Punch and Judy: the show, its storyline, its origins and its history

Detail sheet for the introduction. Legend: ✓ read · ◐ secondary/abstract · † unread · ✗ no source.

Punch and Judy is the traditional British puppet show, played in a portable booth with glove puppets, in which Mr Punch — a squeaky-voiced, lawless trickster — fights and deceives everyone who crosses him, including his wife Judy and their baby, and usually escapes every consequence. There is no single fixed script: performers vary the episodes, combining slapstick, dark humour and audience participation. Its documented roots are Italian, and it has been recorded in London since 1662.

Why it matters here. The introduction takes the show’s name as the book’s name. Meg heard a familiar English reference; Krishan, German, heard something adjacent — Kasperle, the robber, the crocodile, a gentler world where the ending rarely hurts — and then misheard it as “Punching Judy”, which produced the book’s central image: Judy taking the blows, going down, getting up and fighting on. This sheet is the background that argument assumes: how the show is performed, what the traditional storyline contains, who the characters are, what is documented and when, and where the two accounts below disagree.

The show as performed

Pitch and booth. A portable booth, carried by the performer — Joseph Strutt, Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801): the showman “carries his motions with the theatre itself, upon his back”, performing in the open air for whatever the spectators give. ◐
Two people, not one. The “professor” works the figures; an accomplice, the “bottler”, plays drums or panpipes to draw a crowd and collects the money. ✓
The voice is a device. The squeak comes from a reed held at the back of the performer’s mouth — the swazzle (French sifflet-pratique; Italian pivetta, also strega or franceschina). Originally bone or ivory, now tin; hard to master and easy to swallow. ✓
Marionettes first, glove puppets later. The earliest recorded shows used string puppets; the glove-puppet version in a small portable booth became the familiar form by the end of the 18th century (V&A) or “by the 1800s” (London Museum). ◐
No fixed text. Performers vary the episodes, and the show was carried as an oral tradition — the “swatchel omis” families (the Staddons, the Maggs, the Smiths, the Codmans), who were “fiercely proud of their own traditions”. ✓
Not children’s theatre. In the early 19th century the marital strife, and in one recorded show Punch’s girlfriend Pretty Polly, “obviously struck a chord with many adult members of the audience”. ✓

The traditional storyline

One standard version, as supplied by the author; each beat is marked against the two accounts read for this sheet. Beats marked † are not corroborated by either and should be checked against a scripted source before being quoted as standard.

Punch appears in his booth, greets the audience in his squeaky voice and calls for Judy; they dance before Judy leaves him holding their baby. ◐ — the voice and the baby are in both accounts; the dance is not.
The baby cries; Punch rocks it, loses patience and throws it out of the window. †
Judy returns, attacks him with a stick; Punch takes the stick and beats her to death. ◐ — “Punch … fights and deceives whoever crosses his path. Including his wife. And their baby” (London Museum); the death is not stated there.
A policeman arrives to arrest him and is knocked down too. ✓ — “the policeman, who fails to arrest Punch” (London Museum).
A doctor comes to investigate; after a ridiculous examination and an argument he is beaten as well. †
Punch is asked to guard some sausages; a crocodile steals them while the audience shouts warnings; Punch struggles with it and barely escapes its jaws. ◐ — the crocodile stealing the sausages is attested; the audience warnings and the struggle are not.
A hangman arrives to execute Punch; Punch pretends not to understand the noose, and when the hangman demonstrates, Punch pulls the rope and hangs him instead. †
The Devil comes to claim Punch; they fight and Punch defeats even him. ✓ — “it was customary for Punch to fight the Devil. Sometimes the Devil won but usually it was Punch that was victorious” (V&A).
Punch celebrates his escape, shouting “That’s the way to do it!” ✓ — the catchphrase is the V&A article’s title; no dated first attestation is given.
The joke: this outrageous troublemaker escapes every consequence — even punishment by the Devil. ◐ — an interpretation, consistent with both accounts.

Caveat. The two accounts frame variation differently: London Museum that “the storylines have remained roughly the same”, the V&A that “within each show there were considerable variations” — some shows kept a Beadle rather than a policeman, some added turns such as Chinese jugglers or a boxing match, and most 20th-century shows gave the Crocodile the Devil’s role as Punch’s meanest adversary. ◐

Characters

Mr Punch — descended from Pulcinella, “a disobedient rascal recognised by his squeaky voice and hunched back”; by the mid-18th century he had shed his plain white Italian costume for the red and yellow of the English jester. ✓
Judy — Punch’s wife, called Joan until about 1825. ✓
The baby — the victim at the centre of the perennial complaint about the show. ✓
The policeman — fails to arrest Punch; in some shows the older Beadle, an authority figure, was retained instead. ✓
The crocodile — steals Punch’s sausages, and in most 20th-century shows replaces the Devil as his meanest adversary. ✓
The Devil — the traditional opponent, usually beaten. ✓
The clown — based on the London clown Joseph Grimaldi (London Museum). ✓
Also documented: Toby the dog, usually played by a real dog, in place by 1825; Pretty Polly, in the recorded Piccini show; the Scaramouch with his extending neck and the Blind Man, in Cruikshank’s sketches of 1827. ✓
The hangman and the doctor — standard in the storyline above but absent from both accounts read here. †

