1 Oh, ladies and gentlemen, patient sitters for portraits, what if the puppets do reverse the usual order of things? Must you not envy them? Think of having your portrait painted first, the portrait of the ideal you by an artist, and then having a complaisant Creator fashioning your features into the nearest possible semblance of what you might wish to be! Think of it. How delightful for you and how simple for the portrait painter!
2 Only the principal male parts were allowed to speak Sanskrit according to the conventions of Hindu dramaturgy. Lesser male and all female parts were spoken in Prakrit.
3 There are many Italian names for the puppets. From pupa, meaning doll, is derived pupazzi. From fantoccia, also signifying doll, we have fantoccini, or little dolls. From figura, statue or figure, comes figurini, statuettes or little figures. Burattini comes from buratto, cloth, being made mostly of cloth. Marionette is a modification of Maria, the Virgin, meaning little Maries from the early statuettes in churches. Another explanation is found in the tenth century Venetian Festival of the Maries. Upon one occasion Barbary pirates carried off twelve Venetian maidens in their bridal procession. The rape of the affianced Virgins was avenged by Venetian youths and thereafter celebrated annually by a procession of richly dressed girls. These later were replaced by elaborately gowned figures carried year by year in the procession—hence Marionetti, little Maries.
4 The research of scholars has discovered in the Ulm versions of the Faustspiel the suggestion for the Prologue in Heaven, although in the puppet play it was held in the Inferno before Satan, not before Die Padre. Faust’s Monologue seems patterned after that in the Tübingen play or that of Frankfurt am Main. The metaphysical debate between Faust and Mephistopheles has its prototype in the Augsburg Faustus. The tavern scene may have been drawn from a similar scene in the Cologne play. Similarly the Phantasmagoria of Blocksberg and other arrangements may be traced back to the old puppet show Faust.
5 Mrs. Browne, in any case, has not been discouraged. In 1918 she instructed her class in the dramatic department of the University of Utah in the principles and methods of marionette play, developing possible puppeteers for the future. The next spring we find her assisting Mr. Sarg in directing and staging his little puppet drama, The Rose and the Ring.
6 At the same time a less successful and quite unfinished dress rehearsal of another drama was performed; but this play on which the manipulators had labored for many months was abandoned because of too great difficulty in manipulating ... and because of other complications which shall be nameless.
7 Mr. Alfred Kreymborg informs me that Lima Beans, one of his amusing little poem-mimes, was played by puppets in Los Angeles, under the direction of Miss Vivian Aiken. Mr. Kreymborg has written that he considers “the only possible approach to a Synthetic stage is derived from the marionette performance.” Of the puppeteers in Los Angeles, one would like to hear more.
8 Mr. B. Pollock, 73 Hoxton St., London, writes: “I still publish Juvenile Plays and also supply foot lights and tin slides which are used with the theatre. I have now been carrying on the business for forty-two years and my father-in-law about thirty-eight years before me.”
9 Mr. G. Bernard Shaw has written of England: “The old professional marionette showmen have been driven off the road by the picture theatre. I am told that on the Continent where marionettes flourish much more than here, they have suffered the same way from the competition of the irresistible pictures. And I doubt whether they will recover from the attack. I am afraid there is no use pretending that they deserve to.”
How consoling to turn to Mr. Gordon Craig, who has prophesied optimistically in The Marionette: “Burattini are magical, whereas Cinema is only mechanical. When a framework of a film machine is one day found by curiosity-hunters in the ruins of a cellar and marvelled over, the Burattini will still be alive and kicking.”