"Magic century of French mime". Omissions? His name suggests kinship with the Pierrot Grenade of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, but the latter seems to have no connection with the French clown. (Pierrots were legion among the minor, now-forgotten poets: for samples, see Willette's journal The Pierrot, which appeared between 1888 and 1889, then again in 1891.) Personnage de la commedia dell'arte, le plus souvent jeune valet rêveur et poétique.Amant malheureux de Colombine, il est en butte aux facéties des autres personnages.Son costume comprend une veste blanche, à gros boutons sur le devant, une fraise, un pantalon flottant et un chapeau avec un flot de rubans. It ended by occupying the entire piece, and, be it said with all the respect due to the memory of the most perfect actor who ever lived, by departing entirely from its origin and being denaturalized. On late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century French pantomime, see Bonnet; Martinez; Storey. In 2006, Columbine was produced as a special event piece. This page was last edited on 19 January 2021, at 14:06. It would set the stage for the later and greater triumphs of Pierrot in the productions of the Ballets Russes. Il joue sans masque, la figure enfarinée. ), In 1895, the playwright and future Nobel laureate Jacinto Benavente wrote rapturously in his journal of a performance of the Hanlon-Lees,[85] and three years later he published his only pantomime: ‘’The Whiteness of Pierrot’’. [187] Pierrot Grenade, on the other hand, whose name suggests descent from the humble island of Grenada (and who seems to have evolved as a hick cousin of his namesake), dresses in ragged strips of colored cloth, sometimes adorned with cheap trinkets; he has little truck with English culture, but displays his talents (when not singing and dancing) in speechifying upon issues of the day and spelling long words in ingenious ways. He entitled it "Shakespeare at the Funambules", and in it he summarized and analyzed an unnamed pantomime of unusually somber events: Pierrot murders an old-clothes man for garments to court a duchess, then is skewered in turn by the sword with which he stabbed the peddler when the latter's ghost lures him into a dance at his wedding. Gillot introduced Watteau to the theater, specifically the Italian Commedia dell'Arte. A more long-lasting development occurred in Denmark. He, along with his fellow commedia masks,[33] was beginning to be "poeticized" in the early 1700s: he was being made the subject, not only of poignant folksong ("Au clair de la lune", sometimes attributed to Lully),[34] but also of the more ambitious art of Claude Gillot (Master André's Tomb [c. 1717]), of Gillot's students Watteau (Italian Actors [c. 1719]) and Nicolas Lancret (Italian Actors near a Fountain [c. 1719]), of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (Italian Actors in a Park [c. 1725]), and of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (A Boy as Pierrot [1776–1780]). Pierrot/Commedia Dell'Arte/Italian Clown Costume Handmade by me in the 1980's. Another was William Theodore Peters, an acquaintance of Ernest Dowson and other members of the Rhymers' Club and a driving force behind the conception and theatrical realization of Dowson's Pierrot of the Minute (1897; see England above). The best known and most important of these settings is the atonal song-cycle derived from twenty-one of the poems (in Hartleben's translation) by Arnold Schoenberg in 1912, i.e., his Opus 21: Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds Pierrot lunaire (Thrice-Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire—Schoenberg was numerologically superstitious). It also contains a short tale of Pierrot by Paul Leclercq, "A Story in White". Fox")[80] a short story, "The Last of the Pierrots",[81] which is a shaming attack upon the modern commercialization of Carnival. . Pierrot—as "Pjerrot", with his boat-like hat and scarlet grin—remains one of the parks’ chief attractions. [51], Deburau's son, Jean-Charles (or, as he preferred, "Charles" [1829–1873]), assumed Pierrot's blouse the year after his father's death, and he was praised for bringing Baptiste's agility to the role. He was the naïve butt of practical jokes and amorous scheming (Gautier); the prankish but innocent waif (Banville, Verlaine, Willette); the narcissistic dreamer clutching at the moon, which could symbolize many things, from spiritual perfection to death (Giraud, Laforgue, Willette, Dowson); the frail, neurasthenic, often doom-ridden soul (Richepin, Beardsley); the clumsy, though ardent, lover, who wins Columbine's heart, o… The title of choreographer Joseph Hansen's 1884 ballet, Macabre Pierrot, created in collaboration with the