The Drama for Fools is a large-scale dramatic cycle containing multiple puppet plays. This cycle kept Craig exceedingly busy between 1916 and 1918. It was supposed to hold 365 short plays and be performed like a traveling show: each night, from 31 April to 31 March, a new play would be shown in a new location. Craig, who wrote his plays under the pen name Tom Fool, stopped writing before the cycle was finished and gave up on performing the play himself.

Nonetheless, he stored his drafts in three cardboard boxes, as a collection of typewritten notebooks containing many illustrations and whose covers display words written in colourful calligraphy. He cared immensely for these notebooks, as he improved, corrected, and supplemented them until the 1950s. This collection is today held at the Institut International de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières.

The Painter and the Three Magics marks the starting point of the adventures of Blind-Boy, Cockatrice and Columbus the Parrot, the main characters of The Drama for Fools. It takes place right after they get out of Hell, an episode which showed how Cockatrice met his “mother” Blind-boy and introduced the magic objects that will later reappear in The Roman Adventure, and which are directly taken from the folktale Tischchen deck dich, Goldesel und Knüppel aus dem Sack (The Wishing-Table, the Gold-Ass and the Cudgel in the Sack), mostly known to the Brothers Grimm’s rewriting.

Cockatrice is made aware that he must not look at himself in a mirror, otherwise he will die. As he wants to admire his own beauty, he runs away and visits a painter to get a portrait of himself painted. To flatter him, the painter portrays him like an English gentleman. Blind-Boy finds Cockatrice and takes him away with him without paying the painter. Blind-boy tells Cockatrice that Columbus the Parrot and himself met a very old man named Old Man Adam, who owns a donkey, a table, and a stick which have magical powers. All three of them go to Old Man Adam’s house, and Old Man Adam gives them the objects as presents as they will lose their magical powers should they not change owners.