Pierrot
Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins date back to the late 17th-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne. The name is a diminutive of Pierre, using the suffix -ot and derives from the Italian Pedrolino. His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown, often pining for love of Columbine. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim and, more rarely, with a conical shape like a dunce's cap.
Pierrot's character developed from that of a buffoon to become an avatar of the disenfranchised. Many cultural movements found him amenable to their respective causes: Decadents turned him into a disillusioned foe of idealism; Symbolists saw him as a lonely fellow-sufferer; Modernists made him into a silent, alienated observer of the mysteries of the human condition. Much of that mythic quality still adheres to the "sad clown" in the postmodern era.
Origins: 17th century
Pierrot is sometimes said to be a French variant of the sixteenth-century Italian Pedrolino, but the two types have little but their names and social stations in common. Both are comic servants, but Pedrolino, as a so-called "first" Zanni, often acts with cunning and daring, an engine of the plot in the scenarios where he appears. Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second"' Zanni, stands "on the periphery of the action". He dispenses advice and courts his master's young daughter, Columbine, bashfully.His origins among the Italian players in France go back to Molière's peasant Pierrot in Don Juan, or The Stone Guest. In 1673, the Comédie-Italienne made its own contribution to the Don Juan legend with an Addendum to "The Stone Guest", which included Molière's Pierrot. Thereafter the character—sometimes a peasant, but more often now an Italianate "second" Zanni—appeared fairly regularly in the Italians' offerings, his role always taken by one Giuseppe Giaratone.
Among the French dramatists writing roles for Pierrot were Jean de Palaprat, Claude-Ignace Brugière de Barante, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, and Jean-François Regnard. They present him as an anomaly among busy social personalities around him. Columbine laughs at his advances; his masters who are in pursuit of pretty young wives brush off his warnings to act their age. His isolation bears the pathos of Watteau's portraits.
18th century
France
An Italian company was called back to Paris in 1716, and Pierrot was reincarnated by the actors Pierre-François Biancolelli and, after Biancolelli abandoned the role, the celebrated Fabio Sticotti and his son Antoine Jean. But the character seems to have been regarded as unimportant by this company, since he appears infrequently in its new plays.The character appeared often in the 18th century on Parisian stages. Sometimes he spoke gibberish, sometimes the audience itself sang his lines, inscribed on placards held aloft. He could appear as a valet, a cook, or an adventurer; his character is not strictly defined.
In the 1720s, Pierrot came into his own. In plays such as Trophonius's Cave and The Golden Ass, one meets an engaging Pierrot. The accomplished comic actor Jean-Baptiste Hamoche portrayed him with success. After 1733, he rarely appears in new plays.
Pierrot also appeared in the visual arts and in folksongs. The art of Claude Gillot, of Gillot's students Watteau and Nicolas Lancret, of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, of Philippe Mercier, and of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, features him prominently.
England
As early as 1673, just months after Pierrot had made his debut in the Addendum to "The Stone Guest", Scaramouche Tiberio Fiorilli and a troupe assembled from the Comédie-Italienne entertained Londoners with selections from their Parisian repertoire. And in 1717, Pierrot's name first appears in an English entertainment: a pantomime by John Rich entitled The Jealous Doctor; or, The Intriguing Dame. Thereafter, until the end of the century, Pierrot appeared fairly regularly in English pantomimes, finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini. Delpini, according to the popular-theater historian, M. Willson Disher, "kept strictly to the idea of a creature so stupid as to think that if he raised his leg level with his shoulder he could use it as a gun." Pierrot was later displaced by the English clown.Denmark
In 1800, a troupe of Italian players led by Pasquale Casorti performed in Dyrehavsbakken. Casorti's son, Giuseppe, began appearing as Pierrot in pantomimes, which now had a formulaic plot structure. Pierrot is still a fixture at Bakken, at nearby Tivoli Gardens and Tivoli Friheden in Aarhus.Germany
's The Topsy-Turvy World is an early—and highly successful—example of the introduction of the commedia dell'arte characters into parodic metatheater.Spain
The penetration of Pierrot and his companions of the commedia into Spain is documented in a painting by Goya, Itinerant Actors. It foreshadows the work of such Spanish successors as Picasso and Fernand Pelez, both of whom also showed strong sympathy with the lives of traveling saltimbancos.19th century
Pantomime of Deburau at the Théâtre des Funambules
The Théâtre des Funambules was a little theater licensed in its early years to present only mimed and acrobatic acts. It was the home, beginning in 1816, of Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the most famous Pierrot ever. He was immortalized by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise.Deburau, from the year 1825, was the only actor at the Funambules to play Pierrot, and he did so in several types of pantomime: rustic, melodramatic, "realistic", and fantastic. His style, according to Louis Péricaud, formed "an enormous contrast with the exuberance, the superabundance of gestures, of leaps, that... his predecessors had employed". He altered the costume: he dispensed with the frilled collaret, substituted a skullcap for a hat, and greatly increased the wide cut of both blouse and trousers. Deburau's Pierrot avoided the crude Pierrots—timid, sexless, lazy, and greedy—found in earlier pantomime.