poet Théo Hannon, summed up one of the chief strands of the character's persona for many artists of the era. Pierrot est candide, badin et a une certaine dose de bon sens. He invaded the visual arts[66]—not only in the work of Willette, but also in the illustrations and posters of Jules Chéret;[67] in the engravings of Odilon Redon (The Swamp Flower: A Sad Human Head [1885]); and in the canvases of Georges Seurat (Pierrot with a White Pipe [Aman-Jean] [1883]; The Painter Aman-Jean as Pierrot [1883]), Léon Comerre (Pierrot [1884]), Henri Rousseau (A Carnival Night [1886]), Paul Cézanne (Mardi gras [Pierrot and Harlequin] [1888]), Fernand Pelez (Grimaces and Miseries a.k.a. [8] Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second" zanni, is a static character in his earliest incarnations, "standing on the periphery of the action",[9] dispensing advice that seems to him sage, and courting—unsuccessfully—his master's young daughter, Columbine, with bashfulness and indecision.[10]. Inspired by the French Symbolists, especially Verlaine, Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet widely acknowledged as the founder of Spanish-American literary Modernism (modernismo), placed Pierrot ("sad poet and dreamer") in opposition to Columbine ("fatal woman", the arch-materialistic "lover of rich silk garments, golden jewelry, pearls and diamonds")[101] in his 1898 prose-poem The Eternal Adventure of Pierrot and Columbine. 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. On the Folies-Nouvelles, Legrand's pantomime, and Champfleury's relationship to both, see Storey. (Pierrot is a member of the audience watching the play.). Teasdale's "Pierrot" was set to voice and piano by Jesse Johnston (1911), Section-heading under which are grouped several poems about Pierrot in Christie's, See Palacio, pp. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player. Marsh, Roger (2007b). In booklet accompanying CDs: Nye, Edward (2014): "Jean-Gaspard Deburau: romantic Pierrot". He was an embodiment of comic contrasts, showing, imperturbable sang-froid [again the words are Gautier's], artful foolishness and foolish finesse, brazen and naïve gluttony, blustering cowardice, skeptical credulity, scornful servility, preoccupied insouciance, indolent activity, and all those surprising contrasts that must be expressed by a wink of the eye, by a puckering of the mouth, by a knitting of the brow, by a fleeting gesture. A true fin-de-siècle mask, Pierrot paints his face black to commit robbery and murder; then, after restoring his pallor, he hides himself, terrified of his own undoing, in a snowbank—forever. [96] Not until the first decade of the next century, when the great (and popular) fantasist Maxfield Parrish worked his magic on the figure, would Pierrot be comfortably naturalized in America. In film, a beloved early comic hero was the Little Tramp of Charlie Chaplin, who conceived the character, in Chaplin's words, as "a sort of Pierrot".[117]. Like Legrand, Charles's student, the Marseilles mime Louis Rouffe (1849–1885), rarely performed in Pierrot's costume, earning him the epithet "l'Homme Blanc" ("The White Man"). This is the case in many works by minor writers of the, "Pierrot-like tone": Taupin, p. 277. Pierrot oli üks commedia dell'arte'i tüüptegelasi (itaalia keeles tipi fissi).. Pierrot oli äratuntav üleni valge ja oma kehale liigsuure riietuse järgi. 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. Unlike most of the other stock characters, he played without a mask, his face whitened with powder. Jean-Baptiste Pater. )[98], Another pocket of North-American sympathy with the Decadence—one manifestation of what the Latin world called modernismo—could be found in the progressive literary scene of Mexico, its parent country, Spain, having been long conversant with the commedia dell'arte. Costa's pantomime L'Histoire d'un Pierrot (Story of a Pierrot), which debuted in Paris in 1893, was so admired in its day that it eventually reached audiences on several continents, was paired with Cavalleria Rusticana by New York's Metropolitan Opera Company in 1909, and was premiered as a film by Baldassarre Negroni in 1914. