral-Political Puppet Play, 1774), which contains three texts. Only one of them, Jahrmarktsfest von Plundersweilern (Fair at Plundersweilern), is presented as a 35 Ludwig Tieck, ‘Briefe über Shakespear e’, in Kritische Schriften,vol.1(Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1848), 161. 36 See Lars Rebehn, ‘Poets of the puppet booth. Johann Georg Geisselbrecht and the beginnings of literary puppetry in the German-speaking area’, in L’Écriture littéraire pour marionnettes en Europe de l’Ouest (17 e–21e siècles), ed. Carole Guidicelli (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, forthcoming 2025). 37 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hanswursts Hochzeit oder der Lauf der Welt (Hannover: Steegemann, 1921). 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 277 published in 1854 in almanacs for children. In 1855, half a dozen comedies appeared in a volume entitled Neues Kasperl-Theater.62 Pocci’s first plays were, as Manfred Nöbel63 observes, intended for glove puppets. The comedy is essentially verbal, based on confrontations between two characters, and borrows much from popular shows. Kasperl in der Türkei,for example, ends with the Sultan being killed by the whacks of a club; his puppet is then thrown out of the booth, like the baby in the Punch and Judy Show. Pocci’s meeting with Josef Leonhard Schmid in 1858 reveals the distance that separated authors and puppeteers and the misunderstandings that emerged from it.64 When Schmid wrote to Pocci to offer to compose for him a refined repertoire without any of the ‘Hanswurstisms that mor e or less encourage crudeness amongst young people’, it was the same ‘Hanswurstisms’ that amused Pocci and he delighted in making use of them.65 The plays he wrote for the Münchner Marionetten-Theater, compiled under the title Lustige Komödienbüchlein (6 volumes, 1859– 77), did not follow the moralising movement that would later transform Kasperl’s character into a behavioural model in children’s publications: the hero retains all his faults without ever being punished. In Kasperl wird reich (Kasperl Gets Rich, 1872), for example, the protagonist is suffering in poverty and appeals to the Devil to help him. The ghost of a damned soul reveals that there is treasure buried at the foot of the gallows and, if it were to be dug up, he would be free from Hell. Kasperl finds the treasure and, having become rich, keeps the fortune for himself: he pours the chamber pot over the head of the tailor, who presents him with a bill, while the cobbler, whom he ordered boots from, is whacked with a club as his payment. He then l ocks up a policeman who comes to arrest him and hangs him on the washing line. Thrown in prison, he appeals to the 62 Franz von Pocci, Neues Kasperl-Theater (Stuttgart: Blum und Vogel, 1855). 63 Manfred Nöbel, ‘Anmerkungen zu den Stücken’, in von Pocci, Kasperls Heldentaten, 442. 64 Josef Leonhard Schmid, cited by Karl Winkler, in Manfred Wegner, Klaus Peitzmeier, and David Schuster-Stengel, eds., Chronik des Münchner Marionettentheaters (Munich: Allitera, 2018), 29. 65 Jean Boutan, ‘La barbarie et l’enfance: les deux sources de l’écriture pour marionnettes chez F ranz von Pocci’, in L’Écriture littéraire pour marionnettes en Europe de l’Ouest (17 e–21e siècles), ed. Carole Guidicelli (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, forthcoming 2025). 278 D. PLASSARD ghost, who tells him that he has erased all his misdeeds as a thank you for having freed him from Hell: the policeman survives and resumes his service. The s tage is then transformed for a grand finale: the dungeon is replaced with a heavenly garden in the middle of which Kasperl, on his knees, is crowned with laurels by the policeman. The parodic dimension of Pocci’s writing is not only present in this immoral and improbable ending. The intertextuality significantly contributes to it through direct allusions to Faust, Justinus Kerner’s macabre fantasy, Friedrich Kind and Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz, and ‘Hamlet in the Magic Flute’, which Kasperl cites.66 Yet the play also has abrupt changes of register: after Kasperl faints having just made the infernal treasure appear in a storm scene, the curtain raises on the excessive banalities that two busybodies exchange on the road to market: one of them excuses herself to serve morning coffee to her dogs. Social satir e, citation games, and absurd details combine with the lustige Figuren’s usual verbal comedy—puns from distorting words or proper nouns—and fantastic or super natural elements. There are visual changes of scenery: the moon bursts out laughing, and the ghost suddenly appears decapitated with his head in his hands, explaining that he is filling in for the Devil whose horns are being repaired. With such a diversity of effects that combined literary clichés and the memories of popular shows (notably puppet theatre and Vienna’s Volkstück),67 Pocci’s plays were clearly intended for a broad audience and not only for children. In France, the first author to construct an extensive puppet repertoir e was Maurice Sand (1823–89). From 1847 to 1886, he composed and performed almost 200 plays for puppets, first at his mother George Sand’s home in Nohant, then for friends in Paris and finally in Passy.68 Contrary to what Le Théâtre des marionettes,69 a collection of 14 of these plays, suggests, this production was not only split between comedies and farces; 66 Franz von Pocci, ‘Kasperl w ird reich’, in Kasperls Heldentaten, 324. 