puppet

Figure manipulated on a small stage, usually by an unseen operator. The earliest known puppets are from 10th-century BC China. The types include finger or glove puppets (such as Punch); string marionettes (which reached a high artistic level in ancient Burma and Sri Lanka and in Italian princely courts from the 16th to 18th centuries, and for which the composer Franz Joseph Haydn wrote his operetta Dido in 1778); shadow silhouettes (operated by rods and seen on a lit screen, as in Java); and bunraku (devised in Osaka, Japan), in which three or four black-clad operators on stage may combine to work each puppet about 1 m/3 ft high.