While you Gallants—
Who for dear Missie ne’er can do too much
Make Courtships à la mode de Scarramouch.
and a little later he writes:—
Religion has its Scarramouchys too
Whose hums and has get all the praise and pence.
This Italian troop evidently returned in the following year or in 1677, as we have allusions to Dominique Biancolelli and Fiurelli, ‘the Fam’d Harlequin & Scaramouch’, in the Prologue to Ravenscroft’s Scaramouch a Philosopher, Harlequin a School-Boy, Bravo, Merchant, and Magician, a Comedy after the Italian Manner, produced at the Theatre Royal in 1677, with the migratory Joe Haines as Harlequin, and again in Friendship in Fashion, Act iii, 1, when Lady Squeamish cries: ‘Dear Mr. Malagene, won’t you let us see you act a little something of Harlequin? I’ll swear you do it so naturally, it makes me think I am at the Louvre or Whitehall all the time.’ [Malagene acts.]
[p. 117.] Lucia... Mrs. Norris. In the quarto the name of this actress is spelled Norice. Even if the two characters Lucia and Petronella Elenora were not so entirely different, one being a girl, the second a withered crone, it is obvious that as both appear on the stage at one and the same time Mrs. Norris could not have doubled these rôles. The name Mrs. Norice, however, which is cast for Lucia is undoubtedly a misprint for Mrs. Price. This lady may possibly have been the daughter of Joseph Price, an ‘Inimitable sprightly Actor’, who was dead in 1673. We find Mrs. Price cast for various rôles of no great consequence, similar to Lucia in this play. She sustained Camilla in Otway’s Friendship in Fashion (1678), Violante in Leanerd’s The Counterfeits (1679), Sylvia in The Soldier’s Fortune (1683), Hippolita in D’Urfey’s A Commonwealth of Women (1685), and many more, all of which belong to the ‘second walking-lady’.
Mrs. Norris, who acted Petronella Elenora, was a far more important figure in the theatre. One of those useful and, indeed, indispensable performers, who, without ever attaining any prominent position, contribute more essentially than is often realized to the success of a play, she became well known for her capital personations of old women and dowagers. Wife of the actor Norris, she had been one of the earliest members of Davenant’s company, and her son, known as Jubilee Dicky from his superlative performance in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple (1699), was a leading comedian in the reigns of Anne and the first George. Amongst Mrs. Norris’ many rôles such parts as Lady Dupe, the old lady in Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-All (1667), Goody Rash in Crowne’s The Country Wit (1675), Nuarcha, an amorous old maid, in Maidwell’s The Loving Enemies (1680), Mother Dunwell, the bawd in Betterton’s The Revenge; or, A Match in Newgate (1680), all sufficiently typify her special line, within whose limits she won considerable applause.
Act I: Scene i