Seminar organised by Université Paris-Est Créteil.“Puppet Zoology: Performing Artificial Animals in Early Modern England”
Most theories of performance are built for humans, but we have never had a purely human theater. This talk traces the overlap between two of the theater’s most striking nonhuman performers: puppets and animals. Puppets often performed fantastical creatures like dragons in pageants and supernatural ones like fiddling cats on stage. Wearable animal puppets were sometimes made from animal skins that encased the human performer. The result is a hybrid creature that foregrounds human and animal, puppeteer and puppet simultaneously. Ranging across early modern drama from an ass-headed man in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the devil disguised as a talking dog in The Witch of Edmonton, we see the human body strain to accommodate a doubly nonhuman puppet. In that strain, we see the material life of performance as a vibrant part of early modern culture.

Nicole Sheriko is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University, where she specializes in Renaissance literature, theater history and material culture. She writes about theater of all kinds from cycle, civic, court, and commercial drama to processional performance and puppetry. She is finishing a book about early modern English puppetry and co-editing a volume on early European Puppetry. Her other ongoing research is on clowning, dragons, and the afterlives of Shakespeare. She has been a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge. Her research has also been supported by the Huntington Library, Mellon Foundation, Renaissance Society of America, and Folger Shakespeare Library.

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