Punch and Judy’ and Cultural Appropriation Scott Cutler Shershow
Bratich z Amassing the Multitude 1 Popular Culture in History 2 Interpretational Audiences Bratich z Amassing the Multitude 3 1 ‘Punch and Judy’ and Cultural Appropriation Scott Cutler Shershow It is a drama in two acts, is Punch. Ah, it’s a beautiful history; there’s a deal of morals with it, and there’s a large volume wrote about it. (Mayhew, 1967 [1861–62] 3: 46) n The New Yorker magazine of 2 August 1993, a cartoon depicts two grotesque, hook-nosed figures, male and female, fighting with cudgels Iwhile sitting at a table at an elegant restaurant, while a waiter stands by asking, ‘Are you folks ready to order?’ The cartoon prompts me to ask: why should Punch and Judy still be recognizable icons of domestic violence and social trangression at the end of the twentieth century, even to readers who may have never seen an actual ‘Punch and Judy’ puppet show? Versions of this question have, of course, been asked before. In answering them, however, scholars typically claim a primeval or archetypal status for Punch, pointing to his alleged cultural descent from a whole constellation of ancient sources including, for example, ‘the religious plays of medieval England’, ‘the impro- vised farces of the Italian comedians’, and ‘the folk festivals of pagan Greece’ (Speaight, 1970: 230). I will take the opposite position, attempting to locate ‘Punch and Judy’ in the actual processes of social life and cultural transmis- sion in a particular period, and in the dynamic interaction of cultural practices and their discursive reinterpretation. Such an approach may do more justice to the cultural meaning of figures who still apparently embody, as they do in the cartoon, anxieties about status, class, gender, and relative social power.
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