Gilles (stock character)

A Zanni, or comic servant, he is a type of bungling clown, stupid, credulous, and lewd—a character that shares little, problematically, with the sensitive figure in Watteau's famous portrait that, until the latter half of the 20th century, bore his name alone.

[6] But this claim of single parentage is weakened by Victor Fournel's admission that Gilles le Niais could have been "a sobriquet of a type, applied to several personages".

An outdoor performance, usually on a trestle-stage, that was contrived to lure spectators inside a theater, the parade was typically comprised, as William Driver Howarth notes, of five standard elements: The focus here is upon that fool who feels the brunt of the mayhem: he was almost invariably Gilles.

In 1756 a three-volume collection of parades was published anonymously as Théâtre des Boulevards,[16][17] and in its pages Gilles acquires a distinct sharpness of outline.

Robert Storey traces it with trenchancy: "A character of more simplicity than sense and of less decency than either, Gilles inherits the ignoble side of the commedia's comic masks.

[25] It proved such a success that Gueullette formed a theater society, built a playhouse at Auteuil, and began receiving "an astonishing concourse of spectators of the first rank" to laugh at the ribaldry of Gilles.

[18] Writers of ambition, such as Charles Collé and Barthélemy-Christophe Fagan, seized upon the entertainment[17] and soon "made it one of the favourite genres performed in the 'théâtres de société', or private playhouses, which were to blossom from about 1730 onwards in aristocratic châteaux and the townhouses of the capital".

[27] Even in a piece like Les Bottes de sept lieues (The Seven-League Boots), the "least substantial" of Beaumarchais' parades, Gilles gives ample evidence of that winning credulity that "makes him a ready victim for Arlequin's comic invention".

[34] As late as the second decade of the 19th century, we find Pierrot's name changing inexplicably to "Gilles" in the middle of the script of a pantomime performed at the Théâtre des Funambules).

[39] At the end of the century, he makes a brief spectral appearance in Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire (overlooked in Arnold Schoenberg's selective immortalizing of that work).