CHAPTER XIV
ITALIAN COMEDY AND THE THEATRES OF THE FAIR
Humanity, like history, repeats itself in its recurring moods. Some years ago London playgoers went rather mad over what was a comparatively new thing to that period, the production of a delightful play without words, namely, MM. Carré and Wormser’s “L’Enfant Prodigue,” acted to perfection by a cast headed by Mlle. Jane May, as Pierrot, with Mlle. Zanfretta as Pierrette.
About two thousand years ago the playgoers of ancient Rome began to go mad about what was then thought to be a really new thing—pantomime acting without words.
The two pantomimists, Bathyllus and Pylades, then set a standard in mimetic representation never achieved before. The two Roman actors were “dancers,” but it was because they were panto-mimes of such brilliant quality that they became famous. Had they been merely dancers they would hardly have made the impression they did.
The modern ballet-dancer—as we understand the word—knows, or should know, that dancing without the ability to mime is not enough to win the fame of a Taglioni, a Grisi, Génée or Karsavina, in ballet.
In opera a voice of the loveliest tone, together with an acquired technical excellence in the use of it, has not the power to move the hearers if expression is lacking. It is the art of the mime which gives expression and significance to the art of the dancer; and it was as dancer-mimes that Pylades and Bathyllus moved their audience to something like worship.
It is, of course, a pretence, this doing without words. I say “pretence” because you cannot do away with words. You may have a “wordless” play, but behind the dumb-show there are still the words. It is so in life. Behind all things is—the Word. Things are only representative of thoughts; and thoughts are inconceivable without words. We may not always speak with tongue and voice; but, if we have the impulse to speak, the instrument matters not, and we may “speak” with our hands. So doing, a look or gesture becomes a word, a series of gestures a sentence.
Now, in ancient Roman days when the ordinary spoken comedy merged first into a sort of musical comedy, and then, at the dawn of the Christian era, into unspoken comedy or pantomime; and when, in addition, all the Greek plays and stories of the Greek and Latin myths were drawn upon for pantomime, some of the original characters stayed and others were incorporated in the general make-up of the purely wordless play as this form of entertainment grew increasingly popular; and among the new-comers was probably Mercury, who became a sort of Harlequin, with gift of invisibility and magic wand.
The spoken comedy of ancient Rome becoming superseded, first by the pantomimes and secondly by the craze for the circus, finally died down with the fall of the Empire itself, and did not revive for some hundreds of years, until the world’s great reawakening, in the Middle Ages, to the wonders of the classic past. But it is more than probable that this dumb comedy, or panto-mime, any more than dancing, did not die.