Puppetry, the making and manipulation of puppets for use in some

kind of theatrical show. A puppet is a figure—human, animal, or

abstract in form—that is moved by human, and not mechanical, aid.

Guignol
Guignol (right) with a gendarme, puppet performance in Lyon, France.
Brücke-Osteuropa
These definitions are wide enough to include an enormous variety of
shows and an enormous variety of puppet types, but they do exclude
certain related activities and figures. A doll, for instance, is not a
puppet, and a girl playing with her doll as if it were a living baby is not
giving a puppet show; but, if before an audience of her mother and
father she makes the doll walk along the top of a table and act the part
of a baby, she is then presenting a primitive puppet show. Similarly,
automaton figures moved by clockwork that appear when a clock
strikes are not puppets, and such elaborate displays of automatons as
those that perform at the cathedral clock in Strasbourg, France, or the
town hall clock in Munich, Germany, must be excluded from
consideration.

Puppet shows seem to have existed in almost all civilizations and in

almost all periods. In Europe, written records of them go back to the
5th century BCE (e.g., the Symposium of the Greek historian
Xenophon). Written records in other civilizations are less ancient, but
in China, India, Java, and elsewhere in Asia there are ancient
traditions of puppet theatre, the origins of which cannot now be
determined. Among the American Indians, there are traditions of
puppetlike figures used in ritual magic. In Africa, records of puppets
are meagre, but the mask is an important feature in almost all African
magical ceremonies, and the dividing line between the puppet and the
masked actor, as will be seen, is not always easily drawn. It may
certainly be said that puppet theatre has everywhere antedated written
drama and, indeed, writing of any kind. It represents one of the most
primitive instincts of the human race.

This article discusses the various types of puppets as well as historical

and contemporary styles of puppet theatre around the world. Some
specific national styles of puppetry are treated in the articles arts, East
Asian, and arts, Southeast Asian.

Character of puppet theatre

It may well be asked why such an artificial and often complicated form
of dramatic art should possess a universal appeal. The claim has,
indeed, been made that puppet theatre is the most ancient form of
theatre, the origin of the drama itself. Claims of this nature cannot
be substantiated, nor can they be refuted; it is improbable that all
human dramatic forms were directly inspired by puppets, but it seems
certain that from a very early period in man’s development puppet
theatre and human theatre grew side by side, each perhaps influencing
the other. Both find their origins in sympathetic magic, in fertility
rituals, in the human instinct to act out that which one wishes to take
place in reality. As it has developed, these magical origins of the
puppet theatre have been forgotten, to be replaced by a mere childlike
sense of wonder or by more sophisticated theories of art and drama,
but the appeal of the puppet even for modern audiences lies nearer a
primitive sense of magic than most spectators realize.

Granted the common origin of human and puppet theatre, one may
still wonder about the particular features of puppet theatre that have
given it its special appeal and that have ensured its survival over so
many centuries. It is not, for instance, simpler to perform than human
theatre; it is more complicated, less direct, and more expensive in time
and labour to create. Once a show has been created, however, it can
provide the advantage of economy in personnel and of portability; one
man can carry a whole theatre (of certain types of puppet) on his back,
and a cast of puppet actors will survive almost indefinitely. These are
clear advantages, but it would be a mistake to imagine that they can
explain the whole popularity of puppet theatre. They do not apply to
every kind of puppet—some puppets need two or even three
manipulators for each figure, and many puppets need one manipulator
for each figure. The company employed by a major puppet theatre,
whether it be a traditional puppet theatre from Japan or a modern one
from eastern Europe, will not be fewer than for an equivalent human
theatre. The appeal of the puppet must be sought at a deeper level.

The essence of a puppet is its impersonality. It is a type rather than a

person. It shares this characteristic with masked actors or with actors
whose makeup is so heavy that it constitutes a mask. Thus, the
puppets have an affinity with the stock characters of ancient Greek
and Roman drama, with the masked characters of the
Renaissance commedia dell’arte, with the circus clown, with the
ballerina, with the mummers, and with the witch doctor and the
priest.

In an impersonal theatre, where the projection of an actor’s

personality is lacking, the essential rapport between the player and
his audience must be established by other means. The audience must
work harder. The spectators must no longer be mere spectators; they
must bring their sympathetic imagination to bear and project upon the
impersonal mask of the player the emotions of the drama. Spectators
at a puppet show will often swear that they saw the expression of a
puppet change. They saw nothing of the kind; but they were so
wrapped up in the passion of the piece that their imaginations lent to
the puppets their own fears and laughter and tears. The union between
the actor and the audience is the very heart and soul of the theatre,
and this union is possible in a special way, indeed in a specially
heightened way, when the actor is a puppet.
The impersonality of the puppet carries other characteristics. There is
the sense of unreality. In the traditional English Punch-and-
Judy puppet shows, for instance, no one minds when Punch throws
the Baby out of the window or beats Judy until she is dead; everyone
knows that it is not real and laughs at things that would horrify if they
were enacted by human actors. Psychologists agree that the effect is
cathartic—one’s innate aggressive instincts are released through the
medium of these little inanimate figures.

