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 appeared fairly regularly in English pantomimes (which were originally mute harlequinades but later evolved into the Christmas pantomimes of today; in the nineteenth century, the harlequinade was presented as a "play within a play" during the pantomime), finding his most notable interpreter in Carlo Delpini (1740–1828). His role was uncomplicated: Delpini, according to the popular theater historian, M. Willson Disher, "kept strictly to the idea of a creature so stupid as to think that if he raised his leg level with his shoulder he could use it as a gun." So conceived, Pierrot was easily and naturally displaced by the