ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Chapter II: The Royal Marionettes
The Roots of Blackface Puppetry
While it was the American stage that produced the troublesome vestige known as
blackface, puppeteers on the other side of the Atlantic were the first to render it in wood
and paint. Thanks to an unusually visible series of marionette productions, one can trace
the introduction of blackface puppetry to the United States from its loose origins in
Punch and Judy, to the standards set by Lambert D’Arc and William John Bullock’s
Royal Marionettes, and finally to a complicated dissemination in late nineteenth-century
American theatre.
For Paul McPharlin, the eidos of blackface puppetry begins with the Jim Crow
figure of English “Punch” shows. He identifies its origin, somewhat erroneously, in T.
D. Rice’s 1836 visit to London. 22 George Speight argues that the Jim Crow puppet is
really an invention of the English stage renamed to draw on Jim Crow’s popularity. In
either case, the black character of Punch and Judy is at least an important footnote to the
development of blackface puppetry. The theatre’s first “Negro puppet” is a black servant
who tries to silence Punch’s incessant ringing of a bell, at the instruction of his unmet
master. Like nearly all his fellow supporting characters, the servant is made a fool by the
protagonist. Sometime in the 1850s he came to be called Jim Crow, and his appearances
would occasionally feature the figure dancing and singing to Rice’s popular song. 23
It would be easy to make too much of its American heritage, which is influential
22
See: Paul McPharlin, The Puppet Theatre in America: A History, 1524-1948 (Boston: Plays,
Inc., 1949).
23 nd
George Speight, The History of English Puppet Theatre, 2 edition (Carbondale: Southern
University Press, 1990), 218-20.
21