Puppetry Britannica Online Encyclopedia - 2

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Puppetry
puppetry, the
making and TABLE OF CONTENTS
manipulation
Introduction
of puppets for
use in some Character of puppet theatre
kind of Types of puppets
theatrical Hand or glove puppets
Guignol (right) with a gendarme, puppet show. A Rod puppets
performance in Lyon, France.
puppet is a Marionettes or string puppets
Brücke-Osteuropa figure—
Flat figures
human,
Shadow figures
animal, or abstract in form—that is moved by
human, and not mechanical, aid. Other types
Styles of puppet theatre
These definitions are wide enough to include an Puppetry in the contemporary world
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
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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 Pollockʼs
Toy Museum, London.
And to the appreciation, often instinctive, of these
Courtesy of Pollockʼs Toy Museum, London; characteristics that mark the puppet theatre, there
photograph, A.C. Cooper Ltd.
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
Hand puppets made by Paul Klee; in the into the head, and the thumb and second finger to
collection of Felix Klee. The centre puppet is go into the arms. There are, however, many
a… variants of this. The “two-fingers-and-thumb”
Courtesy of Felix Klee, © Cosmopress, method is used for Punch-type figures; it allows
Geneva, and permission of S.P.A.D.E.M. the puppet to pick up and grasp small props very
1971, by French Reproduction Rights, Inc.;
well and is obviously useful when wielding the
photograph, Bil Baird Collection 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
Faun and Nymph, rod puppets by Richard figure. In Moscow Nina Efimova carried out similar
Teschner, 1914; in the Puppet Theatre
experimental productions, and these may have
Collection, Munich.
inspired the State Central Puppet Theatre in
Courtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum,
Moscow, directed by Sergey Obraztsov, to develop
Munich
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.
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
Chinese children playing with marionettes,
each leg, one to each hand, one to each shoulder,
detail from The Hundred Children, a hand …
one to each ear (for head movements), and one to
Courtesy of the trustees of the British
the base of the spine (for bowing); but special
Museum
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.
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
A Bunraku performance of Yoshitsune and master, Uemura Bunrakuken, of the 18th century.
the Thousand Cherry Trees, a play … These figures, which are one-half to two-thirds life
Michael S. Yamashita/Corbis 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
Marionnettes à la planchette, or jigging
Marionnettes à la planchette, or jigging

puppets, … performer’s knee to an upright post. Similar were
puppets held by short rods projecting from the
Namur/Lalance
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.
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.
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
Amusement with a simple finger puppet, that are a feature of street processions in China
lithograph by an unknown artist, c. 1850. and are to be found in some places in Europe—as,
Courtesy of the Puppentheatermuseum, for example, at Tarascon, France. Indeed, when a
Munich 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
An English Punch-and-Judy show, detail

Italian puppet showmen and everywhere became
from Punch or May Day, oil on … adopted as a new character, hunchbacked and
Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate Gallery,

hook-nosed, in the native puppet plays. In France
London; photograph, A.C. Cooper Ltd. 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.
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.
In distinction to these essentially popular shows,

the puppet theatre has, at certain periods of
A puppet-style modern dance-drama based
history, provided a highly fashionable
on the Ramayana, originally …
entertainment. In England, for instance, Punch’s
Mohan Khokar
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
Wayang kulit puppets being manipulated chanter. In the operatic puppet theatre of 18th-
during a shadow-play … century Rome, the refined musical scores of
flydime 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.
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
Indonesian wayang shadow puppet and
decoration. puppet productions to achieve astonishing and
spectacular effects.
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
Fran Allison with Kukla and Ollie, two appeared on it, but initially the great possibilities
puppets created by Burr Tillstrom for the that it seemed to offer were not fully realized. A
television series …
straight transference of a puppet production to
Courtesy of WTTW-TV, Chicago—Public the television screen proved not to be effective,
Broadcasting Service
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.
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.
"puppetry". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

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puppetry -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 12/1/16 12:36 AM

Styles of puppet theatre

CHARACTER OF PUPPET THEATRE

employed by a major puppet theatre, whether it be a traditional puppet theatre from

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

While these puppets that exist furthest from

HAND OR GLOVE PUPPETS

These have a hollow cloth body that fits over the

These figures are also manipulated from below,

MARIONETTES OR STRING PUPPETS

These are full-length figures controlled from

published many plays; Austria published some extremely impressive model-theatre

These five types by no means exhaust every kind

Another minor form of puppet representation is

Marionnettes à la planchette, or jigging

Still another minor puppet form is the finger

The giant figures that process through the streets

STYLES OF PUPPET THEATRE

Puppet theatre has been presented in many

An English Punch-and-Judy show, detail

Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate Gallery,

In Asia the same tradition of partly religious and

In distinction to these essentially popular shows,

important influence in American puppetry, with such large-scale marionette plays as

something more suited to modern ideas of what befits children’s entertainment.

Musical accompaniment is an important feature of

Lighting effects can also play an important part in

PUPPETRY IN THE CONTEMPORARY

There are some possible means of performance

"puppetry". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.

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