Historians of the Greek drama have often commented on the fact that the
Athenian actors wore towering masks, and that thereby they were deprived
of all facial expression. In our snug modern theaters, with their
well-lighted stages, we follow with our eyes the shifting emotions as
these chase each other across the faces of the actors; and this is one
of our keenest pleasures in the playhouse. In the huge theater of
Dionysius at Athens, with its ten or twenty thousand spectators, seated
tier on tier, along the curving hillside of the Acropolis, the actor was
too far removed from most of the playgoers for any play of feature to be
visible; and critics have commiserated the Attic dramatists on their
deprivation of this element of potent appeal. Yet the question arises
whether the Greek playwrights were really the losers by this immobility
of the actors' faces; and we may be allowed to doubt that they were when
we recall the fact that the faces of Mr. Punch and of Mrs. Judy, of the
policeman and of the hangman, are also fixed once for all. The
expression that Mr. Punch wears when he is fondling the baby is,
perforce, the same which illuminates his face when he is engaged in
joyful combat with the devil, a foeman worthy of his stick. Here the
imagination of the spectator comes to the rescue. The wooden head of Mr.
Punch is unchanging, no doubt; but those who gaze entranced upon his
marvelous doings never miss the play of feature which they would expect
if they were part of the audience in a playhouse for grown-ups. Quite
possibly the Athenian spectators did not mind the immobility of the
masks their actors wore; indeed, that very immobility may have been an
incentive to their imaginations. When the Greeks went to their open-air
theater, as when we gather around the tent-like theater of Mr. Punch,
they knew in advance, as we also know, that the faces of the performers
would be unchanging; therefore they did not expect any variety of
expression; and probably they got along as well without it as we do at a
puppet-show.
There is another likeness between Attic tragedy and Punch and Judy;
there is a limitation in the number of characters we are allowed to see
at the same time. As the hidden performer who operates all the figures
has only two hands, he can bring before us at any one moment only Mr.
Punch and one other of the several characters. The fingers of the right
hand animate Mr. Punch, and the fingers of the left hand animate in turn
Mrs. Judy and the negro and the clown. At Athens (for reasons which need
not here be discussed) the dramatist had the use of only three actors,
even tho these might each of them "double" and appear as two or more of
the successive characters of the play. So it was that there were never
more than three persons taking part in any given episode of an Attic
tragedy as there are never more than two persons taking part in any
given episode of Punch and Judy. In the thumb-and-finger plays devised
in Paris by M. Lemercier de Neuville, he felt so severely the
inconvenience of his limitation to two characters that he devised a kind
of spiral-spring arrangement inside the costumes of his little figures
to hold up their heads; and he prepared invisible supports jutting out
just below the flat ledge which forms the base of the proscenium. Thus
he was enabled to leave the figure in sight, while he withdrew his hand
to animate another character. His _Pupazzi_, as he called them, were
clever caricatures of contemporary celebrities; and he was ingenious
enough sometimes to maneuver half a dozen of them at once with his
single pair of hands, four adjusted into the projecting rests, and two
on his fingers.
In the sumptuous puppet-show in the gardens of the Tuileries the same
result is achieved by the employment of two or three manipulators, so
that four or even six figures may appear at once. This has greatly
enlarged the scope of the performance; and the manager of this theater
has very ambitious aims. He likes to rearrange for his juvenile audience
the most appropriate of the pieces which have won favor in the real
theaters, and to present these with all sorts of spectacular adornments.
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. We joy to behold
one tiny figure belaboring another with his solid club or to follow the
vicissitudes of a bout at single-stick, when both combatants thwack
lustily at each other's wooden heads.