Doran John
Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 1 of 3)
Thus, the Bettertons undoubtedly resided in a "fashionable" locality, and we may fairly conclude that their title to "respectability" has been so far established. That the street long continued to enjoy a certain dignity is apparent from the fact that, in 1664, when Betterton was rousing the town by his acting, as Bosola, in Webster's "Duchess of Malfy," Sir Henry Herbert established his office of Master of the Revels, in Tothill Street. It was not till the next century that the decline of this street set in. Southern, the dramatist, resided and died there, but it was in rooms over an oilman's shop; and Edmund Burke lived modestly at the east end, before those mysterious thousands were amassed by which he was enabled to establish himself as a country gentleman.
Galt, and the other biographers of Betterton, complain of the paucity of materials for the life of so great an actor. Therein is his life told; or rather Pepys tells it more correctly in an entry in his diary for October 1662, in which he says – "Betterton is a very sober, serious man, and studious, and humble, following of his studies; and is rich already with what he gets and saves." There is the great and modest artist's whole life – earnestness, labour, lack of presumption, and the recompense. At the two ends of his career, two competent judges pronounced him to be the best actor they had ever seen. The two men were Pepys, who was born in the reign of Charles I., and Pope, who died in the reign of George II. This testimony refers to above a century, during which time the stage knew no such player as he. Pope, indeed, notices that old critics used to place Hart on an equality with him; this is, probably, an error for Harris, who had a party at court among the gay people there who were oppressed by the majesty of Betterton.30 Pepys alludes to this partisanship in 1663. "This fellow" (Harris), he remarks, "grew very proud of late, the King and everybody else crying him up so high, and that above Betterton, he being a more aery man, as he is, indeed."
From the day of Betterton's bright youth to that of his old age, the sober seriousness of the "artist," for which Pepys vouches, never left him. With the dress he assumed, for the night, the nature of the man – be it "Hamlet" or "Thersites," "Valentine" or "Sir John Brute," of whom he was to be the representative. In the "green-room," as on the stage, he was, for the time being, subdued or raised to the quality of him whose likeness he had put on. In presence of the audience, he was never tempted by applause to forget his part, or himself. Once only, Pepys registers, with surprise, an incident which took place at the representation of "Mustapha," in 1667. It was "bravely acted," he says, "only both Betterton and Harris could not contain from laughing, in the midst of a most serious part, from the ridiculous mistake of one of the men upon the stage; which I did not like."
Then for his humility, I find the testimony of Pepys sufficiently corroborated. It may have been politic in him, as a young man, to repair to Mr. Cowley's lodgings in town, and ask from that author his particular views with regard to the Colonel Jolly in the "Cutter of Coleman Street," which had been intrusted to the young actor; but the politic humility of 1661 was, in fact, the practised modesty of his life. In the very meridian of his fame, he, and Mrs. Barry also, were as ready to take instruction respecting the characters of Jaffier and Belvidera, from poor battered Otway, as they subsequently were from that very fine gentleman, Mr. Congreve, when they were cast for the hero and heroine of his comedies. Even to bombastic Rowe, who hardly knew his own reasons for language put on the lips of his characters, they listened with deference; and, at another period, "Sir John and Lady Brute" were not undertaken by them till they had conferred with the author, solid Vanbrugh.
The mention of these last personages reminds me of a domestic circumstance of interest respecting Betterton. He and Mrs. Barry acted the principal characters in "The Provoked Wife;" the part of Lady Fancyfull was played by Mrs. Bowman. This young lady was the adopted child of the Bettertons, and the daughter of a friend (Sir Frederick Watson, Bart.) whose indiscretion or ill-luck had scattered that fortune the laying of the foundation of which is recorded by Pepys. To the sire Betterton had intrusted the bulk of his little wealth as a commercial venture to the East Indies. A ruinous failure ensued, and I know of nothing which puts the private life of the actor in so pleasing a light, as the fact of his adopting the child of the wholly ruined man who had nearly ruined him. He gave her all he had to bestow, careful instruction in his art; and the lady became an actress of merit. This merit, added to considerable personal charms, won for her the homage of Bowman, a player who became, in course of time, the father of the stage, though he never grew, confessedly, old. In after years, he would converse freely enough of his wife and her second father, Betterton; but if you asked the carefully-dressed Mr. Bowman anything with respect to his age, no other reply was to be had from him than – "Sir, it is very well!"
