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KARAGOZ
the songs, which are rendered by voice and guitar. Modern electricity illumines the long, narrow screen with such brilliancy as to tire the eyes, rather as the early cinema is said to have done.
Karagoz's whole personality often reminds us of Punch. Like the English puppet he has a hump, he is very ready with his cudgel, though less savage, and he is decidedly amorous even if he is not often successful. Mrs. Karagoz nags, loses no chance of putting her husband to shame, and is frequently unfaithful, and Karagoz never subdues her as Punch does Mrs. Punch. The kinship of the two puppets probably comes from their common ancestry, for both have descended from the antique Circurricus and the Neapolitan Pulcinelle. Karagoz also has something in common with the Harlequin of the Commedia dell'Arte. One of the coarsest of the Arabic texts, in which the hero is made to believe he is a pregnant woman, exactly corresponds to one of the stock pieces of the Commedia dell'Arte where Harlequin finds himself in the same ridiculous and touching situation. The play in which Karagoz sets up as a scribe turns up in Germany as part of the repertoire of the Kasperltheater, and the episode where he tries to become a schoolmaster provided the material for one of the most popular French shadow shows during the nineteenth century. Karagoz himself, with his black beard and cudgel, appears incongruously among the silhouettes for a toy shadow show on a Victorian sheet published by Clarke; and he even travelled as far afield as America, for Winifred Mills saw his jolly outline in 1938 on a little screen in a New York coffee-house.
Karagoz dominated the shadow play in Egypt, in North Africa, and in Greece, changing his name to Karagyooz, Karakusch, and Karagkiozis, and it was therefore almost inevitable that he should influence the shadow play in Europe. A description given by a Frenchman in a popular magazine of 1872 of a show he attended in Algiers reveals definite affinities between the Karagoz spectacle and the shadow theatre which played such a prominent role in Parisian life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Algerian performance, like all the Arabic Karagoz pieces, dispensed with the traditional Turkish prologue. Caragheuse, as the French narrator calls him, appeared on the screen at once in conversation with a Jew who spoke in dialect. The Jew was succeeded by a Christian and a widow, and all three were mimicked and made the butt of Karagoz's jokes; he next encountered a magician and was
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