Pantalone

Pantalone, one of the stock characters, or ‘masks’, of the commedia dell'arte, from which is derived the Pantaloon of the English harlequinade. In both capacities he retained his place in the scenario as the father or guardian of the young girl, opposing her marriage to the young lover because he wished (as her father) to marry her to one of his friends, or (as her guardian) to marry her himself. Invariably represented as an elderly Venetian, he wore a long black coat over a red suit, with Turkish slippers, a long pointed beard, and a skullcap. By turns avaricious, suspicious, amorous, and gullible, he was the butt of the zanni, who finally outwitted him and brought the young couple together. The character came into the English theatre through the visits of Italian comedians to London, and in Elizabethan times ‘pantaloon’ became a generic term for any old man, as in Shakespeare's reference to the sixth age of man (As You Like It, II. vii): ‘the lean and slipper'd pantaloon With spectacles on nose and pouch on side’; but with the development of Weaver's ‘Italian Night Scenes’ the name was again limited to a specific role. In the harlequinade he was the father or guardian of Columbine, who, with the help of Clown, finally succeeded in eloping with Harlequin. English Pantaloons soon discarded the long coat and the skullcap, and James Barnes, one of the earliest and most famous Pantaloons of the early 19th century, played the part in short striped knee-breeches, a matching jacket with a short cape, and a fringe of beard with a stiff pigtail sticking up behind.