The puppet also carries a sense of universality. This, too, springs from
its impersonality. A puppet Charlemagne in a Sicilian puppet theatre is
not merely an 8th-century Frankish king but a symbol of royal
nobility; and the leader of his rear guard dying on the pass of
Roncesvalles is not merely a petty knight ambushed in a skirmish but
a type representing heroism and chivalry. Similarly, in the Javanese
puppet theatre, a grotesque giant is a personification of the destructive
principle, while an elegantly elongated local deity is a personification
of the constructive principle. Here the puppet theatre reveals its close
relationship with the whole spirit of folklore and legend.

The puppet achieves its elemental qualities of impersonality, unreality,

and universality through the stylizations imposed upon it by its own
limitations. It is a mistake to imagine that the more lifelike or natural
a puppet can be, the more effective it is. Indeed, the opposite is often
the case. A puppet that merely imitates nature inevitably fails to equal
nature; the puppet only justifies itself when it adds something to
nature—by selection, by elimination, or by caricature. Some of the
most effective puppets are the crudest: at Liège, Belgium, for instance,
there is a tradition of puppets whose arm and leg movements are not
controlled but purely accidental. The Rajasthani puppets of India have
no legs at all. Even less naturalistic are the hunchbacked grotesques of
the European tradition, the birdlike profiles of the Indonesian shadow
figures, and the intricately shaped leather cutouts of Thailand, but it is
precisely among these most highly stylized types of puppets that the
art reaches its highest manifestations.

While these puppets that exist furthest from nature can be admired, it
cannot be denied that there is a charm and a fascination in the
miniaturization of life. Much of the appeal of the puppet theatre has
come from the spectators’ delight in watching a world in miniature.
This can be appreciated best of all in a toy theatre, in which a tiny
stage on a drawing room table can be filled with choruses of peasants,
troops of banditti, or armies locked in combat, while the scenery
behind them depicts far vistas of beetling cliffs or winding rivers.

An English toy theatre, 1850; in Pollock's Toy Museum, London.

Courtesy of Pollock's Toy Museum, London; photograph, A.C. Cooper Ltd.
And to the appreciation, often instinctive, of these characteristics that
mark the puppet theatre, there must be added admiration for the
sheer human skill that has gone into the making and manipulation of
the figures. The manipulator is usually unseen; his art lies in hiding
his art, but the audience is aware of it, and this knowledge adds an
element to the dramatic whole. In some kinds of presentation—for
instance, in a type of cabaret floor show that became popular in the
mid-20th century—the manipulator works in full view of the audience,
who may, if they wish, study his methods of manipulation. This is a far
cry from the philosophy of the traditional European puppet players of
earlier generations, who guarded the secrets of their craft as if they
were conjuring tricks. It is, indeed, fair to say that any presentation
that deliberately draws attention to the mechanics of how it is done is
distorting the art of puppetry, but the realization, nevertheless, of the
expertise involved in a performance and some knowledge of the
technical means by which it is achieved do add an extra dimension to
the appreciation of this difficult and highly skilled art.

Types of puppets
There are many different types of puppets. Each type has its own
individual characteristics, and for each there are certain kinds of
suitable dramatic material. Certain types have developed only under
specific cultural or geographic conditions. The most important types
may be classified as follows:

Hand or glove puppets

These have a hollow cloth body that fits over the manipulator’s hand;
his fingers fit into the head and the arms and give them motion. The
figure is seen from the waist upward, and there are normally no legs.
The head is usually of wood, papier-mâché, or rubber material, the
hands of wood or felt. One of the most common ways to fit the puppet
on the hand is for the first finger to go into the head, and the thumb
and second finger to go into the arms. There are, however, many
variants of this. The “two-fingers-and-thumb” method is used for
Punch-type figures; it allows the puppet to pick up and grasp small
props very well and is obviously useful when wielding the stick that
plays a big part in the show, but it tends to produce a lopsided effect,
with one arm higher than the other. The performer normally holds his
hands above his head and stands in a narrow booth with an opening
just above head height. Most of the traditional puppet folk heroes of
Europe are hand puppets; the booth is fairly easily portable, and the
entire show can be presented by one person. This is the typical kind of
puppet show presented in the open air all over Europe and also found
in China. But it need not be limited to one manipulator; large booths
with three or four manipulators provide excellent scope for the use of
these figures. The virtue of the hand puppet is its agility and
quickness; the limitation is small size and ineffective arm gestures.
Rod puppets
These figures are also manipulated from below, but they are full-
length, supported by a rod running inside the body to the head.
Separate thin rods may move the hands and, if necessary, the legs.
Figures of this type are traditional on the Indonesian islands
of Java and Bali, where they are known as wayang golek. In Europe
they were for a long time confined to the Rhineland; but in the early
20th century Richard Teschner in Vienna developed the artistic
potentialities of this type of figure. In Moscow Nina Efimova carried
out similar experimental productions, and these may have inspired
the State Central Puppet Theatre in Moscow, directed by Sergey
Obraztsov, to develop this type of puppet during the 1930s.
After World War II Obraztsov’s theatre made many tours, especially in
eastern Europe, and a number of puppet theatres using rod puppets
were founded as a result. Today the rod puppet is the usual type of
figure in the large state-supported puppet theatres of eastern Europe.
In a similar movement in the United States, largely inspired
by Marjorie Batchelder, the use of rod puppets was greatly developed
in school and college theatres, and the hand-rod puppet was found to
be of particular value. In this figure the hand passes inside the
puppet’s body to grasp a short rod to the head, the arms being
manipulated by rods in the usual way. One great advantage of this
technique is that it permits bending of the body, the manipulator’s
wrist corresponding to the puppet’s waist. Although in general the rod
puppet is suitable for slow and dignified types of drama, its
potentialities are many and of great variety. It is, however, extravagant
in its demands on manipulators, requiring always one person, and
sometimes two or three, for each figure on stage.
Faun and Nymph, rod puppets by Richard Teschner, 1914; in the Puppet Theatre Collection, Munich.
Courtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum, Munich

