Pedrolino

Pedrolino, stock character of the Italian commedia dell’arte, a simpleminded and honest servant, usually a young and personable valet. One of the comic servants, or zanni, Pedrolino functioned in the commedia as an unsuccessful lover and a victim of the pranks of his fellow comedians. His costume consisted of a white jacket with a neck ruff and large buttons down the front, loose trousers, and a hat with a wide, floppy brim. Unlike most of the other stock characters, he played without a mask, his face whitened with powder.

Pedrolino became tremendously popular in later French pantomimes as the naive and appealing Pierrot. For 20 years at the Théâtre des Funambules, the great French mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846) played Pierrot as the pathetic, white-robed lover eternally mooning over the beautiful Columbine. The clown hero of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera I pagliacci (1892) was a later use of a Pierrot-like figure.