In the peep box of satire: Johann Friedrich Schink's Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark

Abstract

Published in 1799, the puppet-play Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark [Hamlet, Prince of Denmark] by North German writer Johann Friedrich Schink was fully in tune with its times. Parodying William Shakespeare's play, it encountered a bold reception on German stages at the end of the eighteenth century, satirising the intellectual and literary circles of the day. Yet, Hamlet was also a common motif in the German puppet repertoire. As in his 1776 collection Marionettentheater, Schink uses marionettes in Prinz Hamlet as a distorting mirror of reality and invites us to look into the peep box of satire.

Breaking away from classical theatre

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) drew inspiration from puppet-plays to write the two parts of his monumental tragedy Faust. At the same time, an author by the name of Johann Friedrich Schink (1755–1835) published another reworking of a play that was also linked to the puppet stage: Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark: Marionettenspiel [Prince Hamlet of Denmark: Puppet Play] (1799). Like Faust, Hamlet was introduced, from the seventeenth century onwards, into the repertoire of Central European travelling theatres by English actors. ¹ For instance, the subject of Goethe's Faust, a play that was later on revered in Germany as a national drama, actually came from Christopher Marlowe. At the end of the eighteenth century, Hamlet was the hero of a German play too: Hamlet, Prinz von Dännemark oder Der bestrafte Brudermord [Prince Hamlet of Denmark or Fratricide Punished], published in 1782, but dating back to 1710 at least. This play presented a significantly different version from Shakespeare's: it has even been suggested – though without any satisfactory evidence – that it may have preserved traces of a hypothetical primitive state of the text, the so-called ‘Ur-Hamlet’.

Schink's play, which explicitly refers to Shakespeare's work, is a different matter. Schink himself was a literary critic and first gained notoriety in the theatre world for his criticism of Johann Franz Brockmann's performance in the role of Hamlet in 1778. Schink's own version of Hamlet, therefore, is steeped in references to bookish and erudite culture. At the same time, the play borrows from the more popular tradition of puppet repertoire, a tradition that was well established in the German-speaking countries. During the eighteenth century, the efforts to create a German national theatre, with the works of theorists and playwrights Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) as well as the construction of permanent theatres in many towns, tended to relegate the tradition of travelling theatres, whether with actors or puppets, to the lower status of mass entertainment. In a speech Goethe wrote on Shakespeare when he was only 22, he nevertheless placed Shakespeare's dramatic work in this travelling theatre tradition too:

Wer eigentlich zuerst drauf gekommen ist die Haupt und Staatsaktionen auf's Theater zu bringen weiss ich nicht, es giebt Gelegenheiten für den Liebhaber zu einer kritischen Abhandlung. Ob Shakespearen die Ehre der Erfindung gehört, zweifl'ich: genung, er brachte diese Art auf den Grad, der noch immer der höchste geschienen hat, da so wenig Augen hinauf reichen. ²

[Who first came up with the idea of bringing the main and state actions to the theatre, I don’t know; there are opportunities for a connoisseur to write a critical treatise. Whether the honour of this invention belongs to Shakespeare, I doubt: enough, he brought this kind of theatre to the degree that still seems to be the highest, for there are not many eyes that can rise to such heights.]

The Haupt- und Staatsaktionen [main and state actions] to which young Goethe referred here were plays where the main action was on a serious subject (a religious or a tragic one), but generally coexisted with farcical numbers. They constituted the typical repertoire of the Baroque tradition in Central Europe, with which a theatre reformer like Gottsched explicitly intended to break. It may seem surprising, at first glance, to associate Shakespeare with this tradition specific to the German-speaking world. This may be explained, however, by the fact that the motifs of Elizabethan theatre were brought to Central Europe by travelling theatre troupes. But above all, Goethe regarded both Shakespeare's work and the repertoire of Haupt- und Staatsaktionen as opposed to the aesthetics of French classicism that Gottsched was promoting. In his speech, Goethe expressly attacked the French theatre, namely Corneille.

