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Updated: May 24, 2025
Lord Byron had brought with him from England a variety of magic lanterns, puppet-shows, and such like toys, and was making preparations to exhibit them in public, for the entertainment of the people, when an order arrived from Bengham to prevent the representation, because it did not become God-fearing Christians to take pleasure in such vain amusements.
When there were any new curiosities in Fleet street, wild men with rings in their noses, wondrous fishes, puppet-shows, or red-capped baboons whirling on a pole, Carew would have Nick see them as well as Cicely; and often took them both to Bartholomew's Fair, where there was a giant eating raw beef and a man dancing upon a rope high over the heads of the people.
I am not about to draw any philosophical inferences, I am a mere looker-on in Munich; but I have never anywhere else seen puppet-shows afford so much delight, nor have I ever seen anybody get more satisfaction out of a sausage and a mug of beer, with the tum-tum of a band near, by, than a Bavarian peasant. The Fest was held on the Theresien Wiese, a vast meadow on the outskirts of the city.
We left York at twelve o'clock, and were delayed an hour or two at Leeds, waiting for a train. I strolled up into the town, and saw a fair, with puppet-shows, booths of penny actors, merry-go-rounds, clowns, boxers, and other such things as I saw, above a year ago, at Greenwich fair, and likewise at Tranmere, during the Whitsuntide holidays.
The cardinal was a modern representative of the ancient patrician. Living himself in princely luxury, he endowed hospitals and surgeries for the public. He distributed alms, patronized men of science and art, and entertained the public with comedies, operas, oratorios, puppet-shows, and academic disputes. Under the auspices of this patron, Handel composed three operas and two oratorios.
One ordinance directed that all the Maypoles in England should forthwith be hewn down. Another proscribed all theatrical diversions. The playhouses were to be dismantled, the spectators fined, the actors whipped at the cart's tail. Rope-dancing, puppet-shows, bowls, horse-racing, were regarded with no friendly eye.
Of still greater effect was Faustus's history on the stage. Through the whole of the seventeenth, as well as the first half of the eighteenth century, it remained one of the favorite subjects of puppet-shows, popular melodramas, exhibitions of ombres chinoises, and pantomimes.
All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music-houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such-like doings, which had bewitched the poor common people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenances even of the common people.
* An antiquated word in use for puppet-shows. "Ha! ha! ha!" cried Tarleton, "Mr. Powell is not the first man who has wrested things holy to serve a carnal purpose, and made use of church bells in order to ring money to the wide pouch of the church's enemies.
The comedy with masks is held in contempt by all who pretend to any degree of refinement, as if they were too wise for it, and is abandoned to the vulgar, in the Sunday representations at the theatres and in the puppet-shows. Under the French rule, Harlequin's merry occupation had been proscribed in the Great Theatres, from a care, it was alleged, for the dignity of man.
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