That’s the way to do it!
A parrot-voiced hunchback with a hook nose, an evil smile and a ghastly taste for domestic violence could hardly be considered a role model for children, yet our love for Punch and Judy shows endures. Matthew Dennison explores the evolution of Pulcinella
Despite the shocking protagonist, Punch and Judy shows endure, reveals Matthew Dennison
It is an outrageous joke which no one would think of regarding as a model of conduct
ONE of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life’ was Charles Dickens’s verdict on Punch and Judy shows, in a letter written in the winter of 1849. Two centuries earlier, Charles II’S view had evidently been similar. In October 1662, the King rewarded one Pietro Gimonde, a puppeteer from northern Italy known as Signor Bologna, with a gold medal and chain valued at the considerable sum of £25 for a special performance of an ‘Italian puppet play’ at Whitehall.
For generations of British children, Punch and Judy shows performed in striped canvas booths by travelling puppeteers at the seaside, on city streets and at country fairs have given just such respite from everyday reality.
The shows’ ingredients are improbable: a parrot-voiced hunchback with a hook nose, an evil smile and, consistent through 350 years, a ghastly taste for domestic violence and the wholesale disparagement of his long-suffering wife, Judy, as well as a frankly unnatural attitude towards his offspring.
Even in Dickensian London, protesters objected roundly to Mr Punch and his horrible antics. Detractors have continued to protest ever since. Dickens’s response was two-fold. To the correspondent who begged his support in banning Punch and Judy shows, he replied: ‘I regard it as quite harmless in its influence and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct.’
The author also offered readers a cautionary tale. In The Old Curiosity Shop, he demonstrated, through the villainous character of Daniel Quilp, the horrors that ensue from anyone adopting Mr Punch as their pattern of behaviour. ‘You’re not a choice spirit,’ Dick Swiveller tells Quilp, with considerable understatement. A misshapen dwarf of ‘remarkably hard features and forbidding aspect’, with ‘a ghastly smile which appear[ed]… to have no connection with any mirthful… feeling,’ Quilp spreads misery and fear in his wake, most of all to his ‘pretty little, mild-spoken, blueeyed’ wife. He resembles the Punch figure of a late-18th-century doggerel poem called Punch’s Pranks: ‘A vile deceitful murderous fellow: Who had a wife, a child also… But he was cruel as a Turk.’ Thuggish, unkind, subversive and, ultimately, irrepressible, Punch is the embodiment of misrule. Children laugh at the bravado of his shockingly bad behaviour; their parents understand that his foolish appearance, dressed in the red-andyellow motley once associated with jesters and clowns, and his ludicrous squawking voice—the result of a small metal reed, a swazzle, in the puppeteer’s mouth—denote his status as the butt of dramatic humour as much as its hero. At his best, Punch represents an unstoppable life force. The
vigorous physical violence that is central to his story makes the same preposterous appeal to audiences as clowns squirting water from plastic flowers or tripping over ludicrously over-sized shoes. Above all, the effect is comic. It is the memory of laughter that has endeared Punch and his longsuffering family to Britons since their first appearance in Restoration London.
Signor Bologna’s performance for the Court of Charles II closely resembled the outdoor show witnessed by Samuel Pepys that May in the vicinity of Covent Garden, as the commemorative stone tablet erected there in 1962 by the Society for Theatre Research and Model Theatre Guild attests.
Bologna’s offering was an improvisation. Up to a point, every subsequent Punch and Judy show has retained this improvised quality, although the story’s framework has coalesced over time. Even the characters’ dialogue tends to proceed along wellestablished lines, most notably in the case of Mr Punch’s own well-known catchphrase: ‘That’s the way to do it!’
Today’s glove puppets were a 19th-century innovation—bologna’s performance used stringed puppets or marionettes. As the 17th-century description of an ‘Italian puppet play’ indicates, first shows made no reference to our island life: they imported the Italian tradition of improvised street theatre known as commedia dell’arte, translated into the world of the puppet booth.
In 2006, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport devised a list of 12 icons of Englishness, which included Punch and Judy shows. Punch’s own origins, however, are as resolutely unenglish as other national icons, including tea and marmalade.
He began his long career of wickedness as Pulcinella, which was anglicised to Punchinello and afterwards abbreviated to Punch. His name probably derives from the Italian pulcino, for chick, perhaps referring to the beak-like mask that subsequently developed into his distinctive profile of hook nose and sharply curved chin, or to his squeaky voice, which was always a feature of the character. For much of the 18th century, his wife was known as Joan.
At his English debut, Pulcinella played his part in a performance that was a raggletaggle of different narrative influences, including the biblical story of Noah’s flood. Within half a century, according to early numbers of The Tatler, he had acquired the ‘scolding wife’ he has ever after treated with such appalling brutality and increasingly found himself the chief protagonist in
The memory of laughter has endeared Punch to Britons since Restoration London
a story focused exclusively on his own awful exploits—culminating in an encounter with the Devil himself or a close escape from the hangman’s noose.
In a song called Punchinello, published in 1731, overweening vanity is Punchinello’s principal characteristic: I’m witty and pretty, And come to delight ye; You cannot be happy without me.
Beyond chronic egotism and simple nastiness, little time has been wasted in offering audiences credible explanations for Punch’s dependably dysfunctional relationships.
In The Author’s Farce of 1729, by Henry Fielding, Punch complains: Joan, you are the plague of my life, A rope wou’d be welcomer than such
a wife.
For the most part, Punch’s response is to hit out at Joan/judy, rather than lament her shortcomings. Punch’s Pranks of 1791 blamed Judy’s jealousy for Punch’s behaviour: Then Punch he in a passion flew, And took it so in dudgeon, He fairly split her head in two, Oh! Monster!—with a bludgeon.
Like the horrors of Struwwelpeter or any number of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm, the average Punch and Judy show offers strong meat to its childish audience. The explanation lies in the performance’s origins as an entertainment for adults. The most distinguished of the early English Punchmen was Martin Powell, whose performances, by 1711, were hosted in a Covent Garden tavern, the Seven Stars.
Powell devised a story that, in essentials, is recognisable today—whatever Punch’s crimes, he emerges victorious, his audience applauding wholeheartedly his terrible misdemeanours. Modern Punches put their baby through a sausage-making machine or hurl it out of the window, relentlessly attack Judy with something resembling a club and do battle with policemen and crocodiles, all to the accompaniment of bubbling children’s laughter.
For the majority of adult spectators, admiration of the puppeteer’s dexterity overwhelms any instinct to criticise. A 1930s LNER poster for Felixstowe, by W. R. S. Stott, showed children and parents cheerfully crowded round a puppet booth; in 1950, British Railways issued a similar poster for travel to the Welsh seaside resort of Rhyl. Labelling Rhyl ‘the children’s paradise’, it depicted a sandy beach on which delighted children gathered in front of a Punch and Judy show, watched by their indulgent parents.
Despite a venerable heritage and the considerable affection with which Punch and
Judy shows are widely regarded, today’s puppeteers, known as ‘professors’, face significant challenges. Heavy road traffic has effectively banished puppet shows from towns and cities; the chequered fortunes of many British seaside resorts affect all those who once earned a living from oldfashioned, bucket-and-spade holidays. Performances are free of charge, their creators relying on the generosity of their audience, a challenging business model given the limits of children’s pocket money.
Yet the best of the 21st century’s Punch professors maintain with enthusiasm and elan a legacy older than many British theatres. Echoing Mr Punch himself, theirs are dauntless spirits.