Afterword: Shakespeare's attitude to puppets

Abstract

This afterword is also a ‘beforehand’: it gives a background for the articles in this special issue, exploring William Shakespeare's own references to puppet shows, puppets themselves and puppet audiences and looking too at the actual puppets he may have used in his plays. Its argument is that, from the first, the relationship between Shakespeare and puppets was reciprocal; he treated puppet plays in much the way that, as these trenchant articles have shown, Shakespeare's plays have come to be treated by puppets and puppeteers.

Introduction

The articles in this volume beautifully reveal how puppet shows adapt William Shakespeare, sometimes directly, often via earlier adaptations, to the puppet world. But Shakespeare was himself often adapting ideas and themes, directly and indirectly, from the puppet world for his own uses, meaning that, from the first, the relationship between Shakespeare and puppets was reciprocal. The following account, in four parts, gives a background for the articles in this journal, exploring puppet shows, puppets themselves, puppet audiences – all as referred to by Shakespeare – and the actual puppets staged in Shakespeare plays. The argument is that the preceding articles form a continuum with Shakespeare himself: they show how Shakespeare's plays are, these days, treated by puppets, but that is in the very same way that Shakespeare, in his time, treated puppet plays.

Puppet shows referred to by Shakespeare

Shakespeare seems to have thought of puppet shows as the repository of mystery and morality plays: the types of drama stamped out under Queen Elizabeth, that lived on in the puppet world (puppet shows were oral, not written, so tended to go under the radar). Autolycus is said to have briefly been a puppeteer when he ‘compassed’ (acquired) ‘a motion’ (puppet show) ‘of the Prodigal son’ (The Winter's Tale, 4.3.92–3); Kent gestures to a puppet show about the seven deadly sins when he accuses Oswald of taking, as he puts it, ‘Vanity the puppet's part’ (King Lear, 2.2.36–7), meaning Goneril. ¹ Such puppet productions, the first in disreputable hands, and the second about the stupidity of Pride – the puppet, borrowing from Renaissance iconography, is to be imagined staring at herself in a tiny mirror – are treated ironically by Shakespeare, probably picking up on the fact that they burlesqued the plays from which they descended. It is, after all, in the nature of puppet shows, as beautifully explored in this volume, to take up, reflect upon, and parody the literature from which they originate in ways that help us rethink both the primary and new contexts. For puppets, with their smallness, or occasionally largeness (like the larger-than-life puppets of Blind Summit, addressed by Cécile Decaix), their motile bodies and fixed faces, are in their natures parodic. And, as the preceding articles illustrate, plays written for puppets, like Johann Friedrich Schink's happy ending Hamlet, addressed by Jean Boutan, or Pierre Rousset's Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet adaptations which, as Yanna Kor explains, descend from Shakespeare operas that are themselves rewritings, tend to be semi-sarcastic takes on their hypotexts and sometimes on their hypotexts’ hypotexts. Just as Shakespeare assimilated what seem to have been puppet lampoons, relished them, and used them with satirical intent in his metatheatre, so, in due time, as is shown in this collection, his own plays met the puppet world and went through that same process.

Shakespeare may, though, also have been inspired by puppet shows when designing his dramas, a fact not often considered, because sources are looked for in documents, and puppets do not leave many documents (as Bruno Leone explains of guaratelle, original puppet plays were oral and only make it late to paper; Boutan adds that such written puppet texts as survive are seldom anyway straightforward accounts of the plays performed). Though it leaves no paper trace, there was a puppet show about Julius Caesar doing the rounds at roughly the time when Shakespeare was penning his play on the subject. It is heard of in Everie woman in her humor, when the Bawd complains that there is nothing new for her to watch given that ‘I have seen the Babones already, the Cittie of new Ninevie, and Julius Caesar acted by the Mammets’, ‘mammets’ meaning ‘puppets’; and a version of it was extant some years earlier when in John Day's The blind-beggar of Bednal-green (1600) the puppeteer advertises that, in his show, ‘you shall … see … the famous City of Norwitch, and the stabbing of Julius Caesar in the French Capitol by a sort of Dutch Mesopotamians’. ² As the lost Julius Caesar puppet show is hard to date – puppet plays are recorded when they are recorded, but the references here are for an entertainment that was already a cliché – it could well have been amongst Shakespeare's inspirations. It may equally, though, have come into being after the Shakespeare play, in which case, the reverse may be true: the puppet show could have been an ironic take on Shakespeare's play, of the kind addressed by Boutan, but years earlier. A third alternative is that the puppet Julius Caesar told its own version of the classical story and simply came into being at around the time Shakespeare was writing. That is fascinating too, for whatever the show was, it will have offered context for the play by Shakespeare. Immediate, accessible and lacking in profundity – typical puppet-show descriptors, and the terms Hélène Beauchamp uses of the puppet show The Tempest of Caliban – the Julius Caesar puppet show will, in its very existence, have told its classical story in a way introduced, situated and repositioned Shakespeare's serious playhouse drama on the same subject.