Marionettes or string puppets

These are full-length figures controlled from above. Normally they are
moved by strings or more often threads, leading from the limbs to a
control or crutch held by the manipulator. Movement is imparted to a
large extent by tilting or rocking the control, but individual strings are
plucked when a decided movement is required. A
simple marionette may have nine strings—one to each leg, one to each
hand, one to each shoulder, one to each ear (for head movements),
and one to the base of the spine (for bowing); but special effects will
require special strings that may double or treble this number. The
manipulation of a many-stringed marionette is a highly skilled
operation. Controls are of two main types—horizontal (or aeroplane)
and vertical—and the choice is largely a matter of personal preference.
Chinese children playing with marionettes, detail from The Hundred Children, a hand scroll of the
17th century; in the British Museum.
Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
The string marionette does not seem to have been fully developed until
the mid-19th century, when the English marionettist Thomas Holden
created a sensation with his ingenious figures and was followed by
many imitators. Before that time, the control of marionettes seems to
have been by a stout wire to the crown of the head, with subsidiary
strings to the hands and feet; even more primitive methods of control
may still be observed in certain traditional folk theatres. In Sicily there
is an iron rod to the head, another rod to the sword arm, and a string
to the other arm; the legs hang free and a distinctive walking gait is
imparted to the figures by a twisting and swinging of the main rod; in
Antwerp, Belgium, there are just rods to the head and to one arm; in
Liège there are no hand rods at all, merely one rod to the head.
Distinctive forms of marionette control are found in India:
in Rajasthan a single string passes from the puppet’s head over the
manipulator’s hand and down to the puppet’s waist (a second loop of
string is sometimes used to control the arms); in southern India there
are marionettes whose weight is supported by strings attached to a
ring on the manipulator’s head, rods controlling the hands.
In European history the marionette represents the most advanced type
of puppet; it is capable of imitating almost every human or animal
gesture. By the early 20th century, however, there was a danger that it
had achieved a sterile naturalism that allowed no further artistic
development; some puppeteers found that the control of the
marionette figure through strings was too indirect and uncertain to
give the firm dramatic effects that they required, and they turned to
the rod puppet to achieve this drama. But, in the hands of a sensitive
performer, the marionette remains the most delicate, if the most
difficult, medium for the puppeteer’s art.

Flat figures
Hitherto, all the types of puppets that have been considered have been
three-dimensional rounded figures. But there is a whole family of two-
dimensional flat figures. Flat figures, worked from above like
marionettes, with hinged flaps that could be raised or lowered, were
sometimes used for trick transformations; flat jointed figures,
operated by piston-type arms attached to revolving wheels below, were
used in displays that featured processions. But the greatest use of flat
figures was in toy theatres. These seem to have originated in England
by a printseller in about 1811 as a kind of theatrical souvenir; one
bought engraved sheets of characters and scenery for popular plays of
the time, mounted them and cut them out, and performed the play at
home. The sheets were sold, in a phrase that has entered the language,
for “a penny plain or twopence coloured,” the colouring by hand in
rapid, vivid strokes of the brush. During a period of about 50 years
some 300 plays—all originally performed in the London theatres—
were adapted and published for toy-theatre performance in what came
to be called the “Juvenile Drama,” and a hundred small printsellers
were engaged in publishing the plays and the theatrical portraits for
tinseling that often went with them. It was always a home activity,
never a professional entertainment, and provided one of the most
popular and creative fireside activities for Regency and Victorian
families. Although few new plays adapted for the toy theatre were
issued after the middle of the 19th century, a handful of publishers
kept the old stock in print until the 20th century. After World War
II this peculiarly English toy was revived. Toy theatres also flourished
in other European countries during the 19th
century: Germany published many plays; Austria published some
extremely impressive model-theatre scenery; in France toy-theatre
sheets were issued; in Denmark a line of plays for the toy theatre
remains in print. The interest of these toy-theatre plays is largely
social, as a form of domestic amusement, and theatrical, as a record of
scenery, costume, and even dramatic gesture in a particular period of
stage history.