Numerous attempts in the second half of the eighteenth century also bear witness to this dynamic. A fragment by Lessing on Faust shows many similarities to the puppet-plays collected and published in the nineteenth century. Goethe also tried his hand at this genre with a fragment of a play about Hanswurst, the comic character of the German repertoire and a key figure in puppet theatre (this was precisely the type of character that Gottsched had wanted to banish from the stage). This fragment is probably related to the later writing of the Faust tragedy, even if Goethe, despite the fact that he was present in Marlowe's play as well as in the puppet repertoire, did not include the comic character in it.

In 1778, Schink followed the same writing procedure as Lessing and Goethe, as he published a collection entitled Marionettentheater [Marionette Theatre], that included the plays Hanswurst von Salzburg mit dem hölzernen Gat [Hanswurst of Salzburg with a Wooden Arse] and Der Staupbesen [The Broom]. Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark followed in 1795. The play was subtitled Ein Marionetenspiel [A Play for Marionettes], yet this mock tragedy in five acts is a relatively long play (210 pages) compared with the few written copies of puppet-plays still extant, which date mainly from the start of the nineteenth century at the earliest. Prinz Hamlet is definitely not a mere fragment, as were Lessing's or Goethe's attempts. Schink's marionette plays were among the very first that were written for puppets in the German-speaking world at the end of the eighteenth century: back then, it was still very rare to record puppet repertoire in writing, because the repertoires of travelling actors and puppeteers were generally only passed on orally. ³

Schink was a contemporary of the authors of Sturm und Drang, a movement that exploited the Shakespearean vein rediscovered in Germany by Lessing in particular, in order to renew the theatre repertoire on the German-speaking stage. On stage, conflict situations and the violent even provocative expression of subjective emotions reflected the break with the classical aesthetic advocated by this movement. From this point of view, it is probably no coincidence that the aforementioned Hamlet text, Der bestrafte Brudermord, also appeared at the height of the Sturm und Drang movement. The play was based on ‘exaggerated’ action, ⁴ pathos and affect. As far as Schink is concerned, he does not seem to have been aware of this publication: instead, he drew on the Hamlet translation of Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) in the Vienna stage version of Franz Heufeld (1731–95) in 1773, as shown by several changes in the names of the characters (Gustav instead of Horatio, Oldenholm instead of Polonius). ⁵

Wieland's translation was far to be faithful, yet Heufeld's adaptation altered the text even more. For instance, he omitted the character of Laertes and left thus Hamlet ‘nobody to duel with in the final act’. ⁶ In Heufeld's play, Hamlet killed the king and apparently became the new ruler of Denmark. No less did Schink take liberties with the Shakespearean model. As Hamlet discovers that his argument with his mother has been spied on by the courtier Oldenholm, he doesn’t stab him, but throws him out the window, into the moats of the castle. Ophelia believes that her father has died and loses her sanity: in Schink's version, however, Hamlet has secretly saved him from drowning. Ophelia reunites with her father and comes back to her senses. Eventually, Hamlet has the king drink the poison that was meant for him. He then ascends the throne of Denmark and marries Ophelia. His uncle, who was saved at death's door, is exiled to Greenland.

Heufeld's Hamlet had started a boom in German productions of the play. ⁷ Although this source has never been reported by scholars, it is obvious that Schink drew his inspiration from the reworking of Heufeld's play through actor and theatre director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816) in 1776: indeed, it was in Schröder's version that the actor whose performance Schink had reported in Vienna, Johann Franz Brockmann, made his name as a Hamlet interpreter. Schink's own puppet version is also part of this boom in productions of Hamlet on German stages, but unlike his precursors Heufeld and Schröder, he conceived his play as a parody. The play's happy ending – Oldenholm (Polonius) is not dead, Ophelia recovers from her madness, even the king survives the poison and is merely exiled – deactivates its tragic dimension (while the tragic dimension was maintained in both Heufeld's and Schröder's versions, even though their Hamlet did not die at the end: instead, the plays emphasised the punishment of fratricide).