Moreover, the version of the Julius Caesar puppet show quoted above, in which the character is found in company of Dutch Mesopotamian (?) puppets against a variety of backcloths of different locations, introduces a further form of early modern puppet play that may have influenced Shakespeare: one that fuses together stories of different origins. The sole puppet bill (advertisement) that survives from around the early modern period shows a range of popular theatrical dramas fused together to make up a single entertainment, referencing Henry Davenport's lost play Henry II (or a story on that subject), Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome's The Late Lancashire Witches – all apparently fan-fiction takes on Elizabethan dramas – interspersed with merriments from by ‘Punchinello’:

John Harris's BOOTH in Bartholomew-fair between the Hospital-gate and Duck-lane-end, next the Rope-dancers, is to be seen,

The court of King Henry the Second; and the Death of Fair Rosamond: With the merry Humours of Punchinello, and the Lancashire-Witches. As also the famous History of Bungy and Frier Bacon: With the merry Conceits of their Man Miles. And the brazen speaking Head; wherein is represented the manner how this Kingdom was to have been walled in with Brass. Acted by Figures as large as Children two years old.

Mistake not the Booth; you may know it by the Brazen Speaking Head in the Gallery. ³

Such shows were fan-fiction adaptations of their theatrical sources. Did Shakespeare see, did his plays feature in, such puppet productions? If so, perhaps his own daring literary combinations – taking the Gloucester subplot in King Lear from Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and the Lear story itself from Raphael Holinshed and/or the play of King Leir – may have had puppet habits or puppet ways of conceiving of drama at their core. It is hard to say more, however, because, as happens all too frequently with puppet material, the bill's date is obscure. It has been variously traced to 1650, making it a cultural memory of the plays banned from production during the interregnum, and 1700, making it an insight into the way Elizabethan plays continued to thrive in the puppet world decades after their life on the people stage had reached its natural end. ⁴ What can be said is that the show's power partly comes from disrupting well-known stories with a comic puppet, Punchinello, in much the way that, as Francesca Di Fazio shows, in nineteenth and twentieth-century Italy, Arleccino from commedia dell’arte disturbed and reanimated the Shakespeare puppet canon. And, though the bill quoted does not itself contain a Shakespeare play, it just may reflect upon a Shakespeare character. Punchinello is post-Shakespearean and Italian in origin: he bears witness to the influence of Italian production on English puppet theatre, beautifully explored in Leone's Neopolitan Shakespeare puppet productions, which still feature Pulcinella, the character's original name, as protagonist. But Punchinello and his later descendent, Mr Punch, an anarchic, cunning, disreputable puppet of girth, is in his nature somewhat Falstaff-like. Might the to and fro between Italian puppets and English theatre have fed some characteristics of Falstaff into the nature of Mr Punch as his English personality developed?

Puppets referred to in Shakespeare

There are many freestanding references to puppets in Shakespeare's works. He knew about unique puppet sounds, for instance, and wrote familiarly of the high-pitched voices produced, as Leone explains, when the puppeteer speaks through a swazzle. When Juliet, desperate not to be forced into a wedding with Paris, begs her father not to marry her off, he accuses her of being ‘a whining mammet’ (Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.186). Shakespeare knew puppets aurally and, this reference suggests, found the sound irritating.

He also thought of puppets visually. He seems to have connected them, for instance, with exotic clothing: Petruchio's claim to Kate that the tailor's fine dress will ‘make a puppet’ of her, suggests an association, in Shakespeare's mind, between puppets and extravagant apparel (The Taming of the Shrew, 4.3.104); Cleopatra's fear that Iris, and she herself, will be displayed like ‘an Egyptian puppet’ suggests that Shakespeare had seen puppets in Egyptian dress (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.208) – indeed, one way Shakespeare learned about clothing habits of other nations without travelling to them may have been through the puppet medium.

