Puppetry – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

How to perform El retablo de Maese Pedro aka El retablo de la libertad de Melisendra in Don Quixote with one puppeteer and a narrator/bottler

Whether Cervantes saw it or not, it is possible as he describes.

Gustave Doré's hallucinogenic 1863 engraving.

The secret life of organ-grinders

Speculation in French revolutionary fiduciary currency, the murder of the great British ballad-singer, & a revised date (1802) for the start of the supposedly post-Napoleonic emigration of Italian puppeteers & organ-grinders

Napoleon, apparently in 1797, warbling lines <a href='https://www.lieder-archiv.de/es_kann_ja_nicht_immer_so_bleiben-notenblatt_300633.html'>apparently</a> written by Kotzebue in 1802:

Organ-grinder tweets for November 2017

More monkey mess from the peripatetic Homerton/Hackney barrel organ.

Rats/mice bearing the cat to his grave in Tarragona, anticipating Russian prints of the scene.

London organ-grinding tweets for October 2017

Lukewarm barrel organ-ish ephemera from Hackney, London and thereabouts.

A bull attacks the first public train service in Russia, causing the ceremonial organ-grinder to teeter dangerously.

The 1660 Foire de Saint-Germain

Featuring castanets, monkeys, marionettes, and human and tortoise castles.

Balthasar Nebot, The Forze D'Ercole; the Castellani acrobats in a Venetian piazza.

On the French penchant for inventing things already in existence elsewhere

François Dominique Séraphin, Bourbon favourite and reputedly the father of ombres chinoises (shadow puppetry), began operating 15 years later than is generally thought, and may have copied his techniques from an itinerant Italian or a London Alsatian. Featuring the memoirs of the valet to the later Louis XVII, early descriptions of the delights of the renovated Palais Royal (including a pygmy show), jolly old Baron Grimm on the lamentable state of French opera, shadow plays, and marionettes, and William Beckford’s favourite designer of theatrical perversions.