The first time that Mercutio fell upon the English stage, there fell with
him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally, for English
drama. That manner of man--Arlecchino, or Harlequin--had outlived his
playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown. A little of
Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little in the father of the Shrew,
but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinate Tranio
in the other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, than the
smouldering of the old man. Arlecchino frolics in and out of the tragedy
and comedy of Shakespeare, until he thus dies in his lightest, his
brightest, his most vital shape.
Arlecchino, the tricksy and shifty spirit, the contriver, the busybody,
the trusty rogue, the wonder-worker, the man in disguise, the mercurial
one, lives on buoyantly in France to the age of Moliere. He is officious
and efficacious in the skin of Mascarille and Ergaste and Scapin; but he
tends to be a lacquey, with a reference rather to Antiquity and the Latin
comedy than to the Middle Ages, as on the English stage his mere memory
survives differently to a later age in the person of "Charles, his
friend." What convinces me that he virtually died with Mercutio is
chiefly this--that this comrade of Romeo's lives so keenly as to be fully
capable of the death that he takes at Tybalt's sword-point; he lived
indeed, he dies indeed. Another thing that marks the close of a career
of ages is his loss of his long customary good luck. Who ever heard of
Arlecchino unfortunate before, at fault with his sword-play, overtaken by
tragedy? His time had surely come. The gay companion was to bleed;
Tybalt's sword had made a way. 'Twas not so deep as a well nor so wide
as a church-door, but it served.
Some confusion comes to pass among the typical figures of the primitive
Italian play, because Harlequin, on that conventional little stage of the
past, has a hero's place, whereas when he interferes in human affairs he
is only the auxiliary. He might be lover and bridegroom on the primitive
stage, in the comedy of these few and unaltered types; but when
Pantaloon, Clown, and Harlequin play with really human beings, then
Harlequin can be no more than a friend of the hero, the friend of the
bridegroom. The five figures of the old stage dance attendance; they
play around the business of those who have the dignity of mortality;
they, poor immortals--a clown who does not die, a pantaloon never far
from death, who yet does not die, a Columbine who never attains
Desdemona's death of innocence or Juliet's death of rectitude and
passion--flit in the backward places of the stage.
Ariel fulfils his office, and is not of one kind with those he serves. Is
there a memory of Harlequin in that delicate figure? Something of the
subservient immortality, of the light indignity, proper to Pantaleone,
Brighella, Arlecchino, Colombina, and the Clown, hovers away from the
stage when Ariel is released from the trouble of human things.
Immortality, did I say? It was immortality until Mercutio fell. And if
some claim be made to it still because Harlequin has transformed so many
scenes for the pleasure of so many thousand children, since Mercutio
died, I must reply that our modern Harlequin is no more than a
_marionnette_; he has returned whence he came. A man may play him, but
he is--as he was first of all--a doll. From doll-hood Arlecchino took
life, and, so promoted, flitted through a thousand comedies, only to be
again what he first was; save that, as once a doll played the man, so now
a man plays the doll. It is but a memory of Arlecchino that our children
see, a poor statue or image endowed with mobility rather than with life.
With Mercutio, vanished the light heart that had given to the serious
ages of the world an hour's refuge from the unforgotten burden of
responsible conscience; the light heart assumed, borrowed, made
dramatically the spectator's own. We are not serious now, and no heart
now is quite light, even for an hour.