Karagiozis -- a form of comic folk drama employing stock puppet figures -- was immensely popular in Greece until recent years, when newer forms of entertainment have virtually eclipsed it. Derived from ancient Byzantine and Greek sources, it takes its name from the principal puppet character, the clever, humpbacked fool-hero Karagiozis, who appears in many guises, surrounded by a cast of folk caricatures from all walks of life.

Kostas and Linda Myrsiades present here a tripartite view of Karagiozis: a translation of a typical text taken directly from a live performance; interviews...

Henryk Jurkowski's seminal 1988 text, Aspects of Puppet Theatre, was groundbreaking in its analysis of puppetry as a performing art. This new edition of a classic brings the original text back to life, including four additional essays and a new introduction, edited and translated by leading puppetry scholar Penny Francis.

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects--objects that are also actors and images of life.

The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the...

The plays presented here were first performed between 1769 and 1832, a time when the Japanese puppet theatre known as Bunraku was beginning to lose its pre-eminence to Kabuki. During this period, however, several important puppet plays were created that went on to become standards in both the Bunraku and Kabuki repertoires; three of the plays in this volume achieved this level of importance. This span of some sixty-odd years was also a formative one in the development of how plays were presented, an important feature in the modern staging of works from the traditional plebeian theatre....