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 and 18th centuries such as Claude-François Ménestrier (1631–1705), John Weaver (1673–1760), Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) and Gasparo Angiolini (1731–1803), earned it respectability and attested to the capability of dance to render complex stories and express human emotion. In the Middle Ages, the Mummers Play was a traditional English folk play, based loosely on the Saint George and the Dragon legend, usually performed during Christmas gatherings, which contained the origin of many of the archetypal elements of the pantomime, such as stage fights, coarse humour and fantastic creatures, gender role reversal, and good defeating evil. Precursors of pantomime also included the masque,