From what has been previously stated, it will be readily believed that the earnestness of Betterton continued to the last. Severely disciplined, as he had been by Davenant, he subjected himself to the same discipline to the very close; and he was not pleased to see it disregarded or relaxed by younger actors whom late and gay "last nights" brought ill and incompetent to rehearsal. Those actors might have reaped valuable instruction out of the harvest of old Thomas's experience and wisdom, had they been so minded.
Young actors of the present time – time when pieces run for months and years; when authors prescribe the extent of the run of their own dramas, and when nothing is "damned" by a patient public – our young actors have little idea of the labours undergone by the great predecessors who gave glory to the stage and dignity to the profession. Not only was Betterton's range of characters unlimited, but the number he "created" was never equalled by any subsequent actor of eminence – namely, about one hundred and thirty! In some single seasons he studied and represented no less than eight original parts – an amount of labour which would shake the nerves of the stoutest among us now.
His brief relaxation was spent on his little Berkshire farm, whence he once took a rustic to Bartholomew Fair for a holiday. The master of the puppet-show declined to take money for admission – "Mr. Betterton," he said, "is a brother actor!" Roger, the rustic, was slow to believe that the puppets were not alive; and so similar in vitality appeared to him, on the same night, at Drury Lane, the Jupiter and Alcmena in "Amphitryon," played by Betterton and Mrs. Barry, that on being asked what he thought of them, Roger, taking them for puppets, answered, "They did wonderfully well for rags and sticks."
Provincial engagements were then unknown. Travelling companies, like that of Watkins, visited Bath, a regular company from town going thither only on royal command; but magistrates ejected strollers from Newbury; and Reading would not tolerate them, even out of respect for Mr. Betterton. At Windsor, however, there was a troop fairly patronised, where, in 1706, a Mistress Carroll, daughter of an old Parliamentarian, was awakening shrill echoes by enacting Alexander the Great. The lady was a friend of Betterton's, who had in the previous year created the part of Lovewell in her comedy of the "Gamester." The powers of Mrs. Carroll had such an effect on Mr. Centlivre, one of the cooks to Queen Anne, that he straightway married her; and when, a few months later, Betterton played Sir Thomas Beaumont, in the lady's comedy, "Love at a Venture,"31 his friend, a royal cook's wife, furnished but an indifferent part for a royal cook's son.
In other friendships cultivated by the great actor, and in the influences which he exerted over the most intellectual men who were his friends, we may discover proofs of Betterton's moral worth and mental power. Glorious Thomas not only associated with "Glorious John," but became his critic, – one to whom Dryden listened with respect, and to whose suggestions he lent a ready acquiescence. In the poet's "Spanish Friar," there was a passage which spoke of kings' bad titles growing good by time; a supposed fact which was illustrated by the lines —
"So, when clay's burned for a hundred years,
It starts forth china!"
The player fearlessly pronounced this passage "mean," and it was forthwith cancelled by the poet.
Intimate as this incident shows Betterton to have been with Dryden, there are others which indicate a closer intimacy of the player with Tillotson. The divine was a man who placed charity above rubrics, and discarded bigotry as he did perukes. He could extend a friendly hand to the benevolent Arian, Firmin, and welcome, even after he entered the archiepiscopal palace at Lambeth, such a visitor as the great actor Betterton. Did objection come from the rigid and ultra-orthodox? – the prelate might have reminded them that it was not so long since a bishop was hanged, and that the player was a far more agreeable and, in every respect, a worthier man than the unlucky diocesan of Waterford. However this may be questioned or conceded, it is indisputable that when Tillotson and Betterton met, the greatest preacher and the greatest player of the day were together. I think, too, that the divine was, in the above respect, somewhat indebted to the actor. We all remember the story how Tillotson was puzzled to account for the circumstance that his friend the actor exercised a vaster power over human sympathies and antipathies than he had hitherto done as a preacher. The reason was plain enough to Thomas Betterton. "You, in the pulpit," said he, "only tell a story: I, on the stage, show facts." Observe, too, what a prettier way this was of putting it than that adopted by Garrick when one of his clerical friends was similarly perplexed. "I account for it in this way," said the latter Roscius: "You deal with facts as if they were fictions; I deal with fictions as if I had faith in them as facts." Again, what Betterton thus remarked to Tillotson was a modest comment, which Colley Cibber has rendered perfect in its application, in the words which tell us that "the most a Vandyke can arrive at is to make his Portraits of Great Persons seem to think. A Shakspeare goes farther yet, and tells you what his Pictures thought. A Betterton steps beyond 'em both, and calls them from the grave, to breathe and be themselves again in Feature, Speech, and Motion." That Tillotson profited by the comment of Betterton – more gracefully than Bossuet did by the actors, whom he consigned, as such, to the nethermost Gehenna – is the more easily to be believed, from the fact that he introduced into the pulpit the custom of preaching from notes. Thenceforth, he left off "telling his story," as from a book, and, having action at command, could the nearer approach to the "acting of facts."