67 See Boutan, ‘La barbarie et l’enfance’. 68 The handwritten notebook Mémento – Répertoire des pièces jouées sur le théâtre des marionnettes de Maurice Sand à Nohant et à Paris (SAND-H0322, Fonds Sand, Bibliothèque Historique de la V ille de Paris) counts 159 plays, including several that are split into episodes, whilst others are reproduced under different titles. A breakdown is included as an annex in Bertrand Tillier, Maurice Sand marionnettiste (Tusson: Éditions du Lérot, 1992), 209–22. 69 Maurice Sand, Le Théâtre des marionnettes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1879). 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 279 it also comprised féeries, parodies, melodramas, and dramas, even if they were treated with a spirit of ridicule that characterised the evenings at Nohant and inevitably took on comic tones. Whereas Pocci only authored one play for actors,70 the writing of this repertoire for puppets was accompanied by the composition of a dozen plays or pantomimes for actors, whether by George or Maurice Sand. They spent evenings at Nohant sometimes improvising on the ‘big stage’, other times on the ‘small stage’ depending on the number of participants: in both cases, the scenarios were put down on paper during dinner served at six o’clock, then worked and performed the same evening without having been rehearsed. Subjects circulated between stage and puppet booth, between mother and son, and even served as drafts for plays that were then confided to Parisian theatres, as Marine Wisniewski has revealed.71 Yet more circulations occurred between the dramatic and narrative modes: Azote, a three-act drama performed by Maurice Sand’s puppets on 4 June 1871, borrows from his novel Mademoiselle Azote published the previous year72 ;and the tale La Sirène draws on a plot developed in Le Vase de bronze ou la Syrène, a féerie comprising five acts, a prologue, and 12 tableaux from October 1881.73 Despite its size and historical significance in its own right, Maurice Sand’s puppet theatre must be considered as an integral part of what Roberto Cuppone describes as a vast ‘writing laboratory’74 set up at Nohant. For this reason, it is difficult to isolate characteristics that are specific to texts for puppets within the corpus, particularly as, aside from the few published pieces, the repertoire remains in its original state of ‘written scenarios with a basic dialogue which the performer 70 Franz von Pocci, Gevatter Tod (Munich: Braun & Schneider, 1855). 71 See Marine Wisniewski, ‘Les marionnettes, ou “le théâtre toujours possible”’, Cahiers George Sand 45 (2023): 11–20. 72 Evidence of this drama is found in the Mémento. Despite being classified amongst the ‘Pièces de théâtre et pantomimes’, the manuscript held at BHVP (SAND-H0333) is that of a novel. 73 Maurice Sand, La Syrène, manuscript, SAND-H0326, BHVP; Le Vase de bronze ou la Sirène, SAND-H0326-3, BHVP. 74 Roberto Cuppone, ed., George Sand, Maurice Sand, Théâtre inédit, documents et dessins, vol. 2 (Torino: Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerche sul Viaggio in Italia, 1997), 11–21. 280 D. PLASSARD can embellish’.75 Searching for any distinctive characteristics was not at all conceivable according to George Sand, who stated that: On stage, the puppet obeys the same fundamental laws that preside over large theatres … There is not two dramatic arts, there is only one.76 Undoubtedly one of the m ain contributions of the experiments conducted at Nohant to the history of puppet theatre is having treated the two stages equally, refusing any hierarchy between the noble and the trivial, large and small theatres, both being defined by the pleasure of acting, not by the literary value of the text. Many writers, like Duranty, would remember this example and claim it as their own,77 whilst forgetting in their enthusiasm that Maurice Sand authored the texts performed by his puppets, not his mother. Several specific characteristics nonetheless emerge from this corpus of puppet plays. In particular, there is a trend of seriality that seems absent from the comedies for actors improvised in the same circumstances.78 From 1849 onwards, an idea was formed to ‘perform the whole French Revolution in a series of plays’,79 a project that was interrupted after the first two episodes. Next came Le Vase de bronze (The Bronze Vase, 1874) in three parts; a series of five plays in 1875; the five parts of Castagnet le subtil (The Skilled Castagnet) in 1876; and a new series of ten plays in 1880–81. Over time, this repertoire sketched out a gallery of recurring characters (the author’s double Balandard, Corisande, Capitaine Vachard, and the innkeeper Friturin), a familiar geography of the local area’s most pleasant village names (La Châtre, Jeu-Maloches, Fouarons, Foin-la-Folie, Viremollet), and a range of fanciful situations, such as the inn named the Hôtel du Veau Qui Désire Téter (Hotel of 75 George Sand, ‘Le théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant’, Le Temps, 11–12 May 1876. Republished in George Sand, Œuvres autobiographiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 1249– 76. 