Punch & Judy

Fellow thespian Lucy Tornado has proposed a Punch and Judy puppet show for The Show Must Go On lineup, an idea I applaud! While riffling through some drawings I made in 1984, I found an image inspired by that beaky, cruel swazzl'd-tongued rogue, at his moment of triumph when the hangman has been roundly beaten, singing,

They're out! they're out, I've done the trick,
Jack Ketch is dead - I'm free!
I do not care, now, if Old Nick
Himself should come for me.

Of course Old Nick makes his appearance and has the devil beaten out of him, too. I have seen Signor Bologna's performance in Covent Garden: I am partial to the old Italian marionette polchinello, but a London hand puppet show always drew a merry crowd. Charles Dickens wrote, "one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstances that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about without any pain or suffering".
Does that not remind you of your charmed existence within this Second Life?

I also found the following, done while I was inspired by Mr. Blake's ghost of a flea walking the boards of a Drury Lane theatre, and by Jean-François Millet's Sower.



As for Mr. Punch's lineage we have this note:

Pulcinella is a Neapolitan mask, he is dressed in white, often singing about love, hunger, money. His name was believed to come from a certain Puccio Aniello, but the actual etymology is ‘Pullicino’ or ‘Pullus Gallinaceus’, in Neapolitan dialect Pollicinella; he pretends to belong to the famous family Cetrulo (cucumber), son of Giancocozza Cetrulo (Watermelon cucumber) and Mrs. Papera (duck) Trentova, all matters of jokes in his songs.