Past and present.

Abstract

n f r a nC i S for d CoPP oL a’S The Godfather: Part II, a Mafia boss walking through New York City’s Little Italy stops in front of an outdoor puppet theater performance to watch two knights wielding swords, then quickly turns away, remarking that the action is too violent for him. While his response is meant to be ironic for the viewer—the notorious mafioso, in fact, is about to be assassinated—I’ll admit that until a couple of decades ago I might have had the same reaction if I had chanced upon one of the fierce swordfights that are the hallmark of the genre. But in the late 1990s, a friend presented me with Catanese souvenir puppets named Orlando, Rinaldo, and Angelica, and told me that Sicilian puppeteers were staging the same epic narratives that I was teaching at Columbia University. Although I hadn’t previously given any thought to this performance tradition, those three two-foot-tall puppets dangling in my living room proceeded to stare at me daily until I decided to go see for myself how Sicilian puppet theater brought to life the medieval and Renaissance poems that had driven my research since my graduate student days. Twenty years and several trips to Sicily later, you could say I’m a bona fide opera dei pupi enthusiast. In addition to bringing puppet theater into my scholarly studies and teaching, I created a website (eboi ardo) to make the chivalric matter staged in puppet plays (as well as in other performance and artistic traditions) more widely available to students and the general public.1 Although Sicilian puppetry is often advertised as “folklore,” puppeteers are actively engaged in nothing less than dramatizing in a meaningful way masterpieces of medieval and Renaissance Italian (and European) literature. This essay first outlines the principal chivalric narratives that found their way into traditional Sicilian puppet theater, and then turns to how today’s puppeteers are refashioning the stories for contemporary audiences.