In this short paper, I challenge the consensus that Beckett's work is consummately post-modern by comparing the comedy of his longer plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, All that Fall, and Happy Days) with that of traditional street puppet theatre (Punch and Judy and Guignol and Gnaffron), and by pointing up the decidedly pre-modern comic fatalism which permeates both.
I begin with Kleist's essay "On the Marionette Theatre", stressing Beckett's fundamental agreement with Kleist's position-a position rooted in neo-Platonism-that what we admire in bird or beast or puppet is unselfconscious "grace"; that the self-awareness which defines us as "human" is also what makes us "fallen".
Next, the respective attributes of marionette (string puppet) and glove puppet are considered. Lucky in Waiting for Godot and Clov in Endgame are equated with string puppets and their respective opposite numbers, Pozzo and Hamm, with glove puppets. This leads into the practical consideration of fit-up (glove puppet) staging for the four plays mentioned above with reference to my own experience in this regard.
There follows an examination of the formal structure, and particularly the shared obsessive symmetry of the Punch and Judy or Guignol and Gnaffron play and Beckett's plays. This includes some bizarrely humorous extracts from a couple nineteenth-century Punch and Judy plays. Finally, the paper concludes with a quick consideration of the archetypal qualities which Beckett's play seem to share with traditional street puppet theatre that can allow both to cross from one culture or period to another whilst retaining their dramatic potency.