Pierrot gave kicks and no longer received them; Harlequin now scarcely dared brush his shoulders with his bat; Cassander would think twice before boxing his ears. Deburau seems to have had a predilection for "realistic" pantomime—a predilection that, as will later become evident here, led eventually to calls for Pierrot's expulsion from it. But the pantomime that had the greatest appeal to his public was the ""pantomime-arlequinade-féerie"", sometimes "in the English style" (i.e., with a prologue in which characters were transformed into the "commedia" types). The action unfolded in fairy-land, peopled with good and bad spirits who both advanced and impeded
Pantomime which grew in pomp and spectacle from the 15th to the 17th centuries. The development of English pantomime was also strongly influenced by the continental "commedia dell'arte", a form of popular theatre that arose in Italy in the Early Modern Period. This was a "comedy of professional artists" travelling from province to province in Italy and then France, who improvised and told comic stories that held lessons for the crowd, changing the main character depending on where they were performing. Each "scenario" used some of the same stock characters. These included the "innamorati" (young lovers); the "vecchi" (old men) such