Moreover, the reference to puppet theatre is there perfectly explicit – as opposed to Der bestrafte Brudermord, which it is doubtful was performed with puppets, nevertheless belonged to the repertoire of travelling comedians. ⁸ In this respect, the Elizabethan repertoire and the travelling theatre repertoire both seem to perform the same function of breaking with the codes of classical theatre. But while the reappropriation of Shakespeare in German literature from Lessing onwards has been well studied, ⁹ Schink's example shows that the influence of popular, ‘trivial’ theatre (in the sense of the German term Trivialliteratur, which refers to this particular type of literature that is generally neglected in favour of ‘great’ literature) on the authors of this generation is more important than is usually assumed. It is possible that one of the major dramas of Sturm und Drang, Friedrich Schiller's The Brigands (1782), borrowed precisely from this repertoire, which is reflected in the many plays about brigands that have survived in puppet theatre.

Breaking away from (pre-)Romanticism

In this respect, Schink's puppet-plays also anticipate the German Romanticists’ interest in folk traditions, as evidenced by the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), one of the first collectors of German folk songs, which he published with his friend Achim von Arnim in the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Boy's Magic Horn] (1805–08), was also interested in puppet theatre to the point of considering writing for one of the major puppeteers of the turn of the century, Johann Georg Geisselbrecht. ¹⁰ Other contemporaries of his, such as Ludwig Tieck and Heinrich von Kleist, with an atypical essay that has become famous, were also part of this new trend at the turn of the 1800s.

As a literary critic, Schink was undoubtedly well aware of what was happening on the literary scene of his time, but he expressly distanced himself from both Sturm und Drang and the nascent Romantic movements. His writings never ceased to confront these aesthetic trends satirically and to criticise their excesses and exaggerations. In Vienna, the then largest metropolis in the German-speaking area, he caricatured the theatre scene in a novel about Vienna as a modern Abdera, a Greek city that was often caricatured in ancient Greek satires. ¹¹ In this novel, Schink depicted the Viennese theatre scene as a small provincial world. The puppet-plays were also intended to be satirical. In 1778, in Hanswurst von Salzburg, Schink mocked the concept of genius that was so typical of the Sturm und Drang period:

Gnädger Herr, Ihr sprecht auch gar zu dumm.

Wist Ihr denn nicht: in's Gelag ‘nein leben

Ordnung, Wohlstand und Geseze aufheben,

Ist des Genie's Privilegium.

Die Genies waren Euch zu jeder Stunde

Von Anbegin die grösten Schweinhunde.

Denn davor sind sie ja Genieen. (1.2.14)

[My lord, you speak too stupidly.

Do you not know: to live recklessly,

To abolish order, prosperity and the law

Is the privilege of geniuses.

Geniuses, as you should know, have always been

The biggest bastards from the very beginning,

Because this is what they are geniuses for.]

For Schink, the artistic genius celebrated by the authors of Sturm und Drang justified all depravities, such as adultery and murder. In Hanswurst von Salzburg, the satire is particularly aimed at a tragedy by Strasburg playwright Heinrich Leopold Wagner (1747–79), Die Kindermörderin [The Child Murderess], yet criticism of the artist's ethos in Sturm und Drang and later in Romanticism is a constant in Schink's work. Der Staupbesen, the second play of the collection Marionettentheater, draws the same conclusion. The play depicts a trial in which Apollo punishes the German muses and German poets for having turned Parnassus into a brothel. The guilty parties are transformed into pigs, donkeys, dung beetles, spittoons, and rubbish bins. A muse explains to Apollo why she is being eating oak acorns (like a wild boar) by referring to the national motifs and to the Germanic folklore that were in vogue in poetry at the end of the eighteenth century (for instance in the dramas of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock), and which Romanticism was to inherit in its turn:

