partner, makes the Tarantella an important feature of his repertoire. The trio in la Forlana was completed with the assistance of Mlle. Louise La Gai, as Columbina, Madame Saracco-Brignole and Sr. Mascagni representing Doctor Pantalone and Harlequin, respectively, completing the little cast.
As a stock character in other pantomimes and farces, Doctor Pantalone’s characteristics, both mental and physical, are so clearly defined that he has the reality of an acquaintance. In brief, he represents self-sureness and self-importance, with a weakness of revealing complete misinformation through indulgence in a habit of correcting the statements of others. Light-headed Columbina and mischief-making Harlequin are their familiar selves. The Forlana is a composition essentially of tableaux, with steps of the dance serving to lead from one picture to another.
Harlequin’s freedom with Columbina is resented by the elderly husband, who threatens the intruder with a cane. The frivolous young people dance away, after a mock-heroic pretence by Harlequin of protecting his inamorata from her husband. They begin a series of groups made to tantalise the dotard, whose possession of the young woman has clearly ceased to exist. Harlequin embraces her, gazes into her eyes, raises her to his shoulder, kisses her, and is otherwise familiar, while Pantalone storms and pleads. Perching aloft with her partner’s support in the various ways known to dancers of an acrobatic genius, Columbina reaches out to her spouse the tip of a finger, in smiling sarcasm. Pantalone later is reduced to kissing the little foot that from time to time kicks upward as the lovers play. When at length even that is the occasion of a dignified protest from Harlequin, the defeated one withdraws from an unequal competition and gives the couple his blessing.
Pantalone, apart from his relation to the Forlana, is one of a group of characters attached to the various Italian states as allegorical representatives. To Sardinia, for instance, pertains a soldierly looking youth called Maschara Sarda. Bologna has its Doctor Balanzone; Florence, Stenterello; Rome, Rugantino; Naples, Pulcinella—and this is to enumerate only a few out of a number slightly in excess of the number of states. These mythical beings are neither heroes nor caricatures, nor are they supposed at all to portray the qualities typical of the population they represent. Their associations seem to be without underlying significance, but they are none the less indissoluble in the mind of the Italian. Those who have most cause to love them are the writers of popular comedies; the simple device of putting a Balanzone or a Rugantino among the characters of the play makes possible a direct expression of ideas purporting to be those of the state itself. Such lines, regardless of the literary tone of the play, are customarily delivered in the local dialect of the region represented.
It is the Tarantella that the world at large accepts as Italy’s national dance; and rightly enough, since there is none whose popularity is more nearly general through the land. It is rather identified with Naples. There it is said to be the amusement that the younger working people think of first, when leisure allows the thought of any amusement at all; but it is very popular, too, through the South.
It is a breezy, animated dance, varied with pantomime not very profound, to be sure, but at least merry