76 Ibid. 77 Duranty, ‘À madame George Sand’, in Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries (Paris: Dubuisson et Cie, 1862), [9]. 78 See the texts compiled in Cuppone, George Sand, Maurice Sand, Théâtre inédit, documents et dessins. 79 George Sand, ‘Le théâtre de marionnettes de Nohant’. George Sand writes that the project was inter rupted by the events of February 1848, but according to the Mémento, the two episodes were performed in April 1849. 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 281 the Calf Who Wants to Suckle). Whilst the scenarios for actors written by George and Maurice Sand generally drew inspiration from the Commedia dell’arte, Romantic pantomime, and a hotchpotch of heterogeneous references parodying drama or melodrama,80 those intended for puppets wer e more focused on local chronicles and satir e. From the ‘big stage’ to the ‘small stage’, the dramatic composition techniques remained the same (disguises and false identities, misunderstandings, revelations, recognition scenes) but the reference universe shifted; impressions of provincial life, rather than clichés of Parisian theatre, was the source of comedy. Municipal councillors, notaries, railway employees, police officers, firefighters, aristocrats, young women of marriageable age, and widows were all attributed a burlesque name (Madame Pétenvert, Colonel Vertébral, Olympia Nantouillet, Crétinet, Madame de Bonbricoulant), a manner of speaking, and obsessions, which contributed to the creation of a quaint fresco mocking the absurdities of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in the Berry region. This dimension of social s atire would be later used by the Nabi painter Paul Ranson who organised performances of L’Abbé Prout, a cycle of comic plays for glove puppets begun in 1889, at his Parisian studio. The serial construction was taken even further in this case. Each of the seven plays published under this title in 1902 constituted an episode in the lives of a small group of people: In each play, the same characters in different plots are moved, chat, and love each other; their social situation sometimes changes slightly, but their character always remains the same. Whatever their role, they retain the same attitude, the same voice, the same mannerisms: in short, it is the same models that act in different adventures.81 The series features, among others, the titular Abbé Prout, inventor of the Vaseline of the Immaculate Conception, ‘a fat jovial parish priest with an apoplectic colouring and a very ecclesiastical voice’; the Marquis de Percefort, ‘a handsome old man, very aristocratic, somewhat senile’; and the 80 For example, in Le Druide peu délicat (The Rude Druid, 1846), the druid, the King of the Gauls and his daughter, Princess of Grenada, a drum major, and the bandit Charabiatinos. See Cuppone, George Sand, Maurice Sand, Théâtre inédit, documents et dessins, 23–25. 81 Paul Ranson, L’Abbé Prout, Guignol pour les vieux enfants (Paris: Mercur e de France, 1902), 13. 282 D. PLASSARD politician Député Troussetutu; Clotilde de Blanc-Bedon, ‘a courteous, elegant, and pleasure-seeking young blonde’. Even the secondary characters are characterised by their physicality (drawings of their faces appear at the start of the collection), their voice, and their language tics, as much as by their s ocial position. There is ‘the nationalist idiot’ Duc Gontran who ‘huffs and puffs’: ‘as soon as he deigns to emit some Prudhommesque extravaganza, out comes hot air’. Clotilde’s tic is that ‘she cannot feel a pinch on the ar m … without immediately crying out in a voice like the call of a flute: “Mummy, mummy, the little birds!”’. Ranson’s comment emphasises the appeal of stereotypes: ‘Is that not charming, and spoken so well in puppet?’.82 Through the reoccurring protagonists the satirical treatment, erotic colour, and risqué humour of the situations, L’Abbé Prout condenses and accentuates certain characteristics sketched out by Maurice Sand’s repertoire. Since it is based on a group of sculpted figures, each highly individualised so they could be identified despite their small dimensions and the narrow opening of the puppet booth, the dramaturgy of traditional glove puppets necessitates stock characters, or ‘maschere’ (masks) as Italian puppeteers refer to them using the vocabulary of the Commedia dell’arte, and writers draw inspiration from them. Similar to how the comedy of the ‘burattini’ is fuelled by the shock of dialects and social profiles, laughter in the works of Maurice Sand and Ranson emerged from the contrast of accents and idioms of highly ster eotyped characters, who were immediately recognisable by the audience. As an art of synthesis and typification, this ‘speaking in puppet’ reflects the techniques of caricature and newspaper drawings that use an emblematic character to r efer to a whole class of individuals, a profession, or a social rank. From 1860 onwards, these techniques were also used by the puppeteer Louis Lemercier de Neuville (1830–1918) for his Pupazzi shows in which he mixed the figures of Monsieur Prudhomme, Robert Macaire, and Madame Benoîton with the literary, artistic, and political celebrities from the Second Empire and the Third Republic.83 82 Ranson, ‘Préface’, in L’Abbé Prout,7. 