The associations Shakespeare drew between puppets and good clothes reveal that he had seen some of the classy marionette shows that came to London from the continent; as, too, does a moment in Measure for Measure when Lucio says that Antonio lacks ‘strings’ (the word in the Shakespeare's First Folio is ‘stings’ but context suggests this may be a typo) ‘and motions’, motions being a term for puppet shows (1.4.59). The famous Italian marionettisti had been given permission by the Privy Council to put on ‘strainge motions’ (puppet shows) in London in the 1570s, and they or at least their puppets had become fixtures thereafter, so that years later Italian puppet shows were regularly to be found roving the country, like the ‘Italiann motion with divers & sundry storyes in it’ that was shown in Coventry in 1632, or the ‘Italian motion’ that could be ‘sett forth … till Tuseday night next & no longer’ in Norwich in 1635. ⁵ These references, too, consolidate the Italian puppet legacy to be found in English puppet shows, and that gave us Mr Punch, addressed above. But when Epicene in Ben Jonson's play of that name refers to ‘one of the French puppets, with the eyes turn’d with a wire’, marionette craftsmanship is presented as being French rather than Italian. ⁶ It seems that to an early modern Londoner, grand puppets came with all-purpose continental cachet. Given the connection between well-crafted marionettes and the continent, then, Shakespeare is already in intriguing dialogue with the essays here: they show how his plays have been rethought for the puppet medium in France (Beauchamp, Kor, Carole Guidicelli), Germany (Boutan, Guidicelli), Portugal (João Paulo Serea Cardoso) and Italy (Guidicelli, Di Fazio, Vincenzo Pernice, Leone), but behind that is a Shakespeare whose own understanding of the finest puppets may have come from the continent in the first place.

No wonder, then, that the word ‘strange’, which meant, as the OED puts it, ‘foreign, alien’ as well as odd, had continental puppet resonance, as in the ‘strainge motions’ of the marionettisti above, or ‘a Motion, a Puppet-play’ in which the ‘little Idoles leape, and moove, and run strangely up and downe’; or the ‘Jugglers’ who ‘worke strange motions in their Puppets’; or the ‘Puppet-play’ at which the country people ‘stand gazing, with Admiration, upon the strange Motion of the Puppets’. ⁷ Janice Valls-Russell beautifully illustrates how The Tempest's references to staging ‘shapes’ with their ‘excellent dumb discourse’ (3.3.37–9), and, later, ‘shapes’ that enter to ‘soft music’ (3.3.82) are taken up by Footsbarn's puppetry as signs that Shakespeare was potentially thinking about puppets. The addition of ‘strange’ in The Tempest's stage direction for them as ‘strange shapes’ (3.3.19) makes that reading yet more likely, for it reveals that Shakespeare was using a ‘puppet’ word as he conceived of magic in his dramas. Perhaps he even staged his play with puppets in a person-puppet combination of the kind explored here by Guidicelli writing of Teatro del Carretto or Pernice's account of Colla's Midsummer Night's Dream.

Shakespeare also, no surprise, thought about puppets broadly whenever addressing things of small size, which is one reason why Helena is outraged to be likened to a puppet (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3.2.289). But that very smallness also led Shakespeare to think of mythical creatures, good or bad, as kinds of puppets, a fact that might also reflect and, as above, potentially also lead to the use of puppets in his plays. At any rate, Caliban is described as a ‘puppy-headed monster’, usually glossed as a reference to a dog, but in context just as likely to mean that his head looks like, perhaps moves like, that of a puppet (‘puppet’ could be written ‘poppet’, ‘poppie’, and other variations) (The Tempest 2.2.152–3); Prospero likewise describes elves as ‘demi-puppets’ (The Tempest 5.1.36), which might be metaphorical – they are puppet-like because managed by Prospero – or literal.

One other aspect of puppets that deeply influenced Shakespeare was the way their shows were run. There was a person who introduced the production to the audience, ‘the interpreter’, who seems to have enthralled him. The interpreter, who might be the contriver of the puppet show, or simply its organiser, was something between the prologue of a play and the clown: he stood between the puppet production and the audience, and conversed with both, using his stick of authority to point to whichever creature, puppet or person, he was addressing. Sometimes he ‘interpreted’ whole puppet shows, pointing at the puppets and giving their speeches. Shakespeare refers to this when Speed worries that Valentine will try to put words into Silvia's mouth: ‘now will he interpret to her’ (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2.1.92). At other times the interpreter took on the role of a chorus, explaining the story, and giving his take on what was happening to the audience. When Hamlet suggests to Ophelia that he could ‘interpret between you and your love, if I could see the puppets dallying’, he offers, ominously, to explain the relationship between her and himself, ‘your love’ (Hamlet, 3.2.244–5). The interpreter role, one of whose descendants is perhaps Donnie in the Blind Summit productions recalled by Decaix, is deeply visible in Shakespeare's characterisation of Prospero, already shown to be a play with deep puppet connections. Valls-Russell explains how Footsbarn's Indian Tempest stages Prospero as a master puppeteer who breaks his staff to step down from the role, and this interpretation brilliantly picks up on what is there in Shakespeare's The Tempest: Prospero, with his rod of command, and role of storyteller – he narrates how he came to the island, how Ariel was rescued, what Caliban did – is the play's interpreter, in charge of, and magically organising the other characters, which renders them all his puppets, until he gives over his power to us, the audience, at the end of the play.

