Pierrot respectively); and Ernest Dowson wrote the verse-play "Pierrot of the Minute" (1897, illustrated by Beardsley). (The American poet William Theodore Peters, who commissioned Dowson's piece and would play Pierrot in its premiere, published a poetic "Epilogue" for it in 1896, and the composer Sir Granville Bantock would later contribute an orchestral prologue [1908].) One of the gadflies of Aestheticism, W. S. Gilbert, introduced Harlequin and Pierrot as love-struck twin brothers into "Eyes and No Eyes, or The Art of Seeing" (1875), for which Thomas German Reed wrote the music. And he ensured that neither character, contrary to many an Aesthetic
Pierrot masks of "commedia dell'arte", Pierrot now knew no national boundaries. Thanks to the international gregariousness of Modernism, he would soon be found everywhere. Pierrot played a seminal role in the emergence of Modernism in the arts. He was a key figure in every art-form except architecture. With respect to poetry, T. S. Eliot's "breakthrough work", "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), owed its existence to the poems of Jules Laforgue, whose ""ton 'pierrot'"" informed all of Eliot's early poetry. (Laforgue, he said, "was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of