Haben eure Gnaden die neuern Musenalmanache gelesen? Da stehn lange schwerfällige Oden drin, die kein Mensch versteht und nicht verstehen soll, da kränzen sich die Barden mit Eichenlaub, rufen den Wodan an, und singen von Wallhalla […]. Ich bin die Muse von den Herrn, die Bardenmuse. ¹²

[Have Your Graces read the recent issues of the Musenalmanach? There are long, ponderous odes in there, that no one does nor even should understand, and where the bards crown themselves with oak leaves, invoke Wotan and sing of Walhalla […]. I am the muse of those people, the bard muse].

The ‘broom’ that gives the play its title is the one with which, symbolically, Apollo will clean German poetry. In these plays, Schink does not hesitate to mock his senior colleague Goethe himself.

Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark is also a parodic text, taking the action of Shakespeare's play in its broadest outline, but adding constant allusions to the political and literary events of the time. The decision to rewrite precisely Hamlet was certainly not unrelated to the theatrical context of Sturm und Drang, with which the author was perfectly familiar. In fact, the play is full of anachronistic references to authors from the late eighteenth century – Mozart, Kant, Jena philosophers Schelling and Fichte, and Romanticist writer and theoretician Ludwig Tieck, among others. In the play, there are hints that Hamlet himself was a student at the University of Jena, the birthplace of German Romanticism. He also keeps discoursing on German idealism, the philosophical doctrine that had first been taught at Jena.

Schink's Hamlet takes an explicit stand in the intellectual and literary landscape of the late eighteenth century. A key moment in the rewriting of Shakespeare's text is the preparation of the famous theatre-within-the-theatre scene, in which Hamlet obtains the proof of his uncle's guilt. In Schink's play, a puppeteer by the name of König comes to perform at court, instead of the travelling actors in Shakespeare's play (and in both Heufeld's and Schröder's German adaptations). At the start of Act 4, Hamlet tells the puppeteer his ideas about modern drama – a point which shall be further developed later. In the next scene, he wonders if he should not write up and publish his thoughts on this topic. At this point, Schink places a parody of the ‘To be or not to be’ monologue, a key moment in the rewriting of Shakespeare's drama. In his adaptation of the text, the monologue turns into a caricature of the material concerns of a writer considering the publication of his texts:

Mich drucken lassen oder nicht? Das ist die Frage!

Ist's besser, meines Geistes Spielwerk in

Dem Schreibepult begraben? oder die Kopie

Wohlabgeschrieben in die Presse schicken,

Und durch Entkerk’rung enden? Ha! Im Druck

Erscheinen vor den Leuten? – Wagen, weiter nichts ! (4.3.91) ¹³

[To be printed or not to be printed? That is the question!

Is it better to have my brainchild buried

In the writing desk? Or to send the copy,

Well-written, to the press,

And end it by incarceration? Ha! To appear

In print before the people? – Dare, nothing more!]

It is also Hamlet who, in the prologue to the play – a frequent theatrical device in puppet theatre, which can also be found in Goethe's Faust – comments on the way in which the author rewrote Shakespeare's text. Hamlet takes the opportunity to mock German literature once again, beginning with German translations of Shakespeare such as Wieland's, which in fact freely adapted the text for German audiences:

Das Originalwerk, brav zerlappt,

Fragmentenweis’ wird aufgepappt,

Mit eignem Flickwerk ausstaffiret;

Das nennt man dann germanisiret. ¹⁴

[The original work, nicely torn into rags,

Fragment by fragment, was slapped on,

Decorated with a self-made patchwork;

That is then called Germanised.]

On the other hand, Schink also insists on the heterogeneous, somehow messy nature of his rewriting. This is no doubt how he saw puppet-plays, with their often incoherent adaptations of major subjects, sometimes from the classic theatre repertoire (such as Don Juan). Just like the plays of travelling puppeteers, Schink's play is riddled with anachronisms and allusions to the present days.

