![]() ![]() This situation, though, presented a paradox: previous research not having had puppetry as its object, the first histories lacked any scientific basis. Grässe’s work attested to the cultural value of puppetry and its attraction as a subject for scholarly research. Like Magnin, the inclusion of puppetry in this work was a first step in the historical research of the subject in Europe. In 1856, a study by Johann Georg Theodor Grässe was published, Zur Geschichte des Puppenspiels und der Automaten (On the History of Puppetry and Automata) which was part of a more comprehensive work, Die Wissenschaften im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ihr Standpunkt und die Resultate ihrer Forschungen (The Sciences in the Nineteenth Century, Their Present State and the Results of Their Research). He established certain parallels between the history of puppet theatre and the history of the drama, and distinguished three phases: hieratic (religious), aristocratic, and popular, organizing the evidence into chapters, each focused on one or several countries. After having collected a great quantity of facts, Magnin gave them a coherent interpretation. In 1852, the first history of puppetry was written and published by Charles Magnin in Paris, Histoire des Marionnettes en Europe depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à nos Jours (The History of Puppets in Europe from Antiquity to Our Time, with a revised edition in 1862 and a reissue in 1982), offering a new scholarly approach to this field. ![]() In the 19th century, folklorists and ethnographers started to collect documents which gave descriptions of the shows and published their dialogues, giving regular attention to the characters of Don Juan, Faust (in Germany), Punch and Judy (in Great Britain), and to the Christian Nativity theme expressed in Poland’s szopka and Ukraine’s vertep. ![]() At the beginning of the 18th century, with the birth of journalism, literary criticism of puppet shows appeared, notably in the British periodical The Spectator. The Middle Ages and Renaissance periods reveal certain accounts, as in the Hortus Deliciarium by the 12th century prioress Herrad von Landsberg, and those by dramatic and satirical authors mentioned by Francesco Saverio Quadrio ( Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia On the History and Reason of All Poetry, Volume V, 1744). As early as the 2nd century BCE, the Natyasastra, an Indian treatise on theatre, gave a particular place to puppetry and it is notable that Indian scholars have often manifested their interest in this art. Another source of information on the practice of puppetry at different periods of history could be found in the works of moralists and poets who used puppet and shadow theatre themes as metaphor of man’s submission to fate, or to the gods who manipulated mortals. At first, most of the information came from amateurs, memoir writers or travellers, occasional spectators of puppet shows. There are several forms of research into puppetry: for example, the point of view of theatre historians and scholars is different from that of anthropologists and ethnographers. ![]()
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