ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses two twenty-first–century shows that use puppetry to explore true stories from medical history: Jane Taylor’s After Cardenio (2011) and Wattle and Daub’s The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak (2017). It discusses visuality both in relation to puppet design in each of the two productions and in relation to anatomical dissection in the mid-seventeenth century and the late eighteenth-century emerging practice of pathological autopsy. After Cardenio uses the puppet’s interior inaccessibility to materialise the inaccessibilities of the life and alleged crime of Anne Greene, a woman hanged for infanticide who revived on the anatomist’s table. In doing so, it explores the mid–seventeenth-century English legal imperative to demonstrate invisible realities via the production of material objects. Tarrare explores visuality through the medical gaze and the puppet’s ability to materialise this gaze through the fragmentation of the body including the incompleteness of Tarrare’s body, the visual accessibility of his interior and the pulling apart of his body into specimens.