It is also characterised by contrasts between the tragic subject of the play and the colloquial, irreverent tone used by the characters. Schink makes deliberate use of the trivial register to mock the pathos of pre-romantic and romantic authors. In Hanswurst von Salzburg, the hero is disgracefully thrown out of the house, with only a shirt on, for having had sex with the wife of his host, Stoffel Knips, who had welcomed him into his home at the beginning of the play: in the next scene, he tries to hang himself from a tree on a stormy night. This scene seems typical of Sturm und Drang dramas, except that Hanswurst still has no trousers. Comedy based on the discrepancy between a high genre such as tragedy or mythology and a low register of language has a well-established tradition in the eighteenth century, but Schink goes very far in this direction: in Der Staupbesen, he even has a character defecate onstage.

Anything might happen on the puppet stage. Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark is less vulgar, but still treats the Shakespearean subject with great irreverence. Hamlet's father is the butt of constant jokes about his corpulence. He is called names as ‘das dicke Ding’ [the fat thing] (1.1.8), ‘Herr von Schmalz’ [Lord of Lard] (1.2.10), ‘seelge Tonne’ [the late barrel] (2.1.22), while Hamlet calls his uncle ‘Kujon’ [dumbass] (1.4.17). The reunion scene with the father's ghost takes a scatological turn when the ghost makes Hamlet listen to all the furies of hell raging in his belly, making as much noise as the trumpets of judgement. Similar jokes can be found, for example, in Doctor Faust by the puppeteer Geisselbrecht, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ¹⁵

Breaking away from great literature

Obscenity and scatology may have been considered an integral part of puppet theatre, which also motivated the measures of several theatre reformers such as Gottsched and later the Austrian writer and statesman Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733–1817) against this form of ‘low’ entertainment, as well as prohibition measures through censorship. ¹⁶ This was still the case in the Romantic period, according to the testimony of the Royal Danish chancellery secretary Johann Friedrich Schütze in 1794:

[E. H.] Freese soll es auch an obszönen Bewegungen seiner Marionetten nicht fehlen gelassen haben. [Johann Friedrich] Schütze sah selbst ‘daß eine Prinzessin Floribunde mit den Worten: “Hier, theuerster Prinz, hast du meine Hand, und mit dieser Hand meine Schätze und mein Herz!” – den Fuß biß ans Knie herauf hob, um den Zuschauern durch dies sinnreiche Quid pro Quo zu lachen zu geben’. ¹⁷

[[E. H.] Freese, it is said, did not fail to lend his puppets obscene movements. [Johann Friedrich] Schütze himself saw ‘a princess Floribunde who said: “Behold, my dearest prince, my hand belongs to you, and with that hand my treasures and my heart” – all the while raising her leg in the air up to her knee, in order to make the audience laugh with such a witty quid pro quo.]

The association of puppet theatre with low-class entertainment and trivial literary genres seems to have been a widespread preconception at the time. The narrator of Kleist's essay Über das Marionettentheater [On Marionette Theatre] admits himself to being surprised that a leading dancer at the opera house could attend such shows: ‘I mentioned how surprised I had been to notice him on several occasions attending a marionette theatre that had been set-up in the local market place, which entertained the masses [den Pöbel, the riff-raff] with short dramatic burlesques […]’. ¹⁸

The repertoire of puppet theatre in Central Europe was mainly passed on orally. The writers of this generation, and Schink in particular, were among the first to look at it from a literary point of view. It is hence difficult to tell to what extent this preconception was justified, especially since the most obscene parts would not necessarily have been recorded. Nonetheless, the few texts available from contemporary puppeteers tend to confirm that burlesque and triviality were an integral part of the repertoire. In Geisselbrecht's aforementioned Doctor Faust, the comical character Hannswurst entered the stage and delivered a long monologue about a bout of diarrhoea (1.3).