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy. And, of course, if the occasion warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear—but only in extreme anger![121]. Lecture at the Italian Institute in London, 1950; cited in Storey. [54] In this he was abetted by the novelist and journalist Champfleury, who set himself the task, in the 1840s, of writing "realistic" pantomimes. Such an audience was not averse to pantomimic experiment, and at mid-century "experiment" very often meant Realism. )[112], In music, historians of Modernism generally place Arnold Schoenberg's 1912 song-cycle Pierrot lunaire at the very pinnacle of High-Modernist achievement. Legrand left the Funambules in 1853 for what was to become his chief venue, the Folies-Nouvelles, which attracted the fashionable and artistic set, unlike the Funambules’ working-class children of paradise. Souvent dans la commedia dell'arte, il est le rival d’Arlequin auprès de Francisquine ou de Zerbinette, et il est amoureux de Colombine la blanchisseuse dans certaines représentations. A pantomime produced at the Funambules in 1828, The Gold Dream, or Harlequin and the Miser, was widely thought to be the work of Nodier, and both Gautier and Banville wrote Pierrot playlets that were eventually produced on other stages—Posthumous Pierrot (1847) and The Kiss (1887), respectively.[48]. Pierrot, ou Pedrolino, est un personnage de l’ancienne comédie italienne, l’un des zanni ou valets bouffons de la comédie italienne. This development will accelerate in the next century. When the four generals of the Bad Kingdom (Joker, Akaoni, Wolfrun and Majorina) first attempted to revive him, he resembled a gigantic clown, dressed in a dark purple suit. Voir : Au clair de la lune, chanson populaire française dont il est le héros. Like Harlequin the trickster, Pierrot the sensitive, and Columbina the unattainable beauty. Modelled in hard paste porcelain after the Commedia dellArte characters Pierrot … [108] Another prominent Modernist, Wallace Stevens, was undisguised in his identification with Pierrot in his earliest poems and letters—an identification that he later complicated and refined through such avatars as Bowl (in Bowl, Cat and Broomstick [1917]), Carlos (in Carlos Among the Candles [1917]), and, most importantly, Crispin (in "The Comedian as the Letter C" [1923]). But the pantomime that had the greatest appeal to his public was the "pantomime-arlequinade-féerie", sometimes "in the English style" (i.e., with a prologue in which characters were transformed into the commedia types). O Pierrot (ou Pierrô) é uma personagem da Commedia dell'Arte, uma variação francesa do Pedrolino italiano. Prior to that century, however, it was in this, the eighteenth, that Pierrot began to be naturalized in other countries. "Pierrot: a silent witness of changing times", The World Festival of Clowns in Yekaterinburg, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierrot&oldid=1001394964, Articles with dead external links from December 2017, Articles with permanently dead external links, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. In 1842, Deburau was inadvertently responsible for translating Pierrot into the realm of tragic myth, heralding the isolated and doomed figure—often the fin-de-siècle artist's alter-ego—of Decadent, Symbolist, and early Modernist art and literature. It has led, among other things, to ensemble groups' appropriating Pierrot's name, such as the English Pierrot Players (1967–70),[178] and to a number of projects—such as the Schoenberg Institute's of 1987[179] and the composer Roger Marsh's of 2001-2002[180]—that have been devised to pay homage to Schoenberg and, at the same time, to extend his avant-garde reach, thereby bringing both Hartleben's and Giraud's complete cycles to full musical fruition. These are listed alphabetically by first name, not last (e.g., "Stevie Wonder", not "Wonder, Stevie"). 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 it importantly marked a turning-point in Pierrot's career: henceforth Pierrot could bear comparisons with the serious over-reachers of high literature, like Don Juan or Macbeth; he could be a victim—even unto death—of his own cruelty and daring. One of the earliest and most influential of these in America, The Chap-Book (1894–98), which featured a story about Pierrot by the aesthete Percival Pollard in its second number,[89] was soon host to Beardsley-inspired Pierrots drawn by E.B. Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second" zanni, is a static character in his earliest incarnations, standing on th… [90] (The Canadian poet Bliss Carman should also be mentioned for his contribution to Pierrot's dissemination in mass-market publications like Harper's. "[36] So conceived, Pierrot was easily and naturally displaced by the native English Clown when the latter found a suitably brilliant interpreter. After this date, we hardly ever see him appear again except in old plays."