Like our stock companies today, traveling groups of actors in the Middle Ages had a limited repertory, which then was often but one play.
Such a group of strolling players, from Italy, visited London in the latter part of the seventeenth century, bringing with them a pantomime in which one of the chief characters was Scaramuccia, a representation of a Spanish don who was a coward and a braggart.
His part in the play involved a series of skirmishes with the hero, and his name is, appropriately, the Italian word for “skirmish.”
This character made a great hit with the London audiences, and they took his name, later modified by the French spelling, Scaramouche, into the language, applying it to a person having the characteristics of the boastful coward who was the original Scaramuccia.