These features of puppet repertoire at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seem to be characteristic of theatre in the provinces and even more so of ‘minor’ national theatre traditions. The beginnings of Czech-language theatre at the ‘Bouda’ [the shack] in Prague, for instance, took the form of the ‘short dramatic burlesques’ described by Kleist. ¹⁹ Some plays performed in the countryside, which have obscene and scatological aspects, such as Nová komedie o Libuši [The New Comedy of Libuše] by František Vodseďálek (1762–1843), are still preserved. ²⁰ Vodseďálek's repertoire was probably also performed with marionettes. ²¹

It may be assumed that Schink did borrow directly from the repertoire of puppet theatre the elements of triviality and obscenity that can be found in his plays. Other aspects suggest that he was familiar with the practices of other puppeteers, for example, in Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark, when the puppeteer König answers Hamlet's question about his repertoire that he is usually performing Ludwig Tieck's plays Der gestiefelte Kater [Puss in Boots] and Blaubart [Bluebeard], as did Geisselbrecht, who also included modern plays in his repertoire. ²² Tieck's plays were indeed performed by puppeteers, even though they were not written for this purpose.

Reading Schink's plays, however, raises the question of whether the author really intended them to be performed with puppets, or whether they were more a kind of a ‘spectacle dans un fauteuil’ [a play in an armchair], according to the term that French Romanticist Alfred de Musset (1810–57) coined to describe plays which were primarily intended for reading rather than performance on stage. Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark seems to have been performed once on the stage of the Augsburg Puppet Theatre, but the play did not remain on the programme for long. Because of its length and numerous digressions on the philosophy and literature of its time, Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark does not seem entirely suitable for a puppet theatre conceived as popular entertainment, although this is the view that Hamlet defends in his discussion with the puppeteer.

In Hanswurst von Salzburg, the intervention of the prompter at the end of the play, coming out of his hole to lament that such a play could only have been written, is more reminiscent of actors’ theatre than of the practice of itinerant puppeteers at the end of the eighteenth century. In the prologue to Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark, of course, the protagonist explicitly states that the entire play is performed with puppets. At the same time, this statement is open to metaphorical interpretation:

Sind zwar – wir müssen's gestehn - die Helden

Aus Holz nur, vom ersten zum letzten Mann […]

Da giebt's weit schlimmere Marionetten

Aus Fleisch und Bein, gezogen am Draht

Von Räthern und Priestern ! ²³

[Although, we have to admit, the heroes are

Only made of wood, from the first to the last man […]

There are far worse puppets

Made of flesh and bone, pulled on a rod

By councillors and priests]

In Act 4, the fact that the puppeteer performs for Hamlet an allegorical short play with a glove puppet, while the theatre-within-the-theatre scene then takes place with string marionettes, suggests that the playwright was especially concerned with theatrical issues. However, the set-up seems somewhat complex to stage.

In 1814, German Romanticist Clemens Brentano published Die Gründung Prags [The Foundation of Prague], a play for actors that is generally considered far too long to be put on stage and not less unplayable than Schink's Prinz Hamlet. Yet, he indicated that he was clearly aware that the play would still have to be adapted for the stage. ²⁴ Perhaps the same was true of Schink. Like Brentano, the playwrights were certainly aware that the plays were not necessarily performed as they stood on the paper, but that they were usually adapted by the directors, and all the more so on the puppet stage. The gap between the written text and stage practice may also explain why publishers of puppet-plays in the Romantic period almost always completely rewrote the text of available manuscripts (when available). This is the case, for instance, of Karl Simrock's Faust play text for puppets, published in 1846: it is in fact a synthesis of several sources, of different versions of the play. ²⁵

