Gilles (stock character) disparate Foire genres—puppet shows, comic operas, and every imaginable permutation of both mute and spoken theater—his character began inevitably to coarsen. It is therefore not surprising that Colombine should call Pierrot a "Gille" in Alexis Piron's "L'Ane d'Or" (The Golden Ass, 1725) or that a police report detailing the suspicious goings-on in Lesage's prologue to "Arlequin, valet de Merlin" (Harlequin, Merlin's Valet, 1718) should refer to Pierrot indiscriminately as "Pierrot" or as "Gilles". (It should also not be surprising that, when the illustrious Pierrot Hamoche was forbidden, in 1721, to play "opéras-comiques", impelling Lesage and Dorneval to lay his Pierrot
Pantomime of the music and shout out phrases to the performers. Pantomime has a long theatrical history in Western culture dating back to classical theatre. It developed partly from the 16th century commedia dell'arte tradition of Italy and other European and British stage traditions, such as 17th-century masques and music hall. An important part of the pantomime, until the late 19th century, was the harlequinade. Outside Britain, the word "pantomime" is often understood to mean miming, rather than the theatrical form discussed here. The word pantomime was adopted from the Latin word "pantomimus", which in turn derives from the Greek word