83 See Louis Lemercier de Neuville, Paris-Pantin (Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoeven et Cie, 1868); Joël Huthwohl, ‘Lemercier de Neuville: de la bohème littéraire au théâtre de marionnettes’, in L’Écriture littéraire pour marionnettes e n Europe de l’Ouest (17 e– 21e siècles), ed. Carole Guidicelli (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, forthcoming 2025). 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 283 From Double Reading to Double Vision Neither the extensive productions of Pocci, Maurice Sand, and Lemercier de Neuville nor the plays of Ranson took the series construction as far as Duranty (1833–80) in his Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries (1862), which was published a year after the inauguration of a puppet booth in the gar dens.84 Bringing together 24 comedies that the writer composed for his small open-air theatre, the volume arranges them in three groups of eight: ‘Polichinelle lettré’ (Educated Polichinelle), ‘Pierrot philosophe’ (Philosopher Pierrot), and ‘Arlequin artiste’ (Artist Arlequin).85 These plays, likely written within a short period of time,86 are formatted and presented identically: each text occupies ‘14 pages of the volume, with a preceding director’s note that summarises and provides commentary on the plot, and two engravings of Duranty, one as a frontispiece and the other as a header for the first page of the text. Despite some variations, the dramatic configuration87 largely relies on the cyclical return of a small group of key characters from Italian comedy, as they wer e established by the Théâtre de la Foire and later by the pantomimes at the Théâtre des Funambules (Arlequin, Pierrot, Polichinelle, Cassandre, Colombine), and their traditional partners fr om glove puppet (the gendar me, the commissaire, the Devil, Death) or stringand r od-marionette (Mère Gigogne) theatres. Duranty sometimes included some original figures alongside them, either referred to by their job title (the pork butcher, the notary, the executioner, the innkeeper) or portrayed in br oad brushstrokes like character types from farce—for example, the rich Lord Niflanguille, the gourmand Gripandouille, and the doctor Cataclysterium. 84 Duranty, Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries (Paris: Dubuisson et Cie, 1862). 85 This somewhat artificial classification would be removed for the second edition (1864). 86 See Marcel Crouzet, Un méconnu du Réalisme: Duranty (1833–1880) (Paris: Nizet, 1964), 133–66; Carole Guidicelli, ‘Le répertoire pour marionnettes à gaine de LouisEdmond Duranty: entre virtuosité instrumentale et sophistication dramaturgique’, in L’Écriture littéraire pour marionnettes en Europe de l’Ouest (17 e–21e siècles),ed. Carole Guidicelli (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, forthcoming 2025). 87 The dramatic configuration is the structuring mode of a group of characters within a theatrical action. See Karl Konrad Polheim, ed., Die dramatische Konfiguration (Stuttgart: UTB, 1997). 284 D. PLASSARD Whether separately, as a pair, or a trio, Arlequin, Pier rot and Polichinelle feature in 20 of these plays, generally as protagonists. Their main function is to accelerate and intensify conflicts, making them more brutal through acts of aggression, fraud, and theft. These characters bring out an already-present social violence, beating and knocking out anyone who crosses their path, responds to them too slowly, or impedes upon their desires. In Le Mariage de raison (The Marriage of Reason), Pierrot completely destroys Mme Trifouillon’s room and fights with her to oblige her to marry him; she vows to get her revenge. In La Malle de Berlingue (Berlingue’s Trunk), Arlequin kills Madame Berlingue and, to get rid of the body, plans to make it disappear in the b aker’s oven. In La Tragédie d’Arlequin (The Tragedy of Arlequin), Cassandr e asks his daughter Colombine to choose between three suitors, Arlequin, Pierrot, and Polichinelle, who each arrive with a gift (a bouquet of dandelions, some ham, a bottle of wine). Colombine violently rejects Pierrot and Polichinelle, but chooses Arlequin. Pierrot and Polichinelle then ambush Arlequin befor e killing and burying him. A pig digs him up and brings him back to life. The two accomplices then kill the animal, cut it up, preserve it in salt, and eat it to prevent it from testifying against them. Two nightmarish visions, a Saucisse-Gendarme and an AndouilleCommissaire, torment them in their sleep. They admit their crimes and Arlequin can marry Colombine.88 With a frenetic tempo, which would have been demanding