Early Modern Puppet ‘Literature’: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton Puppet Plays

Professor Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

The ANU Centre for Early Modern Studies is delighted to host Professor Tiffany Stern for this online seminar.

Abstract

Puppet drama has barely been explored in the history of literature. That is, first, because there is little to analyse: the physical puppets themselves have generally perished, while puppet-shows, which were seldom written down, are also largely lost. But second, it is because puppets have such a hazy relationship to the stories they (partially) celebrate. It is in the nature of puppet-shows to simplify narratives, often with the effect of mocking the tale they tell; they tend not to acknowledge authorship; and they cannot be textual, as they lack texts.

This talk will be about three early modern puppet-shows, Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, and The Creation of the World, that travelled between England and Northern and Central Europe. Mining texts, performance records, pictures, later accounts (puppets do not fit neatly into period timelines), and surviving puppets for information, it will give snapshots of three productions that conveyed ‘literature’ across borders, sometimes in advance of formal translation, and sometimes to the side of it.

About the Speaker

Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her work combines literary criticism, theatre and book history and editing from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She is fascinated by the theatrical contexts that brought about plays by Shakespeare and others; several of her books and articles are on the theatrical documents put together by authors and theatrical personnel in the process of writing and learning a play: actors’ parts (the documents consisting of cues and speeches from which actors learned their roles), prologues, epilogues, songs, letters, arguments, backstage plots, plot scenarios and other separate stage documents. As General Editor of the New Mermaids play series, and Arden Shakespeare 4, She is also interested in the way plays were manifested in manuscript and print, and in how to rethink editing for the digital age. Her scholarship is widely used by theatre companies interested in historically inflected performances.

Tiffany's current projects are a book on early modern theatre and popular entertainment, Playing Fair, exploring the cultural exchanges between playhouses and fairgrounds, a book on Shakespeare Beyond Performance, looking at the theatrical documents produced in the light of a play’s performance – ballads, chapbooks, commonplace books, ‘noted’ texts – and an edition of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

Image credit: Marionette of Hamlet, Museum of Puppets Zanella/Pasqualini. Museum with No Frontiers, https://baroqueart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;BAR;it;Mus13;43;it.