Czech puppet theatre dramaturgy as a specific phenomenon

Czech Puppet Theatre Dramaturgy as a Specific Phenomenon theatre as an educational institution, was taking root, new texts were being written and permanent theatres established.Reforms of dramatic theatres were gaining strength in the 1840s, such as those carried out by Caroline Neuber and Johann Christoph Gottshed, who tried to banish Hanswurst 1 from the stage, or attempts at cultivating decorous and erudite stage speech (yet it took a long time before they became successful, see BROCK-ETT 1999: 371-3).The Enlightenment also brings a completely new view of the theatre as an educational and nation-uniting institution, as formulated for example by Friedrich Schiller in his 1784 essay 'What a Stage of High Standing Can Actually Enact (redaction ' A Consideration of the Theatre as a Moral Institution')' (Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken (red.Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet); this essay was introduced into Czech in a reworked version by Prokop Šedivý under the title Krátké pojednání o užitku, který ustavičně stojící a dobře spořádané divadlo způsobiti může [literally, ' A Short Essay on the Expediency that a Permanently Standing and Well-Organised Theatre Can Effect'] in 1793; for more, see KAČER 1969: 51).The social status of actors in permanent theatre buildings was gradually improving, but this did not include puppeteers.If we simplify the situation a bit, we can say that dramatic theatre was developing significantly from the late eighteenth century onwards, whereas puppet theatre was stagnant.While before this time period, puppets served primarily as a means to finish off performances with a trick and an entertainment of para-theatrical character (e.g.theatrum mundi, laterna magica, puppet peep-shows, panoramas, and so on), and as it seems, they were used when theatre troupes found themselves in financial crises, such uses of marionettes, relate primarily to their highly anthropomorphic look; but now the time has come to separate live actors' and puppet theatres.It is clear that the repertoire of these two performance forms was overlapping till this time or, in other words, that marionette theatre was an imitation of live actors' theatre.But marionette theatre did not only conserve titles popular throughout Europe (such as Don Juan, staged as Don Šajn in the Czech puppetry tradition, the pan-European story of Faust(us) and others), it also conserved archaic declamation and the proscenium arch space of the Baroque period, which were both out-dated in actors' theatre by this time.Puppeteers of this period also adopted the dying-out sung recitation mannerism of the Baroque stage, with characteristically longer vowels and explicit gestures; and it was not an exception that this cliché histrionic kind of delivery was passed from one generation to the next till the twentieth century.In Czech puppetry texts, this mannerism 1 Hanswurst (or Hans-sausage) was a popular but vulgar comic figure of German-speaking improvised and non-literary, popular comedy.His dramaturgy was elastic and lent opportunities for virtuoso performance in skilled interpreters of the role -like many zanni, he lacked psychological substance and was rather a series of incongruous contradictions, played on for comic effect: 'a half doltish half cunning partly stupid partly knowing enterprising and cowardly self indulgent and merry fellow who in accordance with circumstances accentuated one or other of these characteristics.' Pischel, Richard.The Home of the Puppet Play.