Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/234

 216 P A N P A O Fields, produced there as a rival pantomime The Necro mancer, or History of Dr Faustus, no doubt, says Geneste, &quot;gotten up with superior splendour.&quot; He had as early as 1717 been connected with the production of a piece called Harlequin Executed, and there seem traces of similar enter tainments as far back as the year 1700. But it was the inspiriting influence of French example, and the keen rivalry between the London houses, which in 1723 really established pantomime on the English stage. Rich was at the time fighting a difficult battle against Drury Lane, and his pantomimes at Lincoln s Inn Fields, and after wards at Covent Garden, were extraordinarily successful. He was himself an inimitable harlequin, and from Garrick s lines in his honour it appears that his acting consisted of &quot; frolic gestures &quot; without words. The favourite Drury Lane harlequin was Pinkethman (Pope s &quot;poor Pinky&quot;); readers of The Tatler (No. 188) will remember the ironical nicety with which his merits are weighed against those of his competitor Bullock at the other house. Colley Gibber, when described by Pope as &quot; mounting the wind on grinning dragons,&quot; briskly denied having in his own person or otherwise encouraged such fooleries ; in his Apology, however, he enters into an elaborate defence of himself for having allowed himself to be forced into countenancing the &quot;gin-shops of the stage,&quot; pleading that he was justified by necessity, as Henry IV. was in changing his religion. Another butt of Pope s, Lewis Theobald, was himself the author of more than one pantomime ; their titles already run in the familiar fashion, e.g., A Dramatick Entertainment, call d Harlequin a Sorcerer, with the loves of Pluto and Proserpine (1725 ; the &quot;book of the words,&quot; as it may be called, is in the Dyce Library). In another early pantomime (also in the Dyce Library) called Perseus and Andromeda, ivith the Rape of Colomline, or The Flying Lovers, there are five &quot; inter ludes, three serious and two comic.&quot; This is precisely in the manner of Fielding s dramatic squib against panto mimes, Tumble-down Dick, or Phaeton in the Suds, first acted in 1744, and ironically dedicated to &quot;Mr John Lun,&quot; the name that Rich chose to assume as harlequin. It is a capital bit of burlesque, which seems to have been directly suggested by Pritchard s Fall of Phaeton, produced in 1736. There seems no need to pursue further the history of English pantomime. &quot; Things of this nature are above criticism,&quot; as Mr Machine the &quot; composer &quot; of Phaeton says in Fielding s piece. The attempt was made more than once to free the stage from the incubus of entertainments to which the public persisted in flocking ; in vain Colley Gibber at first laid down the rule of never giving a pantomime together with a good play ; in vain his son Theophilus after him advised the return of part of the entrance money to those who would leave the house before the pantomime began. &quot; It may be questioned,&quot; says the chronicler, &quot; if there was a demand for the return of 2Q in ten yeaYs.&quot; Pantomime carried everything before it when there were several theatres in London, and a dearth of high dramatic talent prevailed in all ; and, allowing for occasional counter-attractions of a not very dissimilar nature, pantomime continued to flourish after the Licensing Act of 1737 had restricted the number of London play houses, and after Garrick s star had risen on the theatrical horizon. He was himself obliged to satisfy the public appetite, and to disoblige the admirers of his art, in defer ence to the drama s most imperious patrons the public at large. It should be noted that in France an attempt was made by NOVERRE (q.v.) to restore pantomime proper to the stage as an independent species, by treating mythological subjects seriously in artificial ballets. This attempt, which of course could not prove permanently successful, met in England also with great applause. In an anonymous tract of the year 1789 in the Dyce Library, attributed by Dyce to Archdeacon Nares (the author of the Glossary}, Noverre s pantomime or ballet Cupid and Psyche is commended as of very extraordinary merit in the choice and execution of the subject. It seems to have been without words. The writer of the tract states that &quot; very lately the serious pantomime has made a new advance in this country, and has gained establishment in an English theatre ; &quot; but he leaves it an open question whether the grand ballet of Medea and Jason (apparently produced a few years earlier, for a burlesque on the subject came out in 1781) was the first complete performance of the kind produced in England. He also notes The Death of Captain Cook, adapted from the Parisian stage, as possessing considerable dramatic merit, and exhibiting &quot; a pleasing picture of savage customs and manners.&quot; To conclude, the chief difference between the earlier and later forms of English pantomime seems to lie in the fact that in the earlier Harlequin pervaded the action, appearing in the comic scenes which alternated throughout the piece with the serious which formed the backbone of the story. Columbine (originally in Italian comedy Harlequin s daughter) was generally a village maiden courted by her adventurous lover, whom village constables pursued, thus performing the laborious part of the policeman of the modern harlequinade. The brilliant scenic effects were of course accumulated, instead of upon the transformation scene, upon the last scene of all, which in modern pantomime follows upon the shadowy chase of the characters called the rally. The commanding influence of the clown, to whom pantaloon is attached as friend, flatterer, and foil, seems to be of comparatively modern growth ; the most famous of his craft was un doubtedly Joseph Grimaldi (1779-1837), of whom Charles Dickens in his youth edited a biography. His memory is above all connected with the famous pantomime of Mother Goose, produced at Covent Garden in 1806. It boots not to enumerate favourites of later days ; the type of Christmas pantomime cherished by a generation now passing away has been preserved from oblivion in Thackeray s Sketches and Travels in London. The species still maintains its hold over sections of the grown-up public, and, though now only cultivated in a few of the leading London theatres, appears at Christmas 1883-84, according to professional statistics, to have multiplied itself in the capital alone by thirteen examples. See Geneste, Account of the English Stage, especially vol. iii. ; Dibdin, Complete History of the Stage, especially vols. ii., iv., anclv. ; I Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber; Fitzgerald, Life of Garrick; Prtilss, Dramaturgic. (A. W. W. ) PANYASIS, of Halicarnassus, a poet of the early half of the 5th century B.C. He was a near relation of the historian Herodotus. According to some his father Polyarchus was brother of Herodotus s father Lyxes; Herodotus, was a sister of Panyasis. He led a revival of the old Ionian epic poetry, and his younger contemporary Antimachus continued the movement. Only insignificant fragments of his works are preserved. He wrote a llern- cleas, in which the whole of the Heracles-myths were embraced in 1 4 books (9000 lines), and another poem in elegiacs, 7000 lines long, called Iwvi/ca, in which he related the story of the Ionic settlements in Asia Minor and the exploits of Codrus and Neleus. Though not much thought of in his own time, he is praised by later critics. He was slain by Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus. PAOLI, PASQUALE DE (1725-1807), generalissimo of Corsica, was the son of Giacinto Paoli, a Corsican patriot, and his mother was descended from the old family of the
 * according to others, Rhceo or Dryo, the mother of