ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

different artists, the particular essences of each individual portion (puppet, movement,
and text) can contribute to a convoluted essence for the puppet as a total character. This
is most visibly manifested in a self-referential essence of puppetry. This investigation
detailed the comment by the voice-actor for “Old Snowball,” who described the “grey
wool” on his head, referencing the artificial nature of the object. Brown’s Crusoe and
Topsy bemoaned their treatment at the hands of their creators. The complicated
interaction of disparate puppetry elements is articulated by the notion of essence, which
exists as both the nature of constituent parts and the nature of the whole coalesced in
performance.
Thus, it is the fervent hope of this author that further scholarly work may find
phenomenology useful for investigating the history of puppet theatre. Puppet theatre
remains one of the more underrepresented of theatrical subjects. This may be due to the
general marginalization of puppetry in artistic circles. It may also be due to the paucity
of meaningful scholarly work on the subject. There is nothing scholars can do to respond
to the first cause; there is something scholars can do to respond to the second.
Scholars interested in American puppetry will face the equally daunting challenge
of a general lack of representative materials. Indeed, this investigation could only
uncover fragments of a few dozen productions from nearly three quarters of a century of
theatre history. This is perhaps no worse a dilemma than what faces scholars studying
many theatre history subjects. 285 The records of the Puppeteers of America suggest that
the few dozen productions unearthed constitute only a small percentage of the puppet
285 th
The most obvious example is 5 century Athenian drama, of which only a few dozen scripts
exist from over a thousand recorded productions.
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