Commedia dell'arte the "amorosi". The servants or the clowns are referred to as the "zanni" and include characters such as Arlecchino (also known as Harlequin), Brighella, Scapino and Pedrolino. Some of the better known "commedia dell'arte" characters are Pierrot and Pierrette, Pantalone, Il Dottore, Brighella, Il Capitano, Colombina, the "innamorati", Pedrolino, Pulcinella, Sandrone, Scaramuccia (also known as Scaramouche), La Signora, and Tartaglia. In the 17th century as "commedia" became popular in France, the characters of Pierrot, Columbine and Harlequin were refined and became essentially Parisian, according to Green. Each character in Commedia dell'arte has a distinct costume that helps the audience understand
Pierrot of Pierrot" (1900)—culminating, after the turn of the century (and in the year of Couto's death), with "Pierrot-Gravedigger" (1901). For the Spanish-speaking world, according to scholar Emilio Peral Vega, Couto "expresses that first manifestation of Pierrot as an alter ego in a game of symbolic otherness ..." Inspired by the French Symbolists, especially Verlaine, Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet widely acknowledged as the founder of Spanish-American literary Modernism ("modernismo"), placed Pierrot ("sad poet and dreamer") in opposition to Columbine ("fatal woman", the arch-materialistic "lover of rich silk garments, golden jewelry, pearls and diamonds") in his 1898 prose-poem "The Eternal Adventure