Helen Haiman Joseph wrote the first comprehensive history of marionettes in English, published by B. W. Huebsch in 1920 — but she opens it not with a thesis, sewing costumes late at night in Cleveland for a cast drawn from Lord Dunsany’s The Golden Doom, and being treated as rudely by her own stringed characters as Pinocchio treated Geppetto. Then she lets them recite their ancestry, and the book’s real subject falls out of their mouths: the Ramayana, Japanese jōruri drama, the medieval Passion plays, the pugilistic line of Pulcinella, Punch, Kasperle and Karagöz, and on into Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe, Shaw and Maeterlinck.

The material Joseph assembles:

  • The Drury Lane Theatre petitioned in 1675 to have Punch banned from the neighbourhood, because he was measurably cutting into its box office.
  • Eighteenth-century barber-dentists used marionettes to pull in patients for tooth extraction — puppets as advertising.
  • When Martin Luther’s Calvinist allies refused to administer the sacrament to actors, the actors became puppeteers. Puppeteers and puppets alike ended up in prison often enough that the professional risk was real.
  • Joseph argues Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour were inspired by puppet plays, and that Byron took the model for Don Juan from a Punch & Judy piece called The Libertine Destroyed.
  • The 1862–63 Erotikon Theatron caprices animated Sarah Bernhardt, Jules Simon and Alfred de Musset as tiny pupazzi, made by the journalist Lemercier de Neuville with an amateur crew that included Gustave Doré, Théodore de Banville and Georges Bizet.
  • Joseph calls for American schools to teach national history through puppet plays — while herself flagging American puppetry’s collaboration with blackface minstrelsy.

Her politics of the form are straightforward. Marionettes, she argues, are structurally incapable of respecting authority: granted the power to subvert any worldly power, they “perennially overthrow all social, political, religious, and even artistic conventions.” A wooden figure can say what a paid actor cannot.

The 1920 timing is what makes the book bittersweet. It lands after a century of technical and artistic invention in European and American puppetry, and just as cinema absorbs the world’s attention. Joseph saw that rival and answered it in her chapter “Plea for Polichinelle,” calling marionettes “an antidote for the overdose of moving pictures from which an overwhelming number of us are unconsciously suffering atrophy of the imagination.” She backed Edward Gordon Craig’s prediction that when a future archaeologist unearths a film projector in the ruins, the Burattini will still be alive and kicking.

What she did not foresee was television, and after it an American taste for the puffy felt-and-Styrofoam juvenile — the reduction of a variegated heritage of craggy folk caricature to a vaudevillian mob. A century on, the projector is the archaeological find and the strings are still attached, which is roughly the outcome she predicted and not quite the one she got.