and diffident of moderation, and too eager to thrust forward that which
loses nothing by seclusion.




HARLEQUIN MERCUTIO


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