The audience is beginning to suspect that this is no longer acting. The women draw back frightened, overturning the benches. Silvio is trying to push his way through to the stage.
Nedda makes a dash to escape into the audience. Canio pursues and catches up with her.
"Take that—and—that!" (He stabs her in the back.) "Di morte negli spasimi lo dirai" (In the last death agony, thou'lt call his name).
"Soccorso ... Silvio!" (Help! Help!—Silvio!)
A voice from the audience cries, "Nedda!" A man has nearly reached the spot where she lies dead. Canio turns savagely, leaps at him. A steel blade flashes. Silvio falls dead beside Nedda.
"Gesummaria!" shriek the women; "Ridi Pagliaccio!" sob the instruments of the orchestra. Canio stands stupefied. The knife falls from his hand:
"La commedia è finita" (The comedy is ended).
There are plays and stories in which, as in "Pagliacci," the drama on a mimic stage suddenly becomes real life, so that the tragedy of the play changes to the life-tragedy of one or more of the characters. "Yorick's Love," in which I saw Lawrence Barrett act, and of which I wrote a review for Harper's Weekly, was adapted by William D. Howells from "Drama Nuevo" by Estébanez, which is at least fifty years older than "Pagliacci." In it the actor Yorick really murders the actor, whom in character, he is supposed to kill in the play. In the plot, as in real life, this actor had won away the love of Yorick's wife, before whose eyes he is slain by the wronged husband. About 1883, I should say, I wrote a story, "A Performance of Othello," for a periodical published by students of Columbia University, in which the player of Othello, impelled by jealousy, actually kills his wife, who is the Desdemona, and then, as in the play, slays himself. Yet, although the motif is an old one, this did not prevent Catulle Mendès, who himself had been charged with plagiarizing, in "La Femme de Tabarin," Paul Ferrier's earlier play, "Tabarin," from accusing Leoncavallo of plagiarizing "Pagliacci" from "La Femme de Tabarin," and from instituting legal proceedings to enjoin the performance of the opera in Brussels. Thereupon Leoncavallo, in a letter to his publisher, stated that during his childhood at Montalto a jealous player killed his wife after a performance, that his father was the judge at the criminal's trial—circumstances which so impressed the occurrence on his mind that he was led to adapt the episode for his opera. Catulle Mendès accepted the explanation and withdrew his suit.
There has been some discussion regarding the correct translation of "Pagliacci." It is best rendered as "Clowns," although it only is necessary to read in Italian cyclopedias the definition of Pagliaccio to appreciate Philip Hale's caution that the character is not a clown in the restricted circus sense. Originally the word, which is the same as the French paillasse, signified a bed of straw, then was extended to include an upholstered under-mattress, and finally was applied to the buffoon in the old Italian comedy, whose costume generally was striped like the ticking or stuff, of which the covering of a mattress is made.