Yet this mention of M. Lemercier de Neuville's _Pupazzi_, with their
varied repertory of Aristophanic commentaries on current events, and
this memory of the spectacular efforts exhibited in the gardens of the
Tuileries, suggest a possible explanation for the fact that Punch and
Judy have failed to find wide-spread favor here in America and that they
seem to be losing their pristine popularity in England. There is a
pitiable monotony of program in all English-speaking puppet-shows. They
confine their repertory to the single play which sets forth the deeds
and misdeeds of Mr. Punch. Now, in the Continent of Europe there is no
such monotony. Not only in the gardens of the Tuileries but in the
Champs-Elysees a young spectator can sit thru performance after
performance without fear of having to witness the same piece. Punch
appears in only one drama, whereas his French rival, Guignol, in his
time plays many parts, with a host of other characters to be his
associates, some in one piece and some in another. And the several plays
are adorned with a variety of scenery. Of course, there cannot be a very
wide range of subject; and always is the stick a prominent feature in
the miniature drama. There are a certain number of traditional Guignol
pieces, handed down from generation to generation. Some of these have
been printed for the use of devoted students of the drama, and some are
to be had in little pamphlets for the benefit of the happy French
children who may have had a puppet theater with its dozen or more
figures presented to them as a New Year's gift. There is in the Dramatic
Museum of Columbia University the manuscript of half a dozen of these
little plays, written out (in all the license of his own simplified
spelling) by the incomparable performer who was in charge of the leading
Guignol in the Champs-Elysees in 1867.
It is rather curious that the English puppet-show should have confined
itself for now nearly a hundred years to the unique Punch and Judy,
when the puppet-shows of other countries have a changing repertory. It
was a puppet performance of a German perversion of Marlowe's 'Doctor
Faustus' which first introduced Goethe to the Faust legend. George Sand,
unlike the great German poet in most ways, was yet like him in her
delight in the puppet-show. In her country place at Nohant, she had a
tiny theater of her own for which she dressed all the puppets, while her
son Maurice carved the heads, painted the scenery, devised the plays,
and improvised the dialog. Maurice Sand it was, sometimes alone, but
occasionally with the aid of a friend, who manipulated the little
figures and bestowed upon them a momentary vitality. His mother
persuaded him to write out a dozen of the more successful of his little
plays for puppets and to publish them; and this volume, the 'Theatre des
Marionnettes a Nohant,' appeared in 1876. George Sand herself wrote a
delightful account of the humble beginnings of this famous puppet-show,
and described how there came in time to be all sorts of ingenious
improvements for achieving spectacular effects.
She declared that the puppet-show is not what it is vainly thought,
because it demands an art of a special kind, not only in the
construction of the little figures themselves, but more especially in
the story which these little figures are to interpret. She held that the
particular field of the puppet playwright-performer was to be found in
the dramatization of protracted fantastic romances, abounding in comic
characters and in comic episodes and gratifying the fundamental human
liking for long-drawn tales of adventure and for fantastic
fairy-stories. She found in her son's acted narratives a rest from
reality, a release from the oppression of every-day life, an excursion
into a realm of fancy and of legend--even if the legend was itself a
fanciful invention of the improvising performer. And she declared that
she liked the puppet playhouse in her own home, because it was a
domestic and fireside pleasure, which could be enjoyed without the
exertion imposed by a visit to a real theater. Obviously she found as
much delight in being a spectator--after having been a costumer--as her
son did in being the author and operator of the spectacle.