for the puppeteers but perfectly suited to the comedy of glove puppets, D uranty’s plays rack up fights, adventures, disguises, real and fake deaths, and games of hide and seek. Freed from any form of vraisemblance, interpersonal relationships are reduced to a range of burlesque confrontations. A pair of lawyers look for clients kill Pierrot’s cat and Madame Bégrich’s parrot to make the two owners file complaints against each other, but the commissaire on the case takes them for the murderers of their own animals, shifting their status from complainant to accused, and condemns them to death.89 In these arguments of whacks of clubs, repeat hangings, slips of logic, and reversals of situations, the classic techniques of shows performed in the streets can be readily recognised. Pier rot et le pâtissier 88 Duranty, ‘La tragédie d’Arlequin’, in Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries, 33–48. 89 Duranty, ‘Les plaideurs malgré eux’, in Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries, 225–40. 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 285 (Pierrot and the Pastry Chef ), for example, reuses yet modifies the fight against an animal and the hanging of the executioner: Pierrot pulls off a dog’s tail, kills it, then hides the club in its body to deceive the pastry chef with this simulacre; after having asked the gendarme to show him how to slip his head in the noose and hanging him, he kills the pastry chef and the apothecary by beating them with the gallows.90 In Polichinelle et la Mère Gigogne, Polichinelle is responsible for feeding Mère Gigogne’s ten babies, but he beats them instead, then throws them out the window like in the Punch and Judy Show. Three of them return to punish him.91 Duranty thus rewrites the stock sequences from the street puppet booth, heightening their cruelty and arranging them accor ding to new structures. The dramatic action no longer follows the principle of gradation inherent to improvised shows and rarely ends with the punishment of the guilty party; rather, it is made up of unjustified acts of cruelty— the slightest annoyance results in a whack of a club, while the smallest breach leads to the gallows. According to Duranty, an allegorical meaning hides behind this apparent simplicity. Insisting that his work addressed a double audience, ‘very naïve minds’ and ‘very learned minds’, the playwright stressed the presence of a symbolic backdrop in his paratextual material. For Le Mariage de raison, he wrote ‘No one would dare deny that reason teaches us to accept and bear our lot with resignation’, and for La Malle de Berlingue: The trunk here symbolises humans’ wandering, restless situation on Earth, their voyage through life, their upheavals, their differences and their mistakes, their taste for the unknown, and their haste, their greed and their stupidity, the terrible uses of their free will, the fickleness of their fortune, and their reckless judgements. Moreover, at the end, the Commissaire, touched by compassion for the precarious state of the man, becomes sympathetic to the abolition of the death penalty and shouts ‘Don’t hang anyone!’ (Not even the playwright, implicitly and explicitly understood.)92 90 Duranty, ‘Pierrot et le pâtissier’, in Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries, 97–112. 91 Duranty, ‘Polichinelle et la Mère Gigogne’, in Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries, 65–80. 92 Duranty, ‘La malle de Berlingue’, in Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries, 49–50. 286 D. PLASSARD Even if it is tinged with irony, this claim of a double reading is supported by the engravings accompanying each text: whilst the image placed on the first page of the text depicts a moment of dramatic action, the preceding frontispiece (Illustration 8.1) shows scenes from modern life that inspired it. In Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries, iconographical and paratextual devices thus converge to mark writing for puppets’ entry into a new signifying regime: an opening up to multiple interpretations. Whilst this regime reproduced the traditional alliance b etween entertainment and instruction, it cannot be reduced to it because Duranty instils doubt: he warns that ‘some things will escape the children’, but also Illustration 8.1 Duranty, ‘Polichinelle précepteur’, Théâtre des marionnettes du jardin des Tuileries (Paris: Dubuisson et Cie, 1862) 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 293 the selective approach taken in this book, its effects will be more immediately perceptible for these better-identified repertoires112 ;works that have already been the subject of substantial literary criticism will simply be mentioned, whereas further light will be shed upon lesser-known examples. Rather than reproducing yet another gallery of great works, my intention is to highlight the routes by which poets and writers contributed to r edrawing the imaginary territories of the puppet. Presences of the Past From the turn of the twentieth century, authors who chose to write for puppets were conscious that they were rowing against the current of their time, turning