The Drama for Fools is a long theatrical cycle containing multiple interludes, including Mr Fish and Mrs Bones. This cycle kept Craig very busy between 1916 and 1918. It was supposed to hold 365 short plays and be performed like a traveling show: each night, from April 1st to March 31st, a new play was to be performed in a new location. Craig, who signed his plays under the nickname Tom Fool, stopped writing before the cycle was finished and gave up on performing the play himself. Nonetheless, he managed to keep his drafts in three cardboard boxes, as a collection of typewritten notebooks containing a myriad of illustrations and whose covers were calligraphed in different colors. He cared immensely for these notebooks: he improved, corrected, and added material to them until the 1950s. Nowadays, this collection belongs to the International Puppet Institute (Institut International de la Marionnette), based in Charleville-Mézières.

The play is subtitled “A motion for marionettes in seven scenes”, however only the seventh and last scene seems to have been written by Craig. No trace of the first six can be found in the copies he self-published in 1918 (in The Marionnette review, as offprints), nor in the manuscript he annotated by hand, which is now kept in Charleville-Mézières. Nothing can be found either in the two other typewritten copies stored in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and which were intended for editorial projects in 1920 and 1921 that were never published.

Nonetheless, this is the only part of the Drama for Fools that was staged by Craig and performed for his family and friends in Rapallo in the late 1910s and early 1920s. This play was indeed written for Craig’s and Elena Meo’s children, Nell (aka Nelly, 1904-1975) and Edward (aka Teddy, 1905-1998), who both appear in the play.

Mr. Fish pays a visit to Mrs. Bones and starts a conversation with her. Mrs. Bones uses different excuses to get angry and threaten to kill Mr. Fish. She then asks him to get divorced from his wife, while offering to get a divorce from her husband for them to marry. Mr. Fish, frightened, begs Teddy, his puppeteer, to save him from this situation. The latter pulls at the puppet’s strings to take him back to the fly loft. Then a hand comes down (the puppeteer’s) and threatens Mrs. Bones, while her strings are cut one by one. Cockatrice, Mrs. Bones’ “old friend,” wants to seduce her and take her with him, but Mrs. Bones can no longer move. Cockatrice thus sends for a girl in the audience to take the puppet, which is now merely a doll. The play ends with the appearance of the face of the Governor (the puppeteer) and with a grand finale for Mrs. Bones, who ascends to heaven, to the surprise amazement of a myriad of glove puppets watching her.