Origins and documented record

Commedia dell’arte. Italian comic theatre of masked actors improvising around stock characters; Punch descends from Pulcinella (also Pulcinello, Polichinello, Pulliciniello), “the subversive, thuggish character”. The name may come from pulcino, chick, after the beak-like mask and squeaky voice. ✓ — note the date divergence: “16th century Italian puppet Pulcinella” (V&A) against “17th-century Italian comic theatre” (London Museum). ◐
1662, 9 May — the first English record. Samuel Pepys saw an “Italian puppet play” in Covent Garden: “The best that I ever saw … and a great resort of gallants.” Performed by the Italian showman Pietro Gimonde of Bologna, “Signor Bologna”, with marionettes. ✓
October 1662 — royal attention. Bologna was granted a command performance before Charles II at Whitehall and rewarded with a gold chain and medal worth £25, about £3,000 today. On 10 November Pepys saw another show at Charing Cross, possibly performed by Anthony Devoto — “Antonio Di Voto puncinello” in a warrant of 1672. ✓
18th century — fashionable marionettes. Punch was a leading character in Martin Powell’s marionette shows: Bath 1709 (Punch and Joan), St Martin’s Lane, London by 1710, then the Seven Stars tavern in Covent Garden from 1711. Punch did not yet star in his own play, but was always fighting the Devil. ✓
1738 — a theatre named after him. Charlotte Charke was licensed to open Punch’s Theatre in James Street, off the Haymarket. The venture was short-lived: marionette shows were expensive, and glove-puppet shows in portable booths displaced them. ✓
15 February 1773 — the audience without Punch. When Samuel Foote staged a puppet show at the Haymarket with real actors on strings and no Punch, the upper gallery revolted and tore up the benches on opening night. ✓
1825–27 — the show becomes modern. Judy replaces Joan and Toby appears; a dancing Punch is a Covent Garden Theatre hit in November 1825. In 1827 the journalist John Payne Collier recorded the earliest script, from the 82-year-old Italian Punchman Piccini, with George Cruikshank’s sketches — a script historians have doubted while crediting the illustrations. ✓
European cousins. The same process elsewhere produced Kasperle (southern Germany and Austria), Polichinelle (France), Karakoz (Turkey) and Petrushka (Russia). ✓ — this is the tradition the introduction’s German reading of the name belongs to.
19th century — streets and the seaside. Street pitches announced by drums or panpipes; from 1867 William Judd sold everything needed for a travelling show in the United States (figures $1.75, the crocodile $2, the baby 50 cents); and as railways, excursion trains, reduced working hours and the August Bank Holiday of 1871 filled the new seaside resorts, the show “began to be a standard part of the entertainment on offer”, drawing huge audiences by the century’s end. ✓
20th century — decline and survival. Music hall, variety, cinema and then television drew audiences away; traffic made street pitches harder; the seaside kept the show going, except in wartime when coastal towns were prohibited areas. Fred Tickner gave the first televised performance in the 1930s and also made the original Muffin the Mule; Percy Press worked London’s streets from 1935 to 1980, and his puppets are in the London Museum collection. ✓
Today. A Punch & Judy College of Professors and a Punch & Judy Fellowship; performances at festivals, fetes, schools and the seaside; in a 2006 UK poll the public voted Punch and Judy onto the list of icons of England; the V&A holds the George Speaight Archive, “one of the world’s greatest resources on the history and development of Punch and Judy”. ✓

Contested

The violence complaint is old. People have questioned whether the show is too violent and immoral since at least the 1740s; crowds both laughed and booed while Punch beat his wife and their baby. The question — does it glorify domestic violence? — is still open. ✓
Dickens, 6 November 1849, to Mary Tyler: the street Punch is “one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive”, an “outrageous joke”, and one secret of its pleasure is “the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstance that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about, without any pain or suffering”. ✓
Two positions today. Those who see the show as making light of, or promoting, domestic violence, and those who see a fictional scenario and treat calls for banning it as political correctness. ✓

Sources read for this sheet

London Museum, A brief history of Punch & Judy puppet shows, londonmuseum.org.uk — ✓ read. Supplies the London street history, Covent Garden as key location, “since the mid-1600s” as the key date, the character list (policeman, crocodile, Grimaldi’s clown), Percy Press, and the criticism dating from the 1740s.
Victoria and Albert Museum, “That’s the way to do it!” A history of Punch & Judy, last updated 17 April 2024, vam.ac.uk — ✓ read. Supplies the 1662 documentation and Signor Bologna, the swazzle, Powell, Charke, the glove-puppet shift, Collier’s 1827 script, the European and American spread, the 20th-century professors, and the Dickens letter.
The storyline above was supplied by the author as a paste with no named source. † — its beats are marked individually above; several are corroborated, several are not.

Open items

Check the uncorroborated beats (the doctor, the hangman trick, the sausages, the baby out of the window, Judy’s death) against a scripted source — the 1827 Collier/Piccini script with Cruikshank’s sketches, or Speaight’s history of the English puppet theatre — before quoting them as the standard scenario.
Two date divergences to settle with a third source: glove puppets “by the end of the 18th century” (V&A) or “by the 1800s” (London Museum); commedia dell’arte as 16th century (V&A) or 17th century (London Museum).
“That’s the way to do it” is documented here only as a title and a reported line; a dated first attestation would strengthen any claim about the catchphrase.
The 1742 Philadelphia performance is hedged by the V&A as “probably a marionette show”; the 1850 San Francisco show is stated plainly.