[32]. These developments occurred in 1707 and 1708, respectively; see Bonnassies. They originated in the Smethwick area in the late 1890s and played to large audiences in many parks, theaters, and pubs in the Midlands. [59] And one of the last great mimes of the century, Georges Wague (1875–1965), though he began his career in Pierrot's costume, ultimately dismissed Baptiste's work as puerile and embryonic, averring that it was time for Pierrot's demise in order to make way for "characters less conventional, more human. He also retains monochromatic face make-up, a large ruffled collar around his neck, and dresses clownish, like classic Pierrot is most often portrayed. the words of critic, "The form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue ...": Eliot, in his Introduction to the. The action unfolded in fairy-land, peopled with good and bad spirits who both advanced and impeded the plot, which was interlarded with comically violent (and often scabrous) mayhem. Pierrot (commedia dell'arte) Pour les articles homonymes, voir Pierrot. The mime "Tombre" of Jean Richepin's novel Nice People (Braves Gens [1886]) turned him into a pathetic and alcoholic "phantom"; Paul Verlaine imagined him as a gormandizing naïf in "Pantomime" (1869), then, like Tombre, as a lightning-lit specter in "Pierrot" (1868, pub. True to the Commedia dell'arte storyline, Columbine's two handsome suitors - are now both competing for her affections: gentle Pierrot … [84] (Monti would go on to acquire his own fame by celebrating another spiritual outsider much akin to Pierrot—the Gypsy. Pierrot de Antoine Watteau, v. 1718-19. See more ideas about La Commedia dell’arte aujourd’hui. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697. Pierrot, usually in the company of Pierrette or Columbine, appears among the revelers at many carnivals of the world, most notably at the festivities of Uruguay. ... who saw the creative and solitary Pierrot as a metaphor for contemporary artists. It was the actors who gave the commedia dell’arte its impulse and character, relying on their wits and capacity to create atmosphere and convey character with little scenery or costume. ... without the least proof": Fournier. [25] The extent of that degeneration may be gauged by the fact that Pierrot came to be confused, apparently because of his manner and costume, with that much coarser character Gilles,[26] as a famous portrait by Antoine Watteau attests (note title of image at right). Pierrot (Pedrolino), est un personnage de la Comedia dell'arte. The Pierrot bequeathed to the twentieth century had acquired a rich and wide range of personae. In Achmet and Almanzine (1728) by Lesage and Dorneval,[27] for example, we are introduced not only to the royal society of far-off Astrakhan but also to a familiar and well-drawn servant of old—the headstrong and bungling Pierrot. Il peut également pleurer, mais il fait Pierrot est candide, badin et a une certaine dose de bon sens. Performing Arts Journal Publications 1983 In the last year of the century, Pierrot appeared in a Russian ballet, Harlequin's Millions a.k.a. Pedrolino is a primo zanni, or comic servant, of the Commedia dell'Arte; the name is a hypocorism of Pedro, via the suffix -lino. Joueur, il aime faire des farces, et se déguise volontiers, notamment en femme. The fifty poems that were published by Albert Giraud (born Emile Albert Kayenbergh) as Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques in 1884 quickly attracted composers to set them to music, especially after they were translated, somewhat freely, into German (1892) by the poet and dramatist Otto Erich Hartleben. [62] Sarah Bernhardt even donned Pierrot's blouse for Jean Richepin's Pierrot the Murderer (1883). Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell'Arte by Mel Gordon. La Commedia dell’arte est restée ancrée dans la culture italienne et nous a laissé un pittoresque héritage de personnages. Commercial art. Pierrot est candide, badin et a une certaine dose de bon sens. His style, according to Louis Péricaud, the chronicler of the Funambules, formed "an enormous contrast with the exuberance, the superabundance of gestures, of leaps, that ... his predecessors had employed. Il ne porte pas de masque et a le visage enfariné. Lesage, Alain-René, and Dorneval (1724–1737). In that year, Gautier, drawing upon Deburau's newly acquired audacity as a Pierrot, as well as upon the Romantics’ store of Shakespearean plots and of Don-Juanesque legend, published a "review" of a pantomime he claimed to have seen at the Funambules. "The retirement of Hamoche in 1733", writes Barberet, "was fatal to Pierrot. Personabooks 1977. Cf. He … R. John Wright Dolls is pleased to present the classic Commedia dell'arte fable of Columbine, Pierrot, and Harlequin. In Belgium, where the Decadents and Symbolists were as numerous as their French counterparts, Félicien Rops depicted a grinning Pierrot who is witness to an unromantic backstage scene (Blowing Cupid's Nose [1881]) and James Ensor painted Pierrots (and other masks) obsessively, sometimes rendering them prostrate in the ghastly