Another collection, published in 1806 under the title Marionetten-Theater oder Sammlung lustiger und kurzweiliger Actionen für große und kleine Puppen [Puppet Theatre, or Collection of Amusing and Entertaining Actions for Big or Small Puppets], may lead us to formulate a different hypothesis. The author of that collection, Siegfried August Mahlmann (1771–1826), explained in his preface that he had started from the observation that the Italians and the French did have a light, entertaining literature, whereas the Germans did not: ‘Unsre Schauspieler wollen immer das Höchste und sie fühlen nicht, daß sie langweilig werden’ [Our actors always aspire to the most sublime things and they don’t feel that they are becoming boring]. ²⁶ Mahlmann wanted to enrich German literature with entertainment, satire and caricature. It was this literary genre that he actually called ‘puppet theatre’:

Ich habe hier einen Versuch zu solchen Stücken gemacht. Ich habe sie Marionettenspiele genannt, weil ich glaube, die gezogenen Puppen von Holz werden sie eher und besser ausführen, als die hölzernen lebendigen auf unsern Haupt- und Staatstheatern. ²⁷

[Here I have made an attempt at such pieces. I have called them marionette plays because I believe that they will be sooner and better performed by wooden puppets on strings than by the living puppets and wooden performers of our main and state theatres.]

In Mahlmann's case, the term ‘puppet theatre’ applies therefore first and foremost to a literary genre, that of entertainment literature and light theatre, and only secondarily to stage practice and manipulation techniques. Mahlmann rejects both formal language and popular dialect, overly witty humour and the ‘low, vulgar jokes of the plebs’ (‘auch nicht mit niedrigen und pöbelhaften Späßen’). ²⁸ Not so Schink, who, as we have seen, does not shy away from triviality. Nonetheless, Schink's plays correspond in many respects to the literary programme proposed here by Mahlmann: his own ‘puppet theatre’ is also based on comedy, satire and borrowings from popular entertainment culture; his ‘puppets’ are caricatures, as the prologue to Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark clearly shows. Schink is even more radical than Mahlmann, because he does not much bother about good taste.

Schink's stage directions are admittedly imprecise, but it is certain that he used puppets to break away, like Mahlmann, from the pompous theatre of his time. For him, puppet theatre was a space in which to propose an alternative dramaturgy. This intention is particularly apparent in Hamlet's discussion with the puppeteer König (4.1). He advises him to exaggerate both the vocal effects – in contrast to the ‘natural’ diction promoted by some actors of the time – and the gestures of the puppets. He thus proposes an aesthetic programme that breaks radically with classical theories of beauty. Hamlet defends here a spectacle-driven theatre, relying on the effect on the audience. He sums up his various pieces of advice to the puppeteer with the following sentence: ‘Das heißt, auf Deutsch gesagt, studiert das Publikum’ [That is, let's say it in German: study your audience] (4.1.87).

In this scene, Schink also contradicted all the ideals of the playwrights of his generation by attributing to Hamlet the following words: ‘Eu’r erstes Kunstgesetz sei: die Natur verbannen!’ [Let your first rule in art be: banish nature!] (4.1.87). For Schink, puppet theatre is a way of undermining the pretensions of great literature. Hamlet tells the puppeteer: ‘Der Kenner habe Lust, euch auszuprügeln, dann / staunt, als ein Wunder, der große Haufen an’ [May the connoisseur wish to beat you down, the mob shall then gaze at you in amazement, as if at a wonder] (4.1.87). Hamlet's precepts can certainly be understood ironically. With this apology for puppet theatre, he is once again mocking the bad, ‘wooden’ performers of actors’ theatre. Schink, of course, was accustomed to this practice as a literary critic. In Mahlmann's preface, too, the comparison between puppets and actors turns in favour of the former: it was a common way of discrediting the big stages and the official theatres.

Schink's Prinz Hamlet clearly shows that the satirical dimension was at the forefront of his writing for puppets. Surprisingly, the first version of the play was not published as Hamlet, but as Momus und sein Guckkasten [Momus and His Peep Box]. Momus was the Latin god of laughter and satire. The peep box, or ‘raree show’, is a popular form of entertainment where spectators could see through a small hole an exhibition of pictures or objects: the image of a miniature world contained in a box was well suited to puppets and satire alike. The frontispiece of that edition, no less curious, depicts headless men writing at their desks, piles of newspapers at their feet. While the exact meaning of this vignette remains a mystery, the charge against editorial and journalist circles seems obvious. It was not until the second edition that this frontispiece was replaced by a full-length image of Hamlet, but in Napoleonic array and trampling on books.

