Pantomime is acting on the stage without speech, using only posture, gesture, bodily movement, and exaggerated facial expression to mime ("mimic") a character's actions and to express a character's feelings.
Elaborate pantomimes, halfway between drama and dance, were
put on in ancient Greece and Rome, and the form was revived, often for comic purposes, in Renaissance Europe.
Mimed dramas enjoyed a vogue in
eighteenth-century England, and in the present century the silent movies encouraged a brief revival of the art and produced a superlative pantomimist in
Charlie Chaplin.
Miming survived into the present with French masters such as Marcel Marceau in the theater and Jacques Tati in the cinema.
England still retains the institution of the Christmas pantomime, which enacts children's nursery rhymes, or familiar children's stories such as "Puss in Boots," in a blend of miming, music, and dialogue.
In America and many other countries,
circus clowns are expert pantomimists, and miming has recently been revived
in the theater for the deaf.
A dumb show is an episode of pantomime introduced into a spoken
play.
It was a common device in Elizabethan drama, in imitation of its use by Seneca, the Roman writer of tragedies.
Two well-known dumb shows are the
preliminary episode, summarizing the action to come, of the play-within-a-
play in Hamlet, and the miming of the banishment of the Duchess and
her family in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.
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