Shadow figures
These are a special type of flat figure, in which the shadow is seen
through a translucent screen. They may be cut from leather or some
other opaque material, as in the traditional theatres of Java, Bali,
and Thailand, in the so-called ombres chinoises (French: literally
“Chinese shadows”) of 18th-century Europe, and in the art theatres of
19th-century Paris; or they may be cut from coloured fish skins or
some other translucent material, as in the traditional theatres of
China, India, Turkey, and Greece, and in the recent work of several
European theatres. They may be operated by rods from below, as in
the Javanese theatres; by rods held at right angles to the screen, as in
the Chinese and Greek theatres; or by threads concealed behind the
figures, as in the ombres chinoises and in its successor that came to be
known as the English galanty show. Shadow figures need not be
limited to two dimensions; rounded figures may also be used
effectively. A particular type of shadow show that was conceived in
terms of film is the silhouette films first made by the German
filmmaker Lotte Reiniger in the 1920s; for these films, the screen was
placed horizontally, like a tabletop, a light was placed beneath it, the
camera was above it, looking downward, and the figures were moved
by hand on the screen, being photographed by the stop-action
technique. The shadow theatre is a medium of great delicacy, and the
insubstantial character of shadow puppets exemplifies all the truest
features of puppetry as an art form.

Other types
These five types by no means exhaust every kind of figure or every
method of manipulation. There are, for instance, the puppets carried
by their manipulators in full view of the audience. The most
interesting of these are the Japanese bunraku puppets, which are
named for a Japanese puppet master, Uemura Bunrakuken, of the
18th century. These figures, which are one-half to two-thirds life size,
may be operated by as many as three manipulators: the chief
manipulator controls head movements with one hand by means of
strings inside the body, which may raise the eyebrows or swivel the
eyes, while using the other hand to move the right arm of the puppet;
the second manipulator moves the left arm of the puppet; and the
third moves the legs; the coordination of movement between these
three artists requires long and devoted training. The magnificent
costumes and stylized carving of the bunraku puppets establish them
as among the most striking figures of their kind in the world.

Somewhat similar figures, though artistically altogether inferior, are

the dummies used by ventriloquists; ventriloquism, as such, has no
relation to puppetry, but the ventriloquists’ figures, with their
ingenious facial movements, are true puppets. The technique of the
human actor carrying the puppet actor onto the stage and sometimes
speaking for it is one that has been developed a great deal in some
experimental puppet theatres in recent years. The human actor is
sometimes invisible, through the lighting technique of “black theatre,”
but is sometimes fully visible. This represents a total rejection of much
of the traditional thinking about the nature of puppetry, but it has
become increasingly accepted.

Another minor form of puppet representation is provided by

the jigging puppets, or marionnettes à la planchette, that were, during
the 18th and 19th centuries, frequently performed at street corners
throughout Europe. These small figures were made to dance, more or
less accidentally, by the slight variations in the tension of a thread
passing through their chests horizontally from the performer’s knee to
an upright post. Similar were puppets held by short rods projecting
from the figures’ backs, which were made to dance by bouncing them
on a springy board on the end of which the performer sat. The
unrehearsed movements of figures like these, when loosely jointed,
have a spontaneous vitality that more sophisticated puppets often
miss. Another interesting, if elemental, type of puppet, the “scarecrow
puppets,” or lileki, of Slovenia, is constructed from two crossed sticks
draped with old clothes; two of these figures are held up on either side
of a bench draped with a cloth, under which the manipulator lies. The
puppets talk with each other and with a human musician who always
joins in the proceedings. The playlets usually end with a fight between
the two puppets.

Marionnettes à la planchette, or jigging puppets, being operated by a young puppeteer who provides
his own accompaniment on his drum and whistle in the engraving Les Petites Marionnettes, an
illustration from Le Bon Genre (1820), a work on the entertainments of early 19th-century Paris.
Namur/Lalance
Still another minor puppet form is the finger puppet, in which the
manipulator’s two fingers constitute the limbs of a puppet, whose body
is attached over the manipulator’s hand. An even simpler finger
puppet is a small, hollow figure that fits over a single finger.
Amusement with a simple finger puppet, lithograph by an unknown artist, c. 1850.
Courtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum, Munich
The giant figures that process through the streets of some European
towns in traditional festivities are puppets of a kind, though they do
not normally enact any plays. The same applies to the dragons that are
a feature of street processions in China and are to be found in some
places in Europe—as, for example, at Tarascon, France. Indeed, when
a man hides himself within any external frame or mask, the result may
be called a puppet. Many of the puppet theatres in Poland today also
present plays acted by actors in masks; the Bread and Puppet Theatre
in the United States is another example of the same tendency. The
divisions between human actors and puppet actors are becoming
increasingly blurred; if, in the past, many puppets tried to look and act
like humans, today many human actors are trying to look and act like
puppets. Clearly, puppetry is being recognized not merely as a
particular form of dramatic craft but as one manifestation of total
theatre.
Styles of puppet theatre
Puppet theatre has been presented in many diverse styles and for
many different kinds of audience. Throughout history, the chief of
these has been the performance of folk or traditional plays to popular
audiences. The most familiar examples are the puppet shows that have
grown up around a number of national or regional comic heroes who
appear in a whole repertory of little plays. Pulcinella, for example, was
a human character in the Italian commedia dell’arte who began to
appear on the puppet stages early in the 17th century; he was carried
around Europe by Italian puppet showmen and everywhere became
adopted as a new character, hunchbacked and hook-nosed, in the
native puppet plays. In France he became Polichinelle, in England
Punch, in Russia Petrushka, and so on. In England alone did this wide
repertory of plays based on popular legend become limited to the one
basic pattern of the Punch-and-Judy show. At about the time of
the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, a great many
local puppet heroes displaced the descendants of Pulcinella
throughout Europe: in France it was Guignol, in Germany Kasperl, in
the Netherlands Jan Klaassen, in Spain Christovita, and so on. All
these characters are glove puppets; many speak through a squeaker in
the mouth of the performer that gives a piercing and unhuman timbre
to their voices; and all indulge in the fights and other business typical
of glove-puppet shows. It is a mistake, however, to regard them all as
the same character; they are distinct national types. In Greece the
comic puppet hero is Kararkiózis, a shadow puppet, who originally
came from Turkey, where he is known as Karagöz.
An English Punch-and-Judy show, detail from Punch or May Day, oil on canvas by Benjamin Robert
Haydon, 1829; in the Tate Britain, London.
Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate Britain, London; photograph, A.C. Cooper Ltd.
The dramatic material in which these popular puppets play is
sometimes biblical, sometimes based on folk tales, and sometimes
from heroic sagas. A play on the Passion of Christ, for instance, is still
presented by the Théâtre Toone in Brussels; the Faust legend has
provided the classic theme for the German puppet theatre, and the
Temptation of St. Anthony for the French; and the poems of the
Italian Renaissance poet Ariosto, handed on through many popular
sources, provide the themes of crusading chivalry for the puppet
theatres of Sicily and Liège. More specifically dramatic or literary
sources were used by the traveling marionette theatres of England and
the United States in the 19th century, when popular plays such as East
Lynne and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were played to village audiences almost
everywhere.

