The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947): The Paladins of France in America by Jo Ann Cavallo (review)

Jo Ann Cavallo's volume is, as its title suggests, a convergence of diverse inspirations: not only the Sicilian puppet theater spanning two centuries but also the Paladins of France in America.This text could not appear more intricate.However, from the introduction, the author meticulously explains the evolution of the issue at hand, and that complexity immediately becomes a quality of the book.In the introductory chapter, Cavallo briefly recounts the history of the puppet theater from 1860, when Giusto Lodico adapted twenty Renaissance chivalric poems from the anthology Storia dei Paladini di Francia, which became the foundation for the entire Sicilian puppet theater after the unification of Italy.Agrippino Manteo, the protagonist of this story, is credited with reviving these Renaissance legends for Italian immigrants in America.The book is expertly divided into two parts, each further subdivided into chapters.The first part, "The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo and Family," consists of two chapters.The first chapter, "The Puppeteers," traces the history of the Manteo family through three generations of puppeteers.It begins with Agrippino Manteo (1884Manteo ( -1947)), who moved from Sicily to Argentina and then to New York.In the Big Apple, he opened the first puppet theater in the United States in 1923.The Manteo Theater continued to perform in New York throughout the 1930s.However, in 1939, the theater was permanently closed following the untimely death of his 18-year-old son Johnny.Despite the challenging period for puppet theater in general and Agrippino Manteo's death in 1947, the family-particularly his son Mike-continued to preserve and pass on the legacy left by the founder from Catania.The new tradition revived puppet theater in New York theaters but with some deviations from tradition.While under Agrippino's direction the stories were based on rewritings of Renaissance Italian chivalric poems, under the new direction original characters were invented to reach a contemporary audience unfamiliar with the Paladins of France.This new family-run theater direction proved successful, as the Manteos continued to stage performances in many theaters in New York and Washington D.C. until at least 1989, the year of Mike Manteo's death.The second chapter of the first part, "The Scripts," holds greater philological value as it reveals the content of Manteo's notebooks for the first time.It addresses various aspects of the Manteo family's writings, including the division into sets, the relationship of the scripts with the Storia dei paladini, the structure of individual shows, and marginal comments on the scripts.Cavallo definitively clarifies the sources of the Manteo family's puppet shows.Mike himself seemed convinced that the staged stories all derived from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso rather than from nineteenth-century prose, the Storia dei paladini.Additionally,