Attempts have been made to identify the personages depicted here with known actors of Watteau's day. However, the only contemporary explanation of the picture dates from ten years after Watteau's death. In a notice in the court paper Mercure de France, the subject is identified as French comedians playing a tragicomedy. Such a hybrid theatrical genre would account for the juxtaposition of the noble group at left—which seems to be caricatured—and the bourgeois figure at right, which has been called the comic figure Crispin. The painting is a very late work of 1720–21. It belonged to Watteau's friend, patron, and publicist Jean de Jullienne and later to the German admirer of Watteau's work, Frederick the Great of Prussia. While the picture has been cut down on all sides and the paint is thin, the spirited expressions and delicate rendering of the costumes remain.

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