away from the age of industry, the crowds, and the big cities, and unearthing artistic forms that had disappeared or were disappearing. In 1906, Gustave Kahn announced ‘Guignol is dead!’ in the preface to what he falsely pr esents as a rediscovered text of the ‘drame de Polichinelle’ used by the Champs-Élysées puppet booths: the text in fact republishes a French translation of Collier’s Punch and Judy Show.113 Increasing congestion and traffic noise chased glove puppeteers from urban spaces, and they took refuge in theatres for children, cabarets, and other small performance venues. This reduction of activity can be observed across many forms of p opular puppet theatre, which, at different rates depending on the region, entered a phase of decline in the space of a few decades after its peak. The str engthening of links between literary creation and traditional puppet theatre thus occurred during a moment of existential crisis in puppetry and, for this reason, it was often accompanied by a criticism of modernity. Symbolist circles, in particular, widely employed archaistic, classical, or medieval references to legitimise their productions. The poet Maurice Bouchor (1855–1929) established the Petit-Théâtre de Marionnettes de la Galerie Vivienne in Paris with Henri Signoret. Though he declared himself a defender of secular morality and public schools,114 Bouchor wrote several dramas with religious subject matter for the venue whose 112 See Jurkowski, Écrivains et marionnettes. 113 Gustave Kahn, ‘Préface’, in Polichinelle (de Guignol) (Paris: E. Sansot et Cie, 1906), 9. See also Chapter 3. 114 Maurice Bouchor, ‘Préface’, in Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1901), 5–23. 294 D. PLASSARD titles recall the literary or theatrical models of another age: Tobie (1889), Noël, ou le Mystère de la Nativité (Christmas or the Mystery of the Nativity, 1890), La Légende de sainte Cécile (The Legend of St Cecilia, 1892), and La Dévotion à saint André (The Devotion of St Andrew, 1892). The type of puppets employed at the Petit Théâtre had been in use s ince the end of the eighteenth century in mechanical Nativity scenes in Provence with some technical modifications: figures mounted on a base and controlled from below with the help of hidden strings in the clothing and linked to a small keyboard. Only movements of the head and arms were possible, offering a hieratic form of acting that sharply contrasted with modern puppetry, represented by the feats of ingenuity and realistic illusion of Thomas Holden’s string-marionettes. The ‘freshness’, ‘simplicity’, and even the ‘naivety’ of Bouchor’s performances for the Petit-Théâtre elicited enthusiastic responses.115 Jules Lemaître compared the puppets to the ‘naïve virgins’ of the Italian Primitives116 ; Anatole France declar ed that only puppets could ‘express religious sentiment’117 ; and the polemicist Léon Bloy recounted how he was overcome with emotion during the first scene of Noël in which the archangel Gabriel give the animals the gift of speech.118 Beyond Bouchor’s works, symbolist circles channelled their fascination with using puppets for religious subjects through adapting theatrical works by the abbess Hrotsvita of Gandersheim (tenth century): Abraham l’ermite (Abraham the Hermit)and Paphnutius. These adaptations were performed at the Petit-Théâtre, as private shows given by Paul Ranson, or, in a more ironic mode, at the Théâtre des Pantins founded by Claude Terrasse and Alfred Jarry. These texts, to which Anatole France had drawn attention,119 served as the dramaturgical model for La Légende de sainte Cécile and La Dévotion à saint André. Like Hrotsvita, Bouchor 115 See Didier Plassard, ‘Quand le majeur devient mineur: marionnettes et drame religieux dans les cercles littéraires et artistiques de la fin du 19e siècle’, in Écrire en petit, jouer en mineur. Marginalités littéraires, scéniques et médiatiques, ed. Marie-Astrid Charlier and Florence Thér ond (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2025), 115–26. 116 Jules Lemaître, Impressions de théâtre (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1898), 386. 117 Anatole France, ‘Les marionnettes de M. Signoret’, Le Temps, 10 June 1888. 118 Léon Bloy, ‘Revanche des lys’, La Plume, February 15, 1891, 66. 119 France, ‘Les marionnettes de M. Signoret’. 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 295 explores the theme of refusing sexuality, which is presented as both a temptation and a stigma. The first play r ecounts how a young Christian prefers martyrdom over renouncing her virginity; in the second, St Andrew, disguised as a beggar, prevents a bishop from surrendering to the charms of the young Luce who turns out to be Lucifer. The respect with which Bouchor treats these subjects borrowed from Jacques de Voragine’s Legenda aurea (Golden Legend, around 1261–66) is not an impediment to introducing some comic elements, burlesque rhymes, trivial details, and transformation scenes (Luce’s head pivots on itself to reveal the face of Lucifer), highlighting the debt to popular puppet shows. Other twentieth-century writers occasionally made