No Puppets Dallying: Green’s 1626 Production of Hamlet

Abstract

This paper examines the continental records in order to determine whether the English players’s 1626 performance of Hamlet in Dresden, Germany, was likely to have been presented as a puppet play. Along the way, it reconstructs the seventeenth-century continental stage history of Hamlet . The paper concludes that, while some of the plays in the repertory of the englischen Komödianten enjoyed an after-life as puppet plays, there is no known evidence that the Englishmen on the Continent themselves presented puppet plays. And, despite scholarly claims to the contrary, there are no sure records of seventeenth-century performances of Hamlet on the Continent other than Green’s.