In Asia the same tradition of partly religious and partly legendary

sources provides the repertory for the puppet theatres. The chief of
these are the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, which
provide the basic plots for the puppet theatres of southern India and
of Indonesia.
A puppet-style modern dance-drama based on the Ramayana, originally produced and
choreographed by Shanti Bardhan, c. 1952.
Mohan Khokar
In distinction to these essentially popular shows, the puppet theatre
has, at certain periods of history, provided a highly fashionable
entertainment. In England, for instance, Punch’s Theatre at Covent
Garden, London, directed by Martin Powell from 1711 to 1713, was a
popular attraction for high society and received many mentions in the
letters and journalism of the day. From the 1770s to the 1790s several
Italian companies attracted fashionable audiences and the
commendation of Samuel Johnson. In Italy a magnificent puppet
theatre was established in the Palace of the Chancellery in Rome in
1708, for which Alessandro Scarlatti, with other eminent composers,
composed operas. In Austria-Hungary Josef Haydn was the resident
composer of operas for a puppet theatre erected by Prince Esterházy
about 1770. In France the ombres chinoises of François-Dominique
Seraphin had been established at the Palais-Royal, in the heart of
fashionable Paris, by 1781. The Italian scene designer Antonio Bibiena
painted the scenery for a marionette theatre belonging to a young
Bolognese prince, which performed in London in
1780. Exquisite Venetian marionette theatres preserved in the Bethnal
Green Museum in London and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New
York City indicate the elegance of these fashionable puppet theatres of
the 18th century.

During the 18th century English writers began to turn to the puppet
theatre as a medium, chiefly for satire. The novelist Henry
Fielding presented a satiric puppet show, under the pseudonym of
Madame de la Nash, in 1748. The caustic playwright and actor Samuel
Foote used puppets to burlesque heroic tragedy in 1758
and sentimental comedy in 1773. In a similar vein, the
dramatist Charles Dibdin presented a satiric puppet revue in 1775, and
a group of Irish wits ran the Patagonian Theatre in London from 1776
to 1781 with a program of ballad operas and literary burlesques.
In France there was a great vogue for the puppet theatre among
literary men during the second half of the 19th century. This seems to
have begun with the theatre created in 1847 at Nohant by George
Sand and her son Maurice, who wrote the plays; well over a hundred
plays were produced during a period of 30 years. These productions
were purely for guests at the house; they are witty, graceful, and
whimsical. Some years later another artistic dilettante conceived the
idea of presenting a literary puppet show, but this time for the
public; Louis Duranty opened his theatre in the Tuileries Gardens in
Paris in 1861, but it lacked popular appeal and did not survive in its
original form for very long. The next year Duranty’s experiment
inspired a group of literary and artistic friends to found the Theatron
Erotikon, a tiny private puppet theatre, which only ran for two years,
presenting seven plays to invited audiences. The moving spirit,
however, was Lemercier de Neuville, who went on to create a personal
puppet theatre that played in drawing rooms all over France until
nearly the end of the century.

All these literary puppet theatres in France had made use of hand
puppets, while the English literary puppeteers of the previous century
had used marionettes. In 1887 a French artist, Henri Rivière, created a
shadow theatre that enjoyed considerable success for a decade at the
Chat Noir café in Paris; Rivière was joined by Caran d’Ache and other
artists, and the delicacy of the silhouettes was matched by especially
composed music and a spoken commentary. Another type of puppet
was introduced to Paris in 1888 when Henri Signoret founded
the Little Theatre; this theatre used rod puppets mounted on a base
that ran on rails below the stage, the movement of the limbs being
controlled by strings attached to pedals. The plays presented were
pieces by classic authors—Cervantes, Aristophanes, Shakespeare—and
new plays by French poets. The Little Theatre, like all the 19th-century
French literary puppet theatres, performed infrequently to small
audiences in a bohemian milieu; as a movement, this literary
enthusiasm for the puppet theatre had little popular influence, but it
served as a witness to the potential qualities of puppet theatre.

