Pierrot as Poet: A Revenant Sampler of the Commedia Dell'arte

In the 19th Century, avant-garde writers and artists developed an affinity with the Commedia dell’arte tradition, especially as it was expressed in mime. They were fascinated by its timeless and archetypal stock characters, its straddling of popular and “high art”, its mixture of comedy and pathos, the performances’ combination of convention and improvisation, the compulsive nature of its impetuous characters and repetitive scenarios, and the expressive, gestural silence of the pantomime, which they related to the blank white of Pierrot’s costume. Like the performers of the commedia themselves, avant-gardists used the genre’s conventions as springboards for their own obsessions or critiques; this chapbook contains a sampling of verse, prose poetry, and drawings inspired by the Commedia del’arte from the 1850s to 1920s, revealing both continuities and changes in the dreams of the cultural underground during those tumultuous decades.

Texts by: Paul Leclercq, Alphonse Allais, Anna Hempstead Branch, Paul Margueritte, Théodore de Banville, Céline Arnauld, Léon Valade, Paul Verlaine, & Arthur Rimbaud
Illustrations by: Henry W. McVickar, Gavarni, Aubrey Beardsley, & Nadar
Translations by: Olchar E. Lindsann & Stuart Merrill

Cover image by Gavarni.

20 pgs on folded 8.5”x11”. Oct., 2025/A.Da. 109/A.H. 195
$1.50 + s/h