Puppet theatre

“ The reason is that the puppet show discharges all the functions of the ordinary theatre, with this advantage—that it gives its spectators the privilege of feeling as the gods upon Olympus. With amused and tolerant eye they watch the petty strife of puny creatures who, but for the lack of high divinity, would be life-like effigies of themselves. It may be that “the proper study of mankind is man,” but the occupation is pleasurable only when it can{16} be pursued with such detachment as, in the most complete form, the puppet show makes possible. ”

“ It is like having a company of actors whose exclusive concern is to pronounce the lines of a play perfectly, without any attempt at interpretation or characterization, thus suppressing their own personalities for the sake of the texts. If the plays thus being performed are by Shakespeare, they may well gain a great deal, but most plays will not stand up to such treatment. This is always true of the puppet theatre, for none of the charm or individual talent of the accomplished actor can save the faulty text. ”

“ He mentions a well-managed maschere, Guillette and her lover, a clownish dwarf, both speaking in the Venetian dialect, and after the play, the marionette ballet. Another account tells of a pretty little puppet theatre with boxes, galleries and parquet where dolls thirty-five inches high play classic tragedy of four or five acts and comedy and pantomime, including always a marvellous ballet. Here the most admired puppet receives encores, even bouquets and very properly bows in response. The stages of such little theatres are as complete as the most luxurious real stages. ”

“ These new forms included the kabuki, a brilliant dramatic, but essentially not a literary, art, and the jōruri, or puppet theatre, in my opinion a far more important literary medium. Japan is far from being the only country in which the puppet theatre has a long history, but elsewhere it is seldom considered a very exalted form of art. The puppet-plays produced in Europe are usually either adaptations of plays originally written for actors, or else are trifles calculated to delight or amuse by their ingenuity. In Japan the puppet theatre has been a serious medium for creative artists ”

“ I never disgraced my colours by abandoning legitimate comedy, to whose service I am sworn, and in whose defence I have kept the field for nearly half a century—till at last I have survived all true national taste, and lived to see buffoonery, spectacle, and puerility so effectually triumph, that now to be repulsed from the stage is to be recommended to the closet; and to be applauded by the theatre is little less than a passport to the puppet-show." This spirit of self-satisfaction, and depreciation of the public taste, was nothing new. ”

“ Since he lost one of his eyes, and deluded himself into the belief that with a glass eye he would not be fit for the stage, he is far too proud to step down from the high horse of the tragedian to the donkey of the public reader. Every one knows whether he is acting to his own disadvantage when he plays the malcontent. It is true, though, some one really ought to prevail upon him to become the manager of a puppet-theatre. ”

“ In the case of the theatre proper, the actors carry on all the dialogue, except a part of it just mentioned, and act and dance to the recitation of the narrative part, in a similar manner to the puppets. The narrative part not only supplies the thread of the story, in order to connect the scenes represented by the puppet actors, or the living actors on the stage, but aids the imagination of the audience by describing expressions of countenance, scenery, and many other details that the resources of a theatre cannot but fail to convey. ”

“ The theatre itself is small, being something under the size of our old Haymarket little theatre, but is very neatly and tastefully fitted up. The puppets are about half of the natural size of man, and Girolamo, aided by one or two others, works them and gives them gesture, by means of strings, which are, however, so well contrived as to be scarcely visible; and Girolamo himself speaks for all, as, besides being a ventriloquist, he has a most astonishing faculty of varying his voice, and adapting it to the rôle of each puppet, so that the illusion is complete. ”

“ The King’s conjuror, who takes more money from out the pocket than he puts in, made the lank-haired gentry scratch their pates; the walking French puppet-show had hired an apartment, with additional performers; Punch and the Devil, in his [Pg 201] little moving theatre, were performing without doors, to invite the company into the grand theatre. Men with wooden mummies in show-boxes were found straggling about the fair; tall women in cellars, dropping upon their knees to be kissed by short customers; dwarfs mounted on stools for the same civil purposes ”

“ A puppet sailor danced a hornpipe.
Scene 6. A puppet Indian juggler threw balls.
Scene 7. Before the curtain drew up the collector said, “This is the representation of Billy Waters, Esq.” and a puppet, Billy Waters, appeared with a wooden leg, and danced to the sound of his fiddle for a minute or two when the curtain dropped, and the manager and performers went off with their theatre, leaving the remaining seventeen scenes, if they had them, unrepresented. On the show was painted, “Candler’s Fantoccini, patronised by the Royal Family.” Our old acquaintance, “Punch,” will survive all this. ”

“ In the present day, the puppet-show man travels about the streets when the weather will permit, and carries his motions, with the theatre itself, upon his back! The exhibition takes place in the open air; and the precarious income of the miserable itinerant depends entirely on the voluntary contributions of the spectators, which, as far as one may judge from the square appearance he usually makes, is very trifling. ”

“ Puppet shows."
"Eh?" says Garvey, gawpin'.
"Sort of Punch and Judy stuff," says I. "Whittles little dummies out of wood, paints their faces, dresses 'em up, and makes 'em act by pullin' a lot of strings. Writes reg'lar plays for 'em. He's got a complete little theatre fitted up over his garage; stage, scenery, footlights, folding chairs and everything. Gives a show every now and then. Swell affairs. Everybody turns out. Course they snicker some in private, but he gets away with it." ”

“ With this view, the puppet-show bequeathed by our grandmother was again brought forth, and arranged in such a way that the spectators sat in my gable room; while the persons managing and performing, as well as the theatre itself as far as the proscenium, found a place in the room adjoining. We were allowed, as a special favour, to invite first one and then another of the neighbours' children as spectators; and thus at the outset I gained many friends, but the restlessness inherent in children did not suffer them to remain long a patient audience. ”

