ABSTRACT
“Of Humans and Puppets” is concerned with Lorca’s turn to popular puppet theater immediately after the scandal of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. It studies Lorca’s little-known participation in the Billy-Club Puppets project (1922–23), a Granada-based group that produced what a modernist manifesto in defense of puppet theater. This chapter makes a case for the centrality of Cervantes in Lorca’s experimentation with puppets and comic theater. Examples are discussed from Lorca’s puppet plays The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, as well as two pieces that Lorca defined as ‘farces’ for actors, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín with Belisa in the Garden.
