Abstract
This essay recognizes puppet theater as an important site for the circulation of early modern learning, particularly among the illiterate or those with limited reading skills. Through allusion and simulated puppet shows, Shakespeare and his contemporaries created a fragmentary record of this “little theater”, which offers clues to the subject matter of popular puppet plays and indicates that puppet showmen, like their counterparts in live theater, drew from a wide range of topical sources—from medieval romance and Scripture, Italian texts and theater, to English history, contemporary events, and drama. Print culture trickled down to the lesser classes in puppet adaptations which, among ordinary folk, constituted a type of “cultural literacy” and/or a counter‐cultural awareness of the literary past and current trends. Beginning with a brief history of European puppetry the essay turns to England from 1573–1614 and considers the unwritten repertoire of the puppeteers, echoed in period literature such as Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, which responded to a popular demand for knowledge and entertainment.
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