Shakespeare’s Puppets: The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in The Animated Tales from Shakespeare

Writing about Shakespeare’s romances, Northrop Frye defined them “popular plays”, meaning that they come down “to the audience response at its most fundamental level” (Frye 1986: 154). More interestingly yet, Frye stated that “there’s a close affinity between the romances and the most primitive (and therefore most enduring) forms of drama, like the puppet show” (ibid.). Frye’s inspiring comparison between Shakespeare romances and the puppet theatre is particularly intriguing when considering the two adaptations here under examination: The Tempest (1992) and The Winter’s Tale (1994) both directed by Stanislav Sokolov, who is today reputed the most talented Russian stop-motion film director. The two Romances, that belong with the series of the Animated Tales from Shakespeare, are, indeed, performed by sophisticated puppets that look like the elegant courtly marionettes of the 18th Century. They are not moved, however, by means of traditional strings, but thanks to an extremely refined stop-motion animation technique that recalls both the magic power of Prospero and the art of Paulina. In this chapter, therefore, I focus on the remediation of the puppet theatre, arguing that in these adaptations the art of magic appears keen to the art of the puppeteer, that is the ability to control the movement of bodies in space and time. In addition to this I highlight how the cyclic nature of the romances comes to be enhanced by the extremely compressed time of performance (30 minutes). Finally, I contend that the animated romances were inspired by previous adaptations (for instance, The Winter’s Tale in the BBC Shakespeare series) and on their turn were a source of inspiration for following ones (namely for Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, 2010)