The Artisanal inventiveness

The dynamics of rewriting in the scripts of northern Italian puppeteers (19th-20th century)

Abstract

Reading the scripts of Italian puppeteers between the 19th and early 20th century, one can observe frequent modifications, additions, deletions, substitutions of entire paragraphs… The plays for puppet theatre are sometimes veritable palimpsests, ‘artisanal’ texts that reveal the substrates that formed them. The scripts, in fact, were often handed down from one puppeteer to the next, and each modified it according to his or her own needs, whether material or artistic, testifying to the craftsmanship of the writing process. This ‘artisanal’ mode of rewriting does not stop at the rearrangement of scripts destined exclusively for the puppet-booths, but also intervenes in literary works, opera librettos, other theatrical texts… Henryck Jurkowski argued that the specificity of the puppet theatre’s plays lies in a “dynamic of dramatic and stylistic transformation”. How, then, does this dynamic develop? Usually, in rewrites of texts for puppet theatre, comic characters are interpolated into the action and play minor roles. However, their presence can create extensive variations in the plot. Sometimes, entire scenes are created from scratch around the comic character that do not appear in the original source. At other times, the comic character is placed in the foreground, in the role of companion to the protagonist. Still other times, he becomes the absolute protagonist of the plot and ‘steals the scene’ from the canonical characters. By examining the transformations within the plays for puppet theatre in the repertoires of the art families of northern Italy, the article aims to shed light on the craft inventiveness of the author-puppeteers, in dynamics of rewriting at the crossroads between orality and written crystallization.