light of dawn (The Strange Masks [1892]), sometimes isolating Pierrot in their midst, his head drooping in despondency (Pierrot's Despair [1892]), sometimes augmenting his company with a smiling, stein-hefting skeleton (Pierrot and Skeleton in Yellow [1893]). Mic claims that an historical connection between Pedrolino and "the celebrated Pierrots of [Adolphe] Willette" is "absolutely evident" (p. 211). Thereafter, until the end of the century, Pierrot appeared fairly regularly in English pantomimes (which were originally mute harlequinades but later evolved into the Christmas pantomimes of today; in the nineteenth century, the harlequinade was presented as a "play within a play" during the pantomime), finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini (1740–1828). See Lawner; Kellein; also the plates in Palacio, and the plates and tailpieces in Storey's two books. His costume consisted of a white jacket with a neck ruff and large buttons down the front, loose trousers, and a hat with a wide, floppy brim. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap. [94] So uncustomary was the French Aesthetic viewpoint that, when Pierrot made an appearance in Pierrot the Painter (1893),[95] a pantomime by Alfred Thompson, set to music by the American composer Laura Sedgwick Collins, The New York Times covered it as an event, even though it was only a student production. [183] A passionately sinister Pierrot Lunaire has even shadowed DC Comics' Batman. Signifiant littéralement : « théâtre interprété par des gens de l’art » ; autrement dit : des comédiens professionnels, le terme est, de nos jours, utilisé dans de nombreuses langues, dont le français. [188] A feeble fighter, he spars mainly with his tongue—formerly in Creole or French Patois, when those dialects were common currency—as he circulates through the crowds. Chaplin alleges to have told Mack Sennett, after first having assumed the character, You know, this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. Commedia dell’Arte’s enduring characters and the magic of improvised theatre sparked my imagination, offering a world of possibilities that I explore in Harlequin’s Riddle. "Wherever we look in the history of its reception, whether in general histories of the modern period, in more ephemeral press response, in the comments of musical leaders like, For direct access to these works, go to the footnotes following their titles in, Hughes’ "A Black Pierrot" was set to voice and piano by. Il ne porte pas de masque et a le visage enfariné. As the entries below tend to testify, Pierrot is most visible (as in the eighteenth century) in unapologetically popular genres—in circus acts and street-mime sketches, TV programs and Japanese anime, comic books and graphic novels, children's books and young adult fiction (especially fantasy and, in particular, vampire fiction), Hollywood films, and pop and rock music. [50] In 1860, Deburau was directly credited with inspiring such anguish, when, in a novella called Pierrot by Henri Rivière, the mime-protagonist blames his real-life murder of a treacherous Harlequin on Baptiste's "sinister" cruelties. In not a few of the early Foire plays, Pierrot's character is therefore "quite badly defined. Although he lamented that "the Pierrot figure was inherently alien to the German-speaking world", the playwright Franz Blei introduced him enthusiastically into his playlet The Kissy-Face: A Columbiade (1895), and his fellow-Austrians Richard Specht and Richard Beer-Hofmann made an effort to naturalize Pierrot—in their plays Pierrot-Hunchback (1896) and Pierrot-Hypnotist (1892, first pub. C’est l’origine de la plupart des quiproquos de la Commedia dell’arte. [63] Edmond de Goncourt modeled his acrobat-mimes in his The Zemganno Brothers (1879) upon them; J.-K. Huysmans (whose Against Nature [1884] would become Dorian Gray's bible) and his friend Léon Hennique wrote their pantomime Pierrot the Skeptic (1881) after seeing them perform at the Folies Bergère. Pierrot Grenade is apparently descended from an earlier creature indeed called "Pierrot"—but this name seems to be an outsider's "correction" of the regional "Pay-wo" or "Pié-wo", probably a corruption of "Pay-roi" or "country king," which describes the stature to which the figure aspired. It was a generally buffoonish Pierrot that held the European stage for the first two centuries of his history. and sometimes the most opposed to his personality. . From the Departure of Pierrot" appeared originally in the August 1899 number of. Yet in several lines of the play his actual unhappiness is seen,—for instance, "Moon's just a word to swear by", in which he expresses his conviction that all beauty and romance are fled from the world. [77] Obviously