Puppet audience referred to in Shakespeare

Shakespeare was close enough to puppetry to have thoughts not only about the shows themselves but their spectators. That will be partly because, as the foregoing has suggested, Shakespeare must on occasion himself have been one such audience member. Yet he associated puppets, as still often happens, particularly with childhood. When Hotspur dismisses love itself as childish fun, he tells Kate, his wife, ‘This is no world / To play with mammets and tilt with lips’ (1 Henry IV, 2.3.91–2), dismissing what he sees as a puppet-like plaything from the adult seriousness of war (which the play shows to be equally childish, of course). Puppets, then as now, appealed to children, but were not therefore childish. Rather, children have an intensity that allows them to respond directly and immediately to puppets; as Colla remarks, children are not constrained in their thinking and so are drawn to the imaginative side of puppetry; as a result, he suggests, children help an adult audience see puppets better. Shakespeare, who regularly asked the audience to free its imagination to ‘piece out our imperfections’ (Henry V, Prologue 23), was appealing to the open, childish qualities in his watchers, perhaps inspired by, or perhaps hoping for, a puppet-trained audience.

Puppets staged in Shakespeare

Shakespeare actually included a range of puppets, broadly conceived, in his dramas, not all of which are immediately obvious in his text. Formal clowns, who dressed in motley (multicoloured cloth) and wore coxcombs (hats shaped like the comb of a cockerel), as did Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and the Fool in King Lear, also typically carried a bauble or marotte: a stick topped with a carved, wooden head. That head was, then, a form of puppet, and the clown who wielded it melded the role of interpreter with puppeteer. Shakespeare's main clown after about 1600, Robert Armin, who probably played Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool certainly carried such a bauble, for he dedicated a book to him: ‘To the right worthy Sir Timothy Trunchion, Alias Bastinado, ever my part-taking friende’, saluting his ‘Crab-tree countenance’, and begging ‘Sweete Sir Timothie, kind sir Timothie, tough sir Timothie, use me with kindnesse’ in an strange echo (or is it a source?) for Falstaff's ‘sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff’ (1 Henry IV, 2.4.470–1). ⁸ One can assume that formal clown characters in Shakespeare plays regularly flourished puppety baubles, giving them an implement that might be a phallic innuendo at one point, and a friend at another. That explains, too, why clown monologues are often dialogic, as when the Fool in King Lear asks ‘dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet one?’ His addressee, the ‘boy’, is unlikely to be the ancient King Lear, and is almost certainly, then, his bauble (King Lear, 1.4.135–6). There were, that is to say, more ‘puppets’ onstage in Shakespeare productions than we are now aware of, and the clown's bauble, directly straddled between physical object and character, embodied the ‘contemporary practice’ understanding of puppets of which Guidicelli speaks: a puppet that is both object and character.

There were other puppets, more visible, but less recognisable for what they are (as they are putatively objects), to be found in Shakespeare productions too. As Beauchamp explains, Pupella-Noguès uses a range of practical and household objects for its shows, like a spoon which, if used as a puppet, becomes a puppet. Objects similarly enpuppeted by Shakespeare's drama include the worn shoes used to represent the parents of Launce the clown in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (‘This shoe, with the hole in it, is my mother, and this my father … Father, your blessing’, 2.3.17–24), and the heads in Macbeth that rise up from the cauldron to offer prophecies (‘Beware Macduff … Dismiss me. Enough’, Macbeth, 4.1.71–2). Beyond that are the moments when babies are brought onstage, who might be made from bundles of cloth, dolls or even actually puppets. Whatever they are, if they are staged crying or moving – they do not have speech-prefixes, so their actions are obscure – they are forms of puppet, which gives a potential new insight into Aaron's unnamed baby in Titus Andronicus, Edward IV's baby Edward in 3 Henry VI, Henry VIII's baby Elizabeth in Henry VIII, Pericles baby Marina in Pericles, Laertes's baby Perdita in The Winter's Tale. Indeed, if implements that ‘speak’ and move are considered puppets, then musical instruments themselves, voluble when correctly handled, and silent, when not, like the recorders in Hamlet or the smashed lute in The Taming of the Shrew, are something between musical instruments and puppets, which perhaps simply goes to show that, correctly considered, every prop potentially has the puppet about it.

Conclusion

This brief afterword has suggested that there is something puppety about Shakespeare's works, not least because, in reference and fact, he filled them with puppets. As the tremendous articles in this volume have shown, puppets over the countries and the years, have long been in dialogue with Shakespeare too, making what is familiar ‘strange’ in all meanings of the term. Puppets, and Shakespeare's plays, have a mutually constitutive relationship, that is to say. This special issue has, wonderfully, explained how and why.