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 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