Pierrot

Pierrot ( , , ) is a stock character of pantomime and ''commedia dell'arte'', whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne. The name is a diminutive of ''Pierre'' (Peter), via the suffix '' -ot.'' 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, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. 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 being a buffoon to 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 ("I'm Pierrot," said David Bowie: "I'm Everyman")Jean Rook
"Waiting for Bowie, and finding a genius who insists he's really a clown"
, ''Daily Express'', 5 May 1976. still adheres to the "sad clown" in the postmodern era.

Origins: seventeenth 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 ("Little Pete") 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'' (1665). 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 (or Geratoni, fl. 1639-1697).

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.

Eighteenth century

France

An Italian company was called back to Paris in 1716, and Pierrot was reincarnated by the actors Pierre-François Biancolelli (son of the Harlequin of the banished troupe of players) and, after Biancolelli abandoned the role, the celebrated Fabio Sticotti (1676–1741) and his son Antoine Jean (1715–1772). 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 eighteenth century on Parisian stages. Sometimes he spoke gibberish, sometimes the audience itself sang his lines, inscribed on placards held aloft. He could appears as a valet, a cook, or an adventurer; his character is not strictly defined."

In the 1720s, Pierrot came into his own. In plays like ''Trophonius's Cave'' (1722) and ''The Golden Ass'' (1725), 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 (" Au clair de la lune"). The art of Claude Gillot (''Master André's Tomb'' . 1717, of Gillot's students Watteau (''Italian Actors'' . 1719 and Nicolas Lancret (''Italian Actors near a Fountain'' . 1719, of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (''Italian Actors in a Park'' . 1725, of Philippe Mercier (''Pierrot and Harlequin'' .d., and of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (''A Boy as Pierrot'' 776–1780 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 (which were originally mute harlequinades; in the nineteenth century, the harlequinade was a "play within a play" during the pantomime), finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini (1740–1828). 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 (1749–1826), 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

Ludwig Tieck's ''The Topsy-Turvy World'' (1798) is an early—and highly successful—example of the introduction of the ''commedia dell'arte'' characters into parodic metatheater. (Pierrot is a member of the audience watching the play.)

Spain

The penetration of Pierrot and his companions of the ''commedia'' into Spain is documented in a painting by Goya, ''Itinerant Actors'' (1793). It foreshadows the work of such Spanish successors as Picasso and Fernand Pelez