ABSTRACT
The theater of early modernity expresses its uneasy, stressed relation to value-production in and by means of the time-conditioned lexicons of exile. The term 'theatergram' was proposed by Louise Clubb, who discusses it most fully in Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time. The literary historian Francisco Ynduráin, who re-discovered the play and first edited it in the mid-1950's and then again in 1965 and 1986, exclaims in some exasperation that he can find no trace of such seditious marks in the manuscript. The destruction of Maese Pedro's puppets flows from the Knight's excessive investment in the characters from his incapacity or unwillingness to keep them at the distance appropriate to fictional entities. After that catastrophe, some puppets are paid for on the agreement that they are indeed nothing but puppets, painted wood and fabric, the Knight firmly in the world of material transaction, the translation from the fictional world to the commercial one achieved and established.