use of puppets to revive older forms of expressing religious faith: in 1918, for example, the Swiss art historian Daniel Baud-Bévy (1870–1958) wrote Sainte Chagrin (St ‘Grief’), a ‘short mystery for puppets’ performed as part of the Schweizerischer Werkbund exhibition in Zurich.120 The plot is based on a simplified version of the legend of Sankt Kümmernis (also called St Wilgefortis).121 In the Brothers Grimm tale Saint Solicitous,122 a young woman wishes to to keep her virginity because she wants to become a nun. Her father obliges her to marry the king, yet, on the day of the wedding, an extraordinary beard appears on her face. She is then crucified and honoured as a saint. After her death, her statue drops a golden slipper in front of a minstr el who is then accused of stealing it. When the statue offers him a second slipper, he is deemed to be innocent. BaudBévy’s rewriting reduced the supernatural element (the girl in agony on the cross, rather than the statue, offers a present to the minstrel) and changed the frame narrative: when the Lord of Naters returns from the Italian Wars, he sees three young orphans singing and dancing in a field. Chagrin spurns his advances not due to a chastity vow, but because she does not want a warrior who killed a heron in front of her. The abbess from the orphanage makes her accept his proposal, but her face becomes covered with a beard and the furious Naters crucifies her. 120 Association of artists, architects, designers, and industrialists established in 1913. Inspired by the Deutscher Werkbund, it shared its mission of bringing together art and industry to pr omote the functionalism movement. 121 Known by various names denoting different ideas across Europe, she was honoured in Southern Germany as Sankt Kümmernis (‘grief’). 122 Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Die heilige Frau Kümmernis’, in Kinderund Hausmärchen, vol. 2 (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1815), 293–94. 296 D. PLASSARD These modifications seek to make the theatrical action more familiar, facilitating the audience’s identification with Chagrin. The links between the characters also become closer: Chargin offers her diamondembellished marriage crown to the same minstrel whose music she and her friends danced to at the start of the play. Yet, contrary to these modernisations, the playwright gives the play a medievalising frame. The narr ative plays out in front of two angels who comment upon it, and it ends with Naters being swallowed by the infernal abyss that opens under his feet. Baud-Bévy simultaneously draws upon an imaginary from the end of the Middle Ages and uses theatrical techniques that, in 1918, only survived amongst some puppeteers from the popular tradition. During this period, many traditional theatres in the regions devastated by the First World War, particularly Belgium and northern and eastern France, disappeared. Puppet shows’ evocation of the past has further significance in these contexts, as a defence of local cultures, with theatres becoming ‘lieux de mémoire’,123 sites of memory for regional identities. Writing for puppets thus represents becoming the guar d ian of a collective heritage, even the custodian of a disappeared tradition. In the 1920s, Michel de Ghelderode (1898–1962) published five plays for puppets, which were presented as ‘reconstructions’ of former Brussels shows. The first, Le Mystère de la Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (The Mystery of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ), is referred to as ‘a document of folklore’124 reconstructed using ‘the memorial vestiges of a former actor who is now senile’. 125 The playwright states he took the same approach for Duvelor ou la Farce du diable vieux (Duvelor, or the Old Devil’s Farce),126 La Tentation de saint Antoine (The Temptation of 123 Pierre Nora, ed., Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, trans. Mary Trouille, ed. David P. Jordan, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999–2010). 124 Michel de Ghelderode, ‘Avant-propos’, in Le Mystère de la Passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ pour les marionnettes reconstitué d’après le spectacle (Brussels: La Renaissance d’Occident, 1925), 5. 125 Michel de Ghelderode, unpublished account cited in Jean Francis, L’Éternel aujourd’hui de Michel de Ghelderode (Brussels: Louis Musin, 1968), 125. 126 Michel de Ghelderode, Duvelor ou la Farce du Diable vieux reconstituée d’après le spectacle des marionnettes bruxelloises en 1918, Le RougeetleNoir, 27 May 1931; reproduced in Robert Guiette, ed., Marionnettes de tradition populaire (Brussels: Les Éditions du Cercle d’art, 1950). 