The puppet theatre in Japan entered literature with the plays

of Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725). This writer, known as the
Shakespeare of Japan, took the form of the existing crude Japanese
puppet dramas and developed it into a great art form with over a
hundred pieces, many of which remain in the repertoire of the
bunraku theatre today. In this form of theatre the text, or jōruri, is
chanted by a tayū who is accompanied by a musician on a three-
stringed instrument called a samisen.

In Europe the art-puppet movement was continued into the 20th

century by writers and artists associated with the Bauhaus, the highly
influential German school of design, which advocated a “total” or
“organic” theatre. One of its most illustrious teachers, the Swiss
painter Paul Klee, created figures of great interest for a home puppet
theatre, and others designed marionettes that reflected the ideas of
Cubism. The eminent English man of the theatre Gordon Craig
campaigned vigorously for the puppet as a medium for the thoughts of
the artist. Between World Wars I and II and through the 1950s and
’60s, a number of artists endeavoured in difficult economic conditions
to demonstrate that puppets could present entertainment of high
artistic quality for adult audiences. The marionettes of the Art Puppet
Theatre in Munich, for instance, were striking exemplars of the
German tradition in deeply cut wood carving. In Austria the Salzburg
Marionette Theatre specializes in Mozart operas and has achieved a
high degree of naturalism and technical expertise. In Czechoslovakia—
a country with a fine puppet tradition—Josef Skupa’s marionette
theatre presented musical turns interspersed with witty satiric
sketches introducing the two characters who gave their names to the
theatre: Hurvínek, a precocious boy, and Špejbl, his slow-witted
father. In France the prominent artists who designed for Les
Comédiens de Bois included the painter Fernand Léger. Yves Joly
stripped the art of the puppet to its bare essentials by performing hand
puppet acts with his bare hands, without any puppets. The same effect
was achieved by the Russian puppeteer Sergey Obraztsov with a
performance of charm and wit that was quite different from those of
the great rod-puppet theatre that he founded. In England the fine
craftsman Waldo Lanchester played an important part in the
marionette revival; his productions included the early madrigal
opera L’Amfiparnaso. Jan Bussell, with the Hogarth Puppets,
achieved an international reputation with his marionette ballets and
light operas. In London a permanent marionette theatre, the Little
Angel, was opened by John Wright in 1961. Other permanent puppet
theatres have been established in Birmingham and Norwich and at
Biggar near Edinburgh.

In the United States the artistic puppet revival was largely inspired
by Ellen Van Volkenburg at the Chicago Little Theatre with
productions that included A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1916. She
later directed plays for Tony Sarg, who became the most important
influence in American puppetry, with such large-scale marionette
plays as Rip Van Winkle, The Rose and the Ring, and Alice in
Wonderland. A small group, the Yale Puppeteers, created a theatre in
Hollywood, the Turnabout Theatre, that combined human and puppet
stages at opposite ends of the auditorium and attracted fashionable
audiences for its songs and sketches from 1941 to 1956. Bil Baird ran a
puppet theatre in Greenwich Village, New York City, for some years
from 1967 and made a great contribution to every aspect of puppetry.
But the lack of the kind of state subsidy that is taken for granted in
eastern Europe has made the development of large touring puppet
theatres impossible in the United States. Professional puppetry there
has developed in three main ways: in large, commercially supported
productions for television (see below); in socially involved groups,
such as the Bread and Puppet Theatre, which uses giant puppets to
carry a political or idealistic message; and—at the other end of the
scale—as a medium for intimate tabletop presentations by artists such
as Bruce Schwartz, who makes no attempt to conceal himself as he
handles a single figure with great delicacy.

Meanwhile, the puppet theatre was continuing on a less exalted plane

to demonstrate that it could still provide enjoyable entertainment for
popular audiences. From the 1870s a number of
English marionette companies had developed the technique of their
art to an extraordinarily high level, and their influence was widely
spread through Europe, Asia, and America by a series of world tours.
Their performances made a great feature of trick effects: there was the
dissecting skeleton, whose limbs came apart and then came together
again; the Grand Turk, whose arms and legs dropped off to turn into a
brood of children while his body turned into their mother; the
crinolined lady, who turned into a balloon; the Scaramouch, with three
heads; and a host of jugglers and acrobats. The last of the great touring
marionette theatres in this tradition was the Theatre of the Little Ones
of Vittorio Podrecca, which introduced the marionette pianist and the
soprano with heaving bosom that have been widely copied ever since.

During the 20th century there has been an increasing tendency to

regard the puppet theatre as an entertainment for children. One of the
first people to encourage this development was Count Franz Pocci, a
Bavarian court official of the mid-19th century, who wrote a large
number of children’s plays for the traditional marionette theatre of
Papa Schmid in Munich. Important also was Max Jacob, who
developed the traditional folk repertoire of the German
Kasperltheater, between the 1920s and ’50s, into something more
suited to modern ideas of what befits children’s entertainment. Almost
all contemporary puppeteers have created programs for audiences of
children.