inspired by these troupes were the Will Morris Pierrots, named after their Birmingham founder. Summer issue, 1896; cited in Margolin, p. 37. In fact, what documentation does exist links Pierrot, not with Pedrolino, but with, He appears in forty-nine of the fifty scenarios in Flaminio Scala's, "Indeed, Pierrot appears in comparative isolation from his fellow masks, with few exceptions, in all the plays of, This was its second such contribution, the first being. One of these was the Théâtre des Funambules, licensed in its early years to present only mimed and acrobatic acts. [82], In Germany, Frank Wedekind introduced the femme-fatale of his first "Lulu" play, Earth Spirit (1895), in a Pierrot costume; and when the Austrian composer Alban Berg drew upon the play for his opera Lulu (unfinished; first perf. Using Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the saltimbanque paintings of Picasso and Schoenberg's musical experiments as the starting point, they examine the modernist consciousness, which evolved from the 16th-century concept of the commedia dell'arte character of Pierrot, the original free-spirited revolutionary of European improvisational theater. Many reviewers of his pantomimes make note of this tendency: see, e.g., Gautier. The character made his first appearance in issue #676: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (, The Pantomime of Deburau at the Théâtre des Funambules, The Golden Key, or The Adventures of Buratino, Plays, playlets, pantomimes, and revues: Irish, Plays, playlets, pantomimes, and revues: Slovenian, "Waiting for Bowie, and finding a genius who insists he's really a clown", "Pierrot Hero: The Memoirs of Clifford Essex.". Parfaict, François and Claude, and Godin d'Abguerbe (1767). [38] The formula has proven enduring: Pierrot is still a fixture at Bakken, the oldest amusement park in the world, where he plays the nitwit talking to and entertaining children, and at nearby Tivoli Gardens, the second oldest, where the Harlequin and Columbine act is performed as a pantomime and ballet. But Pierrot's most prominent place in the late twentieth century, as well as in the early twenty-first, has been in popular, not High Modernist, art. Carman's "The Last Room. )[56] Legrand often appeared in realistic costume, his chalky face his only concession to tradition, leading some advocates of pantomime, like Gautier, to lament that he was betraying the character of the type.[57]. However, his most important contribution to the Pierrot canon was not to appear until after the turn of the century (see Plays, playlets, pantomimes, and revues below). 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, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. "[43] He altered the costume: freeing his long neck for comic effects, he dispensed with the frilled collaret; he substituted a skullcap for a hat, thereby keeping his expressive face unshadowed; and he greatly increased the amplitude of both blouse and trousers. Baptiste's Pierrot was both a fool and no fool; he was Cassandre's valet but no one's servant. In 1897, Bernardo Couto Castillo, another Decadent who, at the age of twenty-two, died even more tragically young than Peters, embarked on a series of Pierrot-themed short stories—"Pierrot Enamored of Glory" (1897), "Pierrot and His Cats" (1898), "The Nuptials of Pierrot" (1899), "Pierrot's Gesture" (1899), "The Caprices of Pierrot" (1900)—culminating, after the turn of the century (and in the year of Couto's death), with "Pierrot-Gravedigger" (1901). [21] Sometimes he spoke gibberish (in the so-called pièces à la muette); sometimes the audience itself sang his lines, inscribed on placards held aloft by hovering Cupids (in the pièces à écriteau). So, too, are Honoré Daumier's Pierrots: creatures often suffering a harrowing anguish. An important factor that probably hastened his degeneration was the multiplicity of his fairground interpreters. Pierrot, in an unprecedentedly tragic turn of events, dies from the wound. In 1897, Craig, dressed as Pierrot, gave a quasi-impromptu stage-reading of Hans Christian Andersen’s story "What the Moon Saw" as part of a benefit for a destitute and stranded troupe of provincial players. [186] This "Pierrot"—extinct by the mid-twentieth century—was richly garbed, proud of his mastery of English history and literature (Shakespeare especially), and fiercely pugnacious when encountering his likes. [109], As for fiction, William Faulkner began his career as a chronicler of Pierrot's amorous disappointments and existential anguish in such little-known works as his play The Marionettes (1920) and the verses of his Vision in Spring (1921), works that were an early and revealing declaration of the novelist's "fragmented state".