The Punch and Judy Show
1987; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chl.0.0534
ISSN1543-3374
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoThe Punch and Judy Show Gillian Avery (bio) The Punch and Judy Show, by Robert Leach. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. A screech across the sands; A drum's dull thump;Oh, wicked Mister Punch, Hook-nose and hump!What corpse is this lies here? An infant dear And Judy listeningIn grief and fear, Knowing the HangmanWith his rope draws near. Walter de la Mare's poem suggests how the imaginative might react to the sinister violence that underlies one of the oldest of the traditional English forms of light entertainment. But he would be the exception. "My idea of utter summer bliss is a deck-chair on a sun-baked beach with a choc ice, watching Punch and Judy," a correspondent wrote to a Sunday paper in 1981. In the same spirit this reader and thousands like him would no doubt tranquilly read the accounts of lurid and violent crime in that same paper while waiting for the Sunday roast to be put on the table. For Punch and Judy even when shown as a drawing-room entertainment for children is a celebration of subversiveness, an amoral story demonstrating that crime pays right to the end. Punch throws away his baby, batters his wife to death, kills everybody who tries to intervene, fools the hangman into hanging himself, fights the devil and defeats even him. It was often lewd, it is always violent. If you have grown up with the tradition it seems as much part of childhood as Little Red Riding Hood. Samuel Goodrich, writing his Recollections in 1856, recorded his reactions when—in the course of what seems an excessively sheltered childhood where his only reading was the New England Primer and the contents of his father's theological library—he encountered Little Red Riding Hood and her kind: "one of my companions lent me a volume containing the stories of Little [End Page 193] Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Blue Beard, Jack the Giant-killer, and some other of the tales of horror, commonly put into the hands of youth, as if for the express purpose of reconciling them to vice and crime. Some children, no doubt, have a ready appetite for these monstrosities, but to others they are revolting, until by repetition and familiarity, the taste is sufficiently degraded to relish them. At all events they were shocking to me." The violent shape that popular entertainment so often takes is made plain in Robert Leach's Punch and Judy Show. Apart from anything else, public executions were for centuries a favorite spectacle—the sort of event to which even respectable middle-class citizens might take a child. The fairs where the Punch and Judy show evolved were abhorred by authority as the breeding ground of vice and crime; "Bartholomew Fair, the City Carnival—the delight of apprentices, the abomination of their masters—the solace of maid servants, the dread of their mistresses—the encouragement of thieves, the terror of the Constables," said the Gentleman's Magazine in 1817 (Leach 33). Punch not only cocked a snook at the majesty of the law; he also had no reverence for the institution of marriage or the teaching of the Church. It is recorded that when one showman allowed the devil to be victorious over Punch he was pelted with mud. Glove puppets had long been popular with English crowds, and in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), the Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy denounces them and objects in particular to the squeaking noise now always associated with Punch himself (produced by a "swazzle" in the puppeteer's mouth), which he likens to the creaking of the chariot wheels of Satan. The figure of Punch—thought to derive ultimately from the Italian commedia dell'arte character of Pulcinella but by now thoroughly anglicized—began to make his appearance in the seventeenth century as a red-nosed, hump-backed, potbellied roisterer, and by the 1720s he had been given matrimonial troubles in the shape of a wife, Joan, with "a thundering tongue." By the second half of the century the battle between Punch and the devil had become the climax of the show, which...
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