In this survey of the various styles of puppet theatre in different

countries and in different cultures, there are certain features that are
common to many otherwise differing forms. In many forms of puppet
theatre, for instance, the dialogue is not conducted as if through the
mouths of the puppets, but instead the story is recited or explained by
a person who stands outside the puppet stage to serve as a link with
the audience. This technique was certainly in use in England in
Elizabethan times, when the “interpreter” of the puppets is frequently
referred to; this character is well illustrated in Ben
Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, in which one of the puppets leans out of
the booth (they were hand puppets) and hits the interpreter on the
head because it does not like the way he is telling the story. The same
technique of the reciter is found in the Japanese bunraku theatre, in
which the chanter contributes enormously to the full effect and is,
indeed, regarded as one of the stars of the company. The technique is
also found in the French shadow theatre at the Chat Noir, and its
imitators and successors, which depended to a great extent upon the
chansonnier. Many recent puppet productions utilize this technique as
well. Elsewhere, such as in traditional puppet theatres of Java, Greece,
and Sicily, all the speaking is done by the manipulator. The plays
consist of a mixture of narration and dialogue, and, though the
performer’s voice will certainly vary for the different characters, the
whole inevitably acquires a certain unity that is one of the
most precious attributes of the puppet theatre.

Musical accompaniment is an important feature of many puppet

shows. The gamelan gong and cymbal orchestra that accompanies a
Javanese wayang performance is an essential part of the show; it
establishes the mood, provides the cadence of the puppets’
movements, and gives respite between major actions. Similarly, the
Japanese samisen supports and complements the chanter. In the
operatic puppet theatre of 18th-century Rome, the refined musical
scores of Scarlatti and the stilted conventions and long-held gestures
of the opera of that time must have been admirably matched by the
slow, contrived but strangely impressive movements of the rod
puppets. When in 1662 Samuel Pepys visited the first theatre to
present Punch in England, he noted in his famous diary that “here
among the fiddlers I first saw a dulcimer played on with sticks
knocking of the strings, and it is very pretty.” Even an old-fashioned
Punch-and-Judy show had a drum and panpipes as an overture.
Puppets without music can seem rather bald. At one time the
gramophone was used extensively by puppeteers, and more recently
the tape recorder has provided a more adaptable means of
accompanying a puppet performance with music and other sound
effects.
wayang kulit puppets
Wayang kulit puppets being manipulated during a shadow-play performance in Jakarta, Indonesia.
flydime
Lighting effects can also play an important part in a puppet
production. The flickering oil lamp of the Javanese
wayang enhances the shadows of the figures on the screen; as long ago
as 1781, the scene painter Philip James de Loutherbourg used a large
model theatre called the Eidophusikon to demonstrate the range of
lighting effects that could be achieved with lamps. Modern methods
using ultraviolet lighting have enabled directors of puppet productions
to achieve astonishing and spectacular effects.
Indonesian wayang shadow puppet and decoration.
Courtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum, Munich

Puppetry in the contemporary world

The puppet theatre in the contemporary world faces great difficulties
and great opportunities. The audiences for the traditional folk theatres
have almost disappeared. Punch and Judy on the English beaches
and Guignol in the parks of Paris still draw a crowd, but the indoor
theatres that once attracted humble audiences survive with difficulty,
usually with the aid of a sympathetic town council or a local museum.
Puppets are increasingly regarded as an entertainment only for
children. They certainly do provide a kind of theatre to which children
respond with enthusiasm, and, in the general development of
children’s theatre, the puppet theatre has a part to play. Some
puppeteers are happy to play only for children. But others are eager to
play also on an adult level; and, for these, audiences are few. No
professional puppet theatre can exist in the West on a purely
adult repertoire. Even those theatres that do play for children face
great economic difficulties from the small size of audience to which
puppets can play and from the modest admission fees that can be
charged to children. If a few companies do continue to present
performances of quality, this is a tribute to their dedication to their
art.