Conclusion

Hamlet is certainly a major figure of irony in world literature: as such, he was undoubtedly a well-chosen guardian figure for Schink's satire. Like the Hanswurst character from the earlier collection Marionettentheater, Hamlet also belonged to the repertoire of puppet theatre. Schink's parody does not hesitate to make use of the burlesque potential and trivial register often attributed to this type of theatre: for him, it becomes a medium for satire and caricature. In Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark, however, certain passages also show an interest in the means of expression specific to puppet theatre. When the puppeteer comes to court, the courtier Oldenholm is enthusiastic about the lifelike puppets:

Sie machen schöne Gruppen,

Und sind so fein geschnitzt, so täuschend, in der That,

Daß man sie Menschen glaubt; bewegen sich am Drath

Mit einer Leichtigkeit, Prinz, und gestikulieren

Mit allen Gliedern! … (3.6.70)

[They form beautiful groups,

And are so finely carved, so deceptively so, indeed,

One believes they are people; they move on the rod

With such ease, Prince, and gesticulate

With all their limbs!]

Hamlet, of course, ridicules Oldenholm's comments by comparing in turn courtiers like himself to puppets. The whole passage reflects the characteristics of Schink's rewriting of the Shakespearean subject: he exploits the potential of puppet theatre to satirise the political and intellectual elite of the late eighteenth century through literary parody. Schink's play combines these two aspects well: on the one hand, the taste for popular entertainment theatre conveyed by the puppets, and on the other hand, a ferocious caricature of thought at a turning point in German history of ideas. The contemporary world is seen through the lens of the peep box of literary satire and parody. The result is a play that is extremely radical in its aesthetic choices.

Schink belonged to a generation that rediscovered both Shakespeare and puppet theatre as a way of breaking away from the conventions of classic theatre. In his speech on Shakespeare, Goethe too compared Shakespeare's dramatic works to a ‘nice peep box’ (‘ein schöner Raritätenkasten’). ²⁹ But Schink took the break even further than his contemporaries from the Sturm und Drang movement, using these new literary tools against the Sturm und Drang generation and the younger, nascent Romantic generation. In this way, he opposed the sentimentalism and pathos that characterised the taste of the late eighteenth century by resorting to trivial and obscene humour, and to the bad taste that was attributed to puppet theatre in particular. Puppet theatre undoubtedly appears above all as a genre name: it designates entertainment theatre, light, satirical literature with no great aesthetic demands.

From this point of view, it is not certain that Schink really intended his play to be staged with puppets, even though several manipulation techniques, namely glove puppets and string or rod marionettes, are supposed to be used in the course of the play. In this respect, his plays are reminiscent, a little over a hundred years later, of the collection Marionetten [Marionettes] by the Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler: this cycle of three texts combines a play in which the puppets have only a metaphorical function (the ‘puppeteer’ simply refers to a schemer and manipulator) and two others that present themselves as puppet-plays, but were first created on the stage of the actors’ theatre. The third one features a particularly complex stage set-up, with a live audience, glove puppets, and string puppets.

The whole cycle is also satirical and subversive. From Shakespeare to Schnitzler, via Schink, the comparison clearly shows the role of puppets in the renewal of a theatrical tradition. Prinz Hamlet von Dännemark, like the two plays in the collection Marionettentheater, can be seen as a tribute to this form of theatre, whose subversive potential Schink fully recognised and exploited. Schink's plays may be called ‘modern’ because they deliberately take a stance on current events and the aesthetic movements of their time, but also because they herald the formal innovations of the early twentieth century: though utmost erudite, Schink's works show how popular entertainment, puppet, and raree shows might become a laboratory of modernity.