8 THE THEATRE OF POETS AND WRITERS 297 St Anthony),127 La Farce de la Mort qui faillit trépasser (The Farce of Death Who Almost Died),128 and Le Massacre des innocents (The Massacre of the Innocents).129 From one performance to another, the playwright varied the tale of how he collected the materials for his plays, which has led specialists to cast doubt on his folklorist approach and to view some reconstructions as a ‘mystification’.130 Yet comparing the plays published by Ghelderode and the documentary evidence left by popular puppet theatre in Belgium and northern France shows that his claims bear at least a slither of truth. The Tentation de saint Antoine is almost identical to the one performed by French puppeteers in the nineteenth century, and Le Massacre des innocents shares several episodes with the Naissances from Liège. The farces closely resemble the comic sketches (‘stutske bââ’) performed alongside the programme at the Théâtre Toone in Brussels, with the r e-appearance of the character Pitje-la-Mort131 ; yet, Ghelderode indicates in the Entretiens d’Ostende (The Ostend Interviews) that he was only able to collect the main plots of these plays, meaning that he wrote all their lines.132 Ghelderode’s rewritings of traditional plays also helped breathe new life into Belgian puppet theatre.133 Le Mystère de la Passion was staged by the Brussels puppeteer Jean-Baptiste Hembauf (Toone IV) in 1934; it 127 The first publication of La Tentation de saint Antoine appeared in Michel de Ghelderode, ‘Le folklore bruxellois’, La Renaissance d’Occident (April 1925): 812–19. 128 Michel de Ghelderode, La Farce de la Mort qui faillit trépasser (Brussels: Éditions de la Sirène, 1952). Ghelderode first published an overview of this play in a second instalment of ‘Le folklore bruxellois’ (Brussels Folklore), stating that it was performed under the titles PietjedeDood (Pitje the Dead), De Dood op wandel (Death Goes Walking), De Dood op zwier (Death Carousing), and De Dût op stameney (Death at the Café). See La Renaissance d’Occident (July 1925): 157–60. 129 Michel de Ghelderode, ‘Le Massacre des innocents’, La Renaissance d’Occident (November 1926): 231–37. 130 See notably Roland Beyen, Michel de Ghelderode ou la hantise du masque, Essai de biographie c ritique, 2nd ed. (Brussels: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Françaises, Palais des Académies, 1971), 178–81. 131 For example, Comment Pitje-la-Mort aida les Espagnols, Un verre de vin et un biscuit, Trois paysans en sabots. See the description of these plays on the PuppetPlays database: https://puppetplays.eu. 132 Michel de Ghelderode, Les Entretiens d’Ostende (Toulouse: L’éther vague, 1992), 118. 133 Hélène Beauchamp, La Marionnette, laboratoire du théâtre (Montpellier: Deuxième époque, 2018), 125. 298 D. PLASSARD was revived 1960, at the same time as Duvelor ou la Farce du diable vieux by Victor José Géal (Toone VII), and is still part of the Théâtre Toone’s repertoire today. Ghelderode congratulated himself on this achievement, without mentioning that the puppeteers had largely reworked his text134 : So, go see this Passion: it is performed each year on Rue Haute and already no one remembers me even though I ‘reconstructed’ it. That is okay though: what came from the people has been returned to the people.135 In a similar way, Federico García Lorca claimed that his Tragicomedia de don Cristóbal y la señá Rosita (The Billy-Club Puppets, 1922–25) and Retablillo de don Cristóbal (The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal, 1930–34) were part of the cultural heritage of Andalusia and, more s pecifically, of glove puppet theatre where the origins of several of his characters lie, in particular Don Cristóbal Polichinela. The almost complete absence of written traces of these shows performed at fairgrounds in the s econd half of the nineteenth century136 makes comparing García Lorca’s plays with his sources of inspiration difficult, but some fundamental elements can be identified, such as the puppeteer’s address to the audience and his dialogues with Don Cristóbal or other characters. This metatheatrical device, a key feature of Andalusian puppet shows,137 is used at the start of Retablillo de don Cristóbal when the Director asks the glove puppet to show itself.138 There is also a trace of it in the Mosquito’s pr ologue for the Tragicomedia de don Cristóbal y la señá Rosita. More generally, these two plays borrow several techniques from traditional glove puppet theatre: whacks of clubs, appearances of allegorical figures (Hour emerges from the clock), the extraordinary lengthening of a character’s neck like 134 See the description of La Passion by Pierre Welleman (Toone VI) on the PuppetPlays database: https://puppetplays.eu/oeuvres/315095/la-passion. 135 Ghelderode, Les Entretiens d’Ostende, 117. 136 Francisco J. Cornejo found two descriptions of shows of Don Cristóbal at fairs in the Seville region: they are included as an annex to the article: Francisco J. Cornejo, ‘Don Cristóbal y el tío Juan Misa’, Fantoche 1 (2007): 13–25. 137 See José Gestoso y Pérez, ‘Una feria en un pueblo de Andalucia’, cited in Cornejo, ‘Don Cristóbal y el tío Juan Misa’, 23. 138 In Retablillo de don Cristóbal y doñá Rosita,anadaptationperformed by García Lorca in Buenos Aires in March 1934, Cristóbal himself addresses the audience before conversing with the poet. See F. García Lorca, ‘Retablillo de don Cristóbal y doñá Rosita’, in Teatro completo (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2012), 675–76. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]