ns on a tragical ending to a comedy which is
incorporated in the play. The comedy is a familiar one among the
strolling players who perform at village fairs in Italy, in which
Columbina, Pagliaccio, and Arlecchino (respectively the Columbine,
Clown, and Harlequin of our pantomime) take part. Pagliaccio is husband
to Colombina and Arlecchino is her lover, who hoodwinks Pagliaccio.
There is a fourth character, Taddeo, a servant, who makes foolish love
to Columbina and, mingling imbecile stupidity with maliciousness,
delights in the domestic discord which he helps to foment. The first
act of the opera may be looked upon as an induction to the conventional
comedy which comes to an unconventional and tragic end through the fact
that the Clown (Canio) is in real life the husband of Columbine (Nedda)
and is murderously jealous of her; wherefore, forgetting himself in a
mad rage, he kills her and her lover in the midst of the mimic scene.
The lover, however, is not the Harlequin of the comedy, but one of the
spectators whom Canio had vainly sought to identify, but who is
unconsciously betrayed by his mistress in her death agony. The Taddeo
of the comedy is the clown of the company, who in real life entertains
a passion for Nedda, which is repulsed, whereupon he also carries his
part into actuality and betrays Nedda's secret to Canio. It is in the
ingenious interweaving of these threads--the weft of reality with the
warp of simulation--that the chief dramatic value of Leoncavallo's
opera lies.

Actual murder by a man while apparently playing a part in a drama is
older as a dramatic motif than "Pagliacci," and Leoncavallo's
employment of it gave rise to an interesting controversy and a still
more interesting revelation in the early days of the opera. Old
theatre-goers in England and America remember the device as it was
employed in Dennery's "Paillaisse," known on the English stage as
"Belphegor, the Mountebank." In 1874 Paul Ferrier produced a play
entitled "Tabarin," in which Coquelin appeared at the Theatre Francais.
Thirteen years later Catulle Mendes brought out another play called "La
Femme de Tabarin," for which Chabrier wrote the incidental music. The
critics were prompt in charging Mendes with having plagiarized Ferrier,
and the former defended himself on the ground that the incident which
he had employed, of actual murder in a dramatic performance, was
historical and had often been used. This, however, did not prevent h