![]() In London, during the first half of the 19th century the theatre was dominated by melodrama, romance and pantomime, all mounted in a powerfully visual manner. Nevertheless Punch could still be found in the form of a glove puppet in the booths of the travelling puppeteers, in satirical and salacious sketches played to a working class audience. The string puppet shows in 19th century England followed a new path, without Punch and with a repertory of popular melodramas and pantomimes, almost always following productions already performed by actors and other players on the stages of the contemporary theatre. The stiff rod fixed to the head, preserved in many European folk puppet traditions, was largely abandoned.Īt the same time, the shadow shows occasionally to be seen since the 17th century, reappeared under the French title of “ombres chinoises” (Chinese shadows), imported by French and Italian artists, the shows consisting of a number of short sketches, among which The Broken Bridge was the most popular and enduring. In the mid-19th century the English marionette players began to use only stringed figures controlled from above, because of the demands of the trick puppets. Their shows had Harlequin (see Arlecchino) as the central character, rather than Punch, and featured clever trick and transformation puppets. ![]() The end of the century produced an invasion of Italian marionette performers who presented puppets distinguished by the name fantoccini. In the second half of the century there were no less than twenty-nine different puppet theatres in London. The 18th century was truly the golden age of puppetry in England (the many venues where they were to be seen have been listed by George Speaight in his History of the English Puppet Theatre). These were directed by such artists as Martin Powell (in Covent Garden), Charlotte Charke (daughter of the talented actor-manager Colley Cibber), Henry Fielding (well-known as the author of Tom Jones, who played under the nom-de-plume of Madame de la Nash), Samuel Foote (mime and dramatist), Charles Dibdin (composer and performer of solo entertainments), and lastly a group of Irish dramatists and artists who played under the name of the Patagonian Theatre. In the 18th century in London, a more sophisticated form of puppet theatre saw this same Punch introduced into ballad-operas, burlesques and satires for a more demanding public in little theatres both permanent and temporary. For the next hundred years this same character, under the name of Punch with a wife called Joan (which much later evolved to Judy), was to dominate the booths (the English travelling puppet stages) as the protagonist of stories from the Bible, and in legendary and historical folk tales, played in the fairgrounds all over the country. It seems probable that the puppet was a marionette operated by rod and strings. In 1662, Samuel Pepys records in his Diary the arrival of Pulcinella (who he calls Pollicinella) by an Italian puppet player. This little piece, still entertaining to watch today, incorporates what must be regarded as basic features of popular glove puppetry: great exchanges of bastinado (beatings with a stick) and a totally uncoordinated plot. Since the 16th century there have been multiple references to puppets in various texts, and in 1614 a complete play for puppets was integrated into Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, in which the legend of Hero and Leander was transposed to 17th-century London. ![]() Puppetry in the United Kingdomīritish puppetry is directly derived from the larger picture of the European puppet stage and is also part and parcel of the British popular drama, of pantomimes and drolls, clowns and jesters. The United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy. Scots, a dialect of English, and Scottish Gaelic are also spoken in Scotland and Irish and Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland. The majority language is English Wales (Cymru in Welsh) is officially bilingual with many Welsh speakers. The term Great Britain refers only to the island comprising Scotland, Wales and England. All together these form a nation in the North Atlantic off the north-west coast of continental Europe. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland comprises England, Scotland and Wales, with six counties of the north-east territory of the island of Ireland (known as Northern Ireland), plus several small islands around the coasts of these four main regions.
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