Strings Attached: Helen Haiman Joseph's A Book of Marionettes

Any reader familiar with Shari Lewis' Lamb Chop, Fred Rogers' King Friday XIII, or Jim Henson's Muppets will likely feel they have entered a far more expansive and intricate puppet world at the beginning of Helen Haiman Joseph's A Book of Marionettes, published in 1920. The story commences late one evening in Cleveland, Ohio. A weary marionette seamstress named Helen is meticulously altering the costumes of several stringed characters. These puppets belong to an otherworldly drama titled The Golden Doom by the Anglo-Irish dramatist Lord Dunsany. The cast includes a Chief Prophet of the Stars, a Chamberlain, a pair of Spies, and a Priest.

Instead of expressing gratitude, the puppets treat Helen with rudeness and defiance, much like the wooden puppet Pinocchio treated his creator, Geppetto. Beating a retreat from this imagined Lilliputian assault, the exhausted seamstress overhears the puppets vainly reciting their august, cosmopolitan ancestry. They trace their lineage back to the ancient Indian Ramayana, Japanese jōruri dramas, and medieval Passion plays. Their history extends to famous pugilistic stars like Pulcinella, Punch, Kasperle, and Karaghöz. Their lineage finally reaches the devotion of modern immortals, spanning from William Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Goethe to George Bernard Shaw and Maurice Maeterlinck.

The first comprehensive history of marionette artistry in the English language, A Book of Marionettes, appeared at a watershed moment for both American and world puppetry. This publication arrived after a century of significant artistic and technical innovation but just before the cinema began to globally supplant human attention and storytelling. Drawing on her extensive field studies of European puppetry, Helen Haiman Joseph magisterially surveys the millennia-long world history of string and silhouette marionettes. Born seemingly simultaneously with organized religion, these little creatures never leave their creators' sides.

They are fully capable of expressing the entire range of human emotion and experience in every corner of the globe and in every age. Enlisted as surrogate actors, marionettes perform with their necessarily circumscribed mechanical gestures deeds of immense gravity, all while barely touching the earth. As Joseph moves adeptly through the ever-dynamic world of marionette theaters, one gets the feeling that she is actually narrating a kind of alternate history of the world. This world is altogether more joyously humane than any epic recounted about mere human beings.

Granted the power to subvert any worldly authority, marionettes, as Joseph proves, perennially overthrow all social, political, religious, and even artistic conventions. For example, when Martin Luther's Calvinist confrères refused to administer the sacrament to actors, these performers became puppeteers instead. On more than a few occasions, both puppeteers and puppets found themselves behind bars because their satire against oppressive ecclesiastics and governments was so effective. Since the modern Western state arose at a time when marionette theaters were ubiquitous, the diminutive legion was always at hand to model courage and stoutheartedness for their momentarily cowed audiences. That Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Christopher Marlowe's Massacre of Paris, and Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour were inspired by puppet plays suggests the deep fraternity of modern drama with its little brother. Even Lord Byron drew his model of Don Juan from a Punch & Judy piece titled The Libertine Destroyed.