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The Queen, accompanied by her family and our officer, put off in her own European boat; the Master of the Ceremonies took his station in the fore-part of the boat, turning his compass to the company, and continued, during the passage, his ridiculous harlequinades with his limbs and broad-sword, as if he had been afflicted with Saint Vitus's dance.
Undoubtedly, the modern authors of harlequinades, finding every part ready carved out for them like the men of a chess-board, have not the merit of inventing them; but their first invention is due to Italy; therefore these fantastic personages, which from one end of Europe to the other afford amusement to every child, and to every grown-up person whom imagination has made childlike, must certainly be considered as the creation of Italians: this I should conceive ought to give them some claim to the art of comedy.
Pasquariel, who comes to buy, is utterly bewildered, and is made the target of both jests and missiles of monsieur of the confectioners, and mademoiselle of the adjoining stall. Possibly the shop scenes in our English Harlequinades may have originated from this.
From 1833 onward he was destined to lead a double life, the one before the eyes of the world, with its gesticulations, its eccentricities, its harlequinades, that left the lookers-on gaping with amazement; and the other his secret life, which he revealed only to Mme.
That kind of humour which shines in the authors of harlequinades and opera-buffa, is very commonly found even among men without education. In these days of carnival, when extravagance and caricature are admitted, the most comic scenes take place between the masks.
The pieces performed at the Vaudeville are little comedies of the sentimental cast, a very extensive collection of portraits of French authors and of a few foreigners, some pastoral pieces, parodies closely bordering on the last new piece represented at one of the principal theatres, charming harlequinades, together with a few pieces, in some of which parade and show are introduced; in others, scenes of low life and vulgarity; but the latter species is now almost abandoned.
Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled in and out of by policemen and pantaloons.
In one piece of this kind, the lover kills the brother of his mistress in the second act; in the third he blows out the brains of his mistress herself upon the stage; her funeral occupies the fourth; in the interval, between the fourth and fifth acts, the actor who performs the lover comes forward, and announces to the audience with the greatest tranquillity in the world, the harlequinades which are to be performed on the following evening; he then reappears in the fifth act, to shoot himself with a pistol.
Ridolfo, with his broken head-piece, was a bluff youth, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, a great eater, grimly silent for the most part. Ugolino had a trenchant humour of the Italian sort. What this may be is best exampled by our harlequinades, in which very much of Boccaccio's bent still survives.
In the little farce of Miss Lucy in Town, 1742, he had, he says, but "a very small Share." Besides these, there are three hasty and flimsy pieces which belong to the early part of 1737. The first of these, Tumble-Down Dick; or, Phaeton in the Suds, was a dramatic sketch in ridicule of the unmeaning Entertainments and Harlequinades of John Rich at Covent Garden.
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