The Poet and the Puppets

The Poet and the Puppets takes its name from the header which the Daily Telegraph placed above a letter from Oscar Wilde which it printed on 19 February 1892. Wilde denied the newspaper’s report that in a recent speech at the Playgoers’ Club he had asserted that ‘the stage is only a frame furnished with a set of puppets. It is to the play no more than a picture-frame is to a painting, which frame has no bearing on the intrinsic merit of the art within’. ¹ The comic actor Charles H.E. Brookfield quickly sensed the satiric potential of the phrase used by the Daily Telegraph. He suggested to Charles Hawtrey, then actor-manager of the Comedy Theatre, that they produce a burlesque of Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, which had just opened at the St. James’s Theatre. They enlisted Jimmy Glover to compose the music. The resulting burlesque sketch was duly titled The Poet and the Puppets.