If a performance by puppets deprived 'Salome' of its vulgar grossness by removing it outside the arena of humanity, so to speak, and by relegating it to an unreal world beyond the strict diocese of the conscience, so a performance by puppets of a passion-play or of any other drama in which the Deity has perforce to appear as a character, is thereby relieved of any tincture of irreverence. We no longer see a divine being interpreted by a human being. We cannot help feeling that all the persons in the play, whether they dwell in heaven or on earth, are equally remote from our common humanity. And therefore we need not be surprised when we discover that the marionette has long been allowed to appear in religious drama. Indeed, it appears probable that the very name marionette is directly derived from the name of the Virgin.
Very early in the history of the Christian Church were the puppets permitted to perform passion-plays and little dramas derived from the stories contained both in the New and the Old Testaments. In England under Elizabeth and James religious puppet-shows of this kind went wandering about the kingdom, taking into the smallest villages an entertainment which would afford to the rural inhabitants the same kind of pleasant instruction which the dwellers in the larger towns had in the more elaborate and long-drawn mysteries performed by the trade-guilds on the Corpus Christi day. That masterly rogue Autolycus in the 'Winter's Tale' tells us that in his time he had been on the road with "a motion of the Prodigal Son"—and a motion was the Elizabethan term for a marionette-exhibition. In like manner one of the characters in Ben Jonson's 'Every Man out of His Humor' speaks of "a new motion of the city of Nineveh, with Jonas and the whale." Of course, the puppet performers, like the grown-up actors, did not long confine themselves to sacred themes; they ventured also into contemporary history. A puppet showman who appears in Ben Jonson's 'Bartholomew Fair' tells us that a certain motion setting forth the mysterious Gunpowder Plot, was "a get-penny."
Story described one puppet-play which he saw in a little village on the main road from Rome to Naples, and which had for its central figure Judas Iscariot. But here again his attitude is unsympathetic, perhaps because the performance was clumsy. "The kiss of Judas, when, after sliding along the stage, he suddenly turned with a sidelong jerk and rapped the other wooden puppet's head with his own, as well as the subsequent scene in which he goes out and hangs himself, beggar description." Yet the expatriated American spectator honestly recorded that the Italian spectators "looked and listened with great gravity, seemed to be highly edified, and certainly showed no signs of seeing anything ludicrous in the performance." We may venture the suggestion that even the sophisticated sculptor-poet himself would have seen nothing ludicrous in this performance if the operator of Judas had been as skilful as the operator of Salome in Holden's marionettes.
A Neapolitan Punchinella
From "By Italian Seas," by Ernest C. Peixotto
A few years ago in Paris one of the younger poets wrote a passion-play which was performed during Lent by a company of dolls, designed and dressed in fit and appropriate costumes by an artist friend familiar with the manners and customs of the Holy Land. While the wires were managed by expert hands, the words of the dialog were spoken by the poet himself, and by two or three other poets who came to his aid. This must have been a seemly spectacle, and it won careful consideration from more than one of the most eminent dramatic critics of France. Here we may find a useful suggestion for those who wish to see certain plays by modern dramatic poets, in which the Deity is a necessary character—Rostand's 'Samaritaine,' for one, and Hauptmann's 'Hannele,' for another. Many of the devout have a natural repugnance to any performance on the stage (with its materialistic environment and its often sordid conditions) which calls for the impersonation of a divine being by an actor of ordinary flesh and blood. Yet if these same plays were reverently performed by marionettes the aroma of irreverence would be removed. It might even be possible to reproduce in the puppet-show not a little of the solemn religious effect which is felt by all visitors to the passion-play at Oberammergau.
(1912.)