PUPPET SHOWS

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 61, 15 March 1924, Page 16

PUPPET SHOWS

WELL KNOWN IN ANCIENT

GREECE,

Puppets were well known in Greece in the time of Euripides; Plato comparod man to a doll and his passions to the cords which caused its movements and actions; Aristotle described "puppets made of wood, moved by strings"; and Pindar also alluded to the Tittle stringed figures. The fact that the wise men of ancient times exhorted their readers not to be like puppets is nothing against the little wooden actors, writes Madge Anderson in "The Heroes of the Puppet Stage." The philosophers were ad vising^ their fellow-puppets not to follow the jerking of their strings when others like themselves pulled tlie/n. The puppets are only obedient to the will of a superior being. ''The folly of men is an inexhaustible fund of riches, and I am always sure of •filling my purse by exhibiting a few pieces of wood," said a Sicilian showman at the banquet of Callias which Aenophon described There are Greek marionettes still in existence, made of baked earth with jointed arms and legs. In ancient Greece puppet showmen wandered about from village to town, and fortune tellers-, menageries, jugglers, and tricksters of all sorts.

How the puppets came into Greece is a question the historians differ about Perhaps the doll actors came from the Orient, or they may have come Lo Greece from Egypt. 'When Herodotus visited that country more than four hundred years before Christ, he saw women in the procession at the feast of Osiris carrying images of the jjod. which were moved by strings. '." .'. These strin-Tetl figures were probably only toys: but it i.s not unlikely that the first puppets were toys, especially as the word punpet came from the nane | )f a doll. There must have been puppets before there were puppet plays just as there were people before there were professional actors. The children of primitive man had their doll play, anc i i\ Vxlil was probably the first vmppet drama.