Note 29 — THE MAKER OF DREAMS[28] A FANTASY IN ONE ACT By OLIPHANT DOWN

Pierrot's ancestry is not so clearly Italian as the others. Pedrolino, a mischievous, intriguing buffoon, Pagliaccio, a madcap who wore a painted hat of white wool and a garment of white linen, whose face was covered with flour, and who wore a white mask, have both been cited as types that may have contributed to the figure of Pierrot, whose name makes its first appearance in Molière's play, Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre. Not that this dull servant of Molière's is in any sense the counterpart of the Pierrot of our day who is by turns languishing or vivacious, impish or poetic, but never doltish. From the seventeenth century, Pierrot, his costume borrowed from the Neapolitan mask, Pulcinella, became more and more prominent on both the Italian and the French stage. It was a certain French pantomime actor by the name of Deburau who died a few years before the middle of the nineteenth century, who gave Pierrot the prominence that he enjoys to-day and who dressed the character in the guise that he most often assumes on the modern stage. "The short woolen tunic, with its great buttons and its narrow sleeves, that overhung the hands, soon became an ample calico blouse with wide long sleeves like those of the Italian Pagliaccio. He suppressed the collar, which cast an upward shadow from the footlights on to his face, and interfered with the play of his countenance, and instead of the white skull-cap of his predecessor, he emphasized the pallor of his face by framing it in a cap of black velvet."[29] The Pierrot of our fancy[30] comes to us also through the pictures of Watteau and Pater and the designs of Aubrey Beardsley.