The Funambules Pierrot appealed to audiences in the faery-tale style which incorporate the commedia types. The plot often hinged on Cassander's pursuit of Harlequin and Columbine, having to deal with a clever and ambiguous Pierrot. Deburau early—about 1828—caught the attention of the Romantics. In 1842, Théophile Gautier published a fake review of a "Shakespeare" pantomime he claimed to have seen at the Funambules. It placed Pierrot in the company of over-reachers in high literature such as Don Juan or Macbeth.
Pantomime after Baptiste: Charles Deburau, Paul Legrand, and their successors
Deburau's son, Jean-Charles, assumed Pierrot's blouse the year after his father died. Another important Pierrot of mid-century was Charles-Dominique-Martin Legrand, known as Paul Legrand. He began appearing at the Funambules as Pierrot in 1845.File:Ch.Leandre PierrotEtColombine.png|thumb|Georges Wague in one of the cantomimes of Xavier Privas. Poster by Charles Léandre, 1899.
Legrand left the Funambules in 1853 for the Folies-Nouvelles, which attracted the fashionable set, unlike the Funambules' working-class audiences. Legrand often appeared in realistic costume, his chalky face his only concession to tradition, leading some advocates of pantomime, such as Gautier, to lament that he was betraying the character of the type. Legrand's Pierrot influenced future mimes.
Pantomime and late 19th-century art
France
;Popular and literary pantomimeFile:Sarah Bernhardt as Pierrot.jpg|thumb|Atelier Nadar: Sarah Bernhardt in Jean Richepin's Pierrot the Murderer, 1883. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
File:Léon Hennique - Pierrot sceptique.jpg|thumb|Jules Chéret: Title-page of Hennique and Huysmans' Pierrot the Skeptic, 1881
File:Paul Cézanne, 1888, Mardi gras, oil on canvas, 102 x 81 cm, Pushkin Museum.jpg|thumb|Paul Cézanne: Mardi gras , 1888, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
In the 1880s and 1890s, the pantomime reached a type of apogee, and Pierrot became ubiquitous. Moreover, he acquired a female counterpart, Pierrette, who rivaled Columbine for his affections. A Cercle Funambulesque was founded in 1888, and Pierrot dominated its productions until its demise in 1898. Sarah Bernhardt even donned Pierrot's blouse for Jean Richepin's Pierrot the Murderer.
But French mimes and actors were not the only figures responsible for Pierrot's ubiquity: the English Hanlon brothers, gymnasts and acrobats who had been schooled in the 1860s in pantomimes from Baptiste's repertoire, traveled the world well into the 20th century with their pantomimic sketches and extravaganzas featuring riotously nightmarish Pierrots. The Naturalists—Émile Zola especially, who wrote glowingly of them—were captivated by their art. Edmond de Goncourt modeled his acrobat-mimes in his The Zemganno Brothers upon them; J.-K. Huysmans and his friend Léon Hennique wrote their pantomime Pierrot the Skeptic after seeing them perform at the Folies Bergère. It was in part through the enthusiasm that they excited, coupled with the Impressionists' taste for popular entertainment, such as the circus and the music-hall, as well as the new bohemianism that then reigned in artistic quarters such as Montmartre —it was through all this that Pierrot achieved almost unprecedented currency and visibility towards the end of the century.
;Visual arts, fiction, poetry, music, and film
He invaded the visual arts—not only in the work of Willette, but also in the illustrations and posters of Jules Chéret; in the engravings of Odilon Redon ; and in the canvases of Georges Seurat, Léon Comerre, Henri Rousseau, Paul Cézanne, Fernand Pelez, Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Seignac, Théophile Steinlen, and Édouard Vuillard. The mime "Tombre" of Jean Richepin's novel Nice People turned him into a pathetic and alcoholic "phantom"; Paul Verlaine imagined him as a gormandizing naïf in "Pantomime", then, like Tombre, as a lightning-lit specter in "Pierrot". Laforgue put three of the "complaints" of his first published volume of poems into "Lord" Pierrot's mouth—and dedicated his next book, The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon, completely to Pierrot and his world. In the realm of song, Claude Debussy set both Verlaine's "Pantomime" and Banville's "Pierrot" to music in 1881 —the only precedents among works by major composers being the "Pierrot" section of Telemann's Burlesque Overture, Mozart's 1783 "Masquerade", and the "Pierrot" section of Robert Schumann's Carnival. Even the embryonic art of the motion picture turned to Pierrot before the century was out: he appeared, not only in early celluloid shorts, but also in Emile Reynaud's Praxinoscope production of Poor Pierrot, the first animated movie and the first hand-colored one.