“A very equal well-proportion’d pair”: creative collaboration in the careers of restoration actress, Mrs Norris, and playwright, Aphra Behn

Despite a career spanning twenty-five years little is known about one of England’s earliest professional actresses. Drawing upon new archival evidence, this study reveals the biographical details of a woman cited in cast lists as “Mrs Norris” as early as 1662. Not only was Norris the matriarch of an acting family that held a presence on the stage until 1737, she also won “considerable applause” for her comic displays of old age. Her performance of peripheral characters who harbour great bitterness and resentment towards a play’s youthful protagonists spoke to a fashionable contemporary aversion to seniority. Appearing most often in the plays of Aphra Behn, Norris’s career culminated in comic displays of older women in productions of “The Revenge” (1680) and “The Second Part of the Rover” (1681). By examining the contributions of a supporting player, as opposed to that of leading actors, this study expands our understanding of the broad network of significations at play through the character development of less studied roles. I argue that whilst Behn demonstrated sympathy for characters, particularly women, who are rejected wholesale by the theatrical mainstream, she consistently relies on an audience’s contempt for Norris’s characterisations of seniority to secure a dependable laugh.