“ Greg and his Protestant company, whose soirées I did not attend; and, at the Abbey Street Theatre, whither I went in order to see, if possible, some specimens of the national humour, I found a company of English people ranting through a melodrama, the tragedy whereof was the only laughable thing to be witnessed.
Humbler popular recreations may be seen by the curious. One night I paid twopence to see a puppet-show—such an entertainment as may have been popular a hundred and thirty years ago, and is described in the Spectator. ”

“ Lighting a puppet stage, 227–229. Lima Beans, given in Los Angeles, 183. Literary puppets in Paris, 109–111. Little Theatre, Chicago, history of, 173–178. London, Italian puppets in, 146; present-day street puppets, 155. Los Angeles, puppets in, 183. Louis XIV, puppets a feature of marriage procession, 79; gives special privileges to La Grille, 88. Lupi brothers, Italian showmen, 68–69; description of performance for children, 199–200. Luschan, von, F., on puppet plays in Turkey, 38. Luther, Martin, denunciations against actors, 123. ”

“ The puppets sometimes took over plays of the day, and satirized them cleverly upon their own stages, the dolls costumed as nearly as possible like the prominent actors whom they imitated. Later, when for a time the Puritans abolished the theatres, the marionettes were allowed to continue their shows, and thus the entire repertory of the real stage fell into their hands. Permanent puppet stages grew up all over London: people thronged to the puppets. ”

“ He doth indeed, in this GRAND DRAMA, rather perform the part of the prompter, and doth instruct the well-drest figures, who are strutting in public on the stage, what to say and do. To say the truth, a puppet-show will illustrate our meaning better, where it is the master of the show (the great man) who dances and moves everything, whether it be the king of Muscovy or whatever other potentate alias puppet which we behold on the stage ”

“ Indeed so powerful a factor has it been that living actors in the classic drama have accepted the conventions of the puppet stage and are trained to the gesture and manner of the ancient marionette. This does not apply, of course,45 to the innumerable strolling booths of the Chinese linen bag variety, but rather to the renowned and long established stationary theatres for puppets, theatres with exclusive boxes for the select and well-to-do of the audience and ample seating capacity for the common people who visit the show in great numbers.
The dolls are not quite half as tall as a man ”

“ That is why a puppet play is not only more amusing but more artistic than a real one.” He continues: “Puppets, moreover, have style. They are cut out sharply to represent their particular characteristics, and those characteristics are pronounced. The manager of a puppet show has a free hand in the fashioning of such a company as best carries out his creative impulse. But with real actors it is impossible to make them other than they are, to subordinate them entirely to the manager’s will. I have been an actor, both in Germany and in Russia ... ”

“ Now that the puppet is on the stage, imagine what a shock it would be to your audience to see a great hand coming down below the proscenium arch. To prevent this, always keep your hand, even during rehearsals, close to your control.
While on the stage, every motion must have a reason behind it. Puppets cannot move aimlessly about the stage any more than real actors can. Every gesture, too, must mean something. ”

“ In a hundred small ways a puppet can show life. The point is, there should be no dead puppets on the stage.
132But there is a danger here. Puppets must not divert the attention of the audience from the main character. For example, in Men of Iron in the scene showing the great hall of Devlin Castle, the minstrel is singing before the king and his court. The jester, with his pranks and capers, could easily have taken too much of the attention of the audience to himself and away from the minstrel, but instead, he sat down on the floor near the minstrel and pretended to be playing a lute. ”

“ Foote, the Aristophanes of the English drama, who was always on the alert to turn every subject of popular excitement to account, seeing the success of the Fantoccini, gave out that he should produce a Primitive Puppet-show at the Haymarket, to be entitled the Handsome Chambermaid, or Piety in Pattens: intended to burlesque the sentimental comedy which Garrick still maintained at Drury Lane. The idea of a play to be performed in a regular theater by puppets excited the curiosity and talk of the town. “Will your puppets be as large as life, Mr. ”

“ One of the specialties of the sole surviving puppet-show of this sort in the Champs-Elysées is the performance of a juggler who tosses aloft and catches in turn a number of glittering balls. The delicate balancing of the tight-rope walker, with her frequent pirouettes on her toes, and with her surprising summersets, is also one of the exhibitions in which the puppet can defy the rivalry of any living executant, however skilful in the art. At the circus we feel that the tightrope dancer might fall, whereas at the puppet-show we know with certainty that any fatal mishap is impossible. ”

“ The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti—a famous company from Milan—is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld in my life. I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous. They look between four and five feet high, but are really much smaller; for when a musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat on the stage, it becomes alarmingly gigantic, and almost blots out an actor. They usually play a comedy, and a ballet. The comic man in the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter in an hotel. There never was such a locomotive actor, since the world began. ”

“ He has even ventured to give plays as elaborate as 'Around the World in Eighty Days.' But it may be doubted whether this vaulting ambition has not overleaped itself, and whether a puppet-show does not gain rather than lose by restricting its efforts within narrower limits. After all, nothing so delights us at a puppet-show as the feats which are most characteristic and least difficult of accomplishment. ”

“ Puppet-shows are delightful because they are easily made and quite convincing. Very good ones have been improvised even by tiny children, with a pasteboard suit-box opening to the front, a slit at the top to let down paper-doll actors on a thread, a bit of scenery, outdoors or in, drawn as background, and a showman to talk for all the characters. ”

“ Stravinsky has woven a dramatic plot around the puppet stage. ‘To take us behind the scenes and show the mingled comedy and tragedy of the puppet world, was a true and dramatic inspiration’ of the composer. The scenic effect of Petrouchka is calculated to create a melancholy feeling in the spectator with its bleak gray background and dull frigidity. It gives a striking contrast to the barbaric colors of the crowd on the stage. ”