ABSTRACT
Nevertheless, the relations between the puppet stage and the ‘literary’ drama across the centuries also demonstrate what Peter Burke calls the ‘two-way traffic’ between high and low modes of culture (Burke, 1978:58). In the early modern period, for example, puppets were still performing the biblical stories that had been performed by actors in the Middle Ages; in the eighteenth century, similarly, puppets were still performing some of the popular favorites of the Renaissance stage such as Doctor Faustus. Correspondingly, in a wide variety of bourgeois discourse from an extended historical period, the puppet theater has been described, defined, disparaged, celebrated, and, in short, appropriated by theorists and thinkers, playwrights and performers, who inscribe this ephemeral form of ‘popular’ performance in texts that also declare their own contrary status as ‘legitimate’ or ‘literary’. What Susan Stewart observes of ‘the miniature’ applies perhaps even more intensely to the puppet, which has often seemed to possess an inescapable theatricality not only on the diminutive stages where it literally performs, but also as an imagined object in a discursive space ‘on which we project, by means of association or textuality’, the anxieties and constructions that shape our social lives (Stewart, 1984:54).