There are some possible means of performance beyond the children’s

theatre. There are cruise ships and nightclubs, which provide an
opportunity for short turns but obviously no scope for serious drama.
And there is television. At first sight, television would seem an ideal
medium for puppetry, and many puppet shows have in fact appeared
on it, but initially the great possibilities that it seemed to offer were
not fully realized. A straight transference of a puppet production to the
television screen proved not to be effective, and puppet acts on
television were often limited to short presentations on variety shows.
Several programs designed for television, sometimes combining
puppets with human performers, did, however, gain great success. In
England, for instance, Muffin the Mule and his animal friends,
manipulated by Ann Hogarth, appeared from 1946 on the top of a
piano at which Annette Mills played and sang. In the United States a
series featuring the Kuklapolitans, created by Burr Tillstrom, began
airing in 1947; Kukla, a small boy, had a host of friends, including Ollie
the Dragon, who exchanged repartee with Fran Allison, a human
actress standing outside the booth. In 1969, puppets were introduced
on the educational program “Sesame Street”; these were created
by Jim Henson and represented a type of figure that reached its full
potential in “The Muppet Show,” which attracted enormous audiences
in more than a hundred countries between 1976 and 1981. Henson
went on to create puppet films in which fantastic puppet characters
were manipulated by radio-controlled mechanisms of extraordinary
ingenuity. Another type of television puppetry could be seen
in “Spitting Image,” a program introduced in 1984
with caricatured puppets designed by Roger Law and Peter Fluck. It
consisted of satiric sketches, originally of English politicians and
personalities, and represented a revival of the 18th-century tradition
of adult satiric puppet theatre.
Fran Allison with Kukla and Ollie, two puppets created by Burr Tillstrom for the television series
“Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.”
Courtesy of WTTW-TV, Chicago—Public Broadcasting Service
The economic difficulties facing puppet companies in western Europe
and the United States have been lifted in eastern Europe and China,
where the state provides generous subsidies for puppet theatres.
Whereas in the West a puppet theatre is lucky if it can afford to pay a
company of 5 or 6 performers, it is not unusual for a puppet theatre in
the East to employ 50 or 60 performers, artists, and technicians.
Interest in the puppet theatre has surged in eastern Europe
since World War II, and, while the state supports these theatres, there
is very little sign of any direct political propaganda in their programs.
The results of all this aid have often been impressive in the sheer
weight of numbers and scenic effects, and the productions have often
been experimental and imaginative. Mere size, however, does not
necessarily guarantee artistic success, and some of the best of these
theatres would seem to feel a lack of confidence in their medium by
their restless searching for new methods of presentation through
“black theatre,” mask theatre, and other techniques.

A great feature of education during the 20th century was the

introduction of puppet making into schools as a craft activity. The
difficulties facing professional puppet theatre are entirely absent here,
and a puppet performance can synthesize many of the arts and skills of
a group of children in making, costuming, and manipulating puppets,
in writing plays for them, and in acting them. When this activity was
first introduced, undue importance was often placed upon the mere
construction of figures according to certain set methods and upon the
painstaking preparation of a showing, so that the creative release of
the performance was long delayed and sometimes never reached.
Today the tendency is to create puppets quickly from scrap materials
or from natural objects and to perform them impromptu, without
rehearsal, as a form of dramatic self-expression. It is from such
activities that the therapeutic potentialities of puppets have been
utilized by psychiatrists working with disturbed children.

The future of the puppet theatre will certainly be greatly influenced by

the cross-fertilization between different traditions in puppetry that
will result from puppeteers meeting each other and seeing each other’s
performances at international festivals of the puppet theatre. These
festivals now take place almost every year and are usually sponsored
by UNIMA, the Union Internationale de la Marionnette, an
international society of puppeteers. Originally founded in 1929 and
reconstituted in 1957, UNIMA has members in some 65 countries and
provides a common meeting ground for professional and amateur
performers, critics, and enthusiasts. In the meantime traditional styles
of puppetry will not be neglected. Many countries now boast national
organizations—the Puppeteers of America in the United States and
Canada or The Puppet Centre in Great Britain, for example—which
promote the differing local traditions of this minor but fascinating art.

Bunraku
Japanese puppet theatre

Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive
knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via
study for an advanced degree....
Bunraku, Japanese traditional puppet theatre in which half-life-size
dolls act out a chanted dramatic narrative, called jōruri, to the
accompaniment of a small samisen (three-stringed Japanese lute). The
term Bunraku derives from the name of a troupe organized by puppet
master Uemura Bunrakuken in the early 19th century; the term
for puppetry is ayatsuri and puppetry theatre is more accurately
rendered ayatsuri jōruri.

Bunraku
A Bunraku performance.
© coward_lion/iStock.com
Puppetry appeared around the 11th century with kugutsu-
mawashi (“puppet turners”), traveling players whose art may have
come from Central Asia. Until the end of the 17th century, the puppets
were still primitive, having neither hands nor feet. Before the 18th
century the puppet manipulators remained hidden; after that time
they emerged to operate in the open. Dolls now range in height from
one to four feet; they have heads, hands, and legs of wood (female
dolls do not have legs or feet because premodern dress hid that part of
the female body). The dolls are trunkless and elaborately costumed.
Principal dolls require three manipulators. The chief handler, wearing
18th-century dress, operates the head and right hand, moving the
eyes, eyebrows, lips, and fingers. Two helpers, dressed and hooded in
black to make themselves invisible, operate the left hand and the legs
and feet (or in the case of female dolls, the movements of the kimono).
The puppeteer’s art requires long training to achieve perfect
synchronization of movement and thoroughly lifelike actions and
portrayal of emotions in the dolls.

Japanese Bunraku theatre; woodblock print by Utashige, 19th century. The puppeteers appear on
stage with their puppets; the narrator is shown at the right.
Courtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum, Munich
Puppet theatre reached its height in the 18th century with the plays
of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Later it declined because of the lack of
excellent jōruri writers, but during the second half of the 20th century
it attracted renewed interest. In 1963 two small rival troupes joined to
form the Bunraku Kyōkai (Bunraku Association), based at the Asahi-
za (originally called the Bunraku-za), a traditional Bunraku theatre
in Ōsaka. Today performances are held in Kokuritsu Bunraku Gekijō
(National Bunraku Theatre; opened 1984) in Ōsaka. In 2003 UNESCO
declared Bunraku a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of
Humanity.