"Virgilium tantum vidi!" Pope said this of Dryden, whom he once saw when a boy. He was wont to say of Betterton, that he had known him from his own boyhood upwards, till the actor died, in 1710, when the poet was twenty-two years of age. The latter listened eagerly to the old traditions which the player narrated of the earlier times. Betterton was warrant to him, on the authority of Davenant, from whom the actor had it, that there was no foundation for the old legend which told of an ungenerous rivalry between Shakspeare and Old Ben. The player who had been as fearless with Dryden as Socrates was with his friend Euripides – "judiciously lopping" redundant nonsense or false and mean maxims, as Dryden himself confesses – was counsellor, rather than critic or censor, with young Pope. The latter, at the age of twelve years, had written the greater portion of an imitative epic poem, entitled Alcander, Prince of Rhodes. I commend to artists in search of a subject the incident of Pope, at fifteen or sixteen, showing this early effort of his Muse to Betterton. It was a poem which abounded in dashing exaggerations, and fair imitations of the styles of the then greater English poets. There was a dramatic vein about it, however, or the player would not have advised the bard to convert his poem into a play. The lad excused himself. He feared encountering either the law of the drama or the taste of the town; and Betterton left him to his own unfettered way. The actor lived to see that the boy was the better judge of his own powers, for young Pope produced his Essay on Criticism the year before Betterton died. A few years later the poet rendered any possible fulfilment of the player's counsel impossible, by dropping the manuscript of Alcander into the flames. Atterbury had less esteem for this work than Betterton. "I am not sorry your Alcander is burnt," he says; "but had I known your intentions I would have interceded for the first page, and put it, with your leave, among my curiosities."
Pope remembered the player with affection. For some time after Betterton's decease the print-shops abounded with mezzotinto engravings of his portrait by Kneller. Of this portrait the poet himself executed a copy, which still exists. His friendly intercourse with the half-mad Irish artist, Jervas, is well known. When alone, Pope was the poet; with Jervas, and under his instructions, he became an artist – in his way, but yet an artist – if a copier of portraits deserves so lofty a name. In 1713, he writes to Gay: – "You may guess in how uneasy state I am, when every day the performances of others appear more beautiful and excellent, and my own more despicable. I have thrown away three Dr. Swifts, each of which was once my vanity, two Lady Bridgewaters, a Duchess of Montague, half-a-dozen Earls, and one Knight of the Garter." He perfected, however, and kept his portrait of Betterton, from Kneller, which passed into the collection of his friend Murray, and which is now in that of Murray's descendant, the Earl of Mansfield.
Kneller's portrait of Betterton is enshrined among goodly company at princely Knole – the patrimony of the Sackvilles. It is there, with that of his fellow-actor, Mohun, his friend Dryden, and his great successor Garrick – the latter being the work of Reynolds. The grand old Kentish Hall is a fitting place for such a brotherhood.
This master of his art had the greatest esteem for a silent and attentive audience. It was easy, he used to say, for any player to rouse the house, but to subdue it, render it rapt and hushed to, at the most, a murmur, was work for an artist; and in such effects no one approached him. And yet the rage of Othello was more "in his line" than the tenderness of Castalio; but he touched the audience in his rage. Harris competed with him for a brief period, but if he ever excelled him it was only in very light comedy. The dignity and earnestness of Betterton were so notorious and so attractive, that people flocked only to hear him speak a prologue, while brother actors looked on, admired, and despaired.
Age, trials, infirmity, never damped his ardour. Even angry and unsuccessful authors, who railed against the players who had brought their dramas to grief, made exception of Betterton. He was always ready, always perfect, always anxious to effect the utmost within his power. Among the foremost of his merits may be noticed his freedom from all jealousy, and his willingness to assist others up the height which he had himself surmounted. That he played Bassanio to Dogget's Shylock is, perhaps, not saying much by way of illustration; but that he acted Horatio to Powell's Lothario; that he gave up Jupiter (Amphitryon) and Valentine, two of his original parts, to Wilks, and even yielded Othello, one of the most elaborate and exquisite of his "presentments," to Thurmond, are fair instances in point. When Bowman introduced young Barton Booth to "old Thomas," the latter welcomed him heartily, and after seeing his Maximus, in "Valentinian," recognised in him his successor. At that moment the town, speculating on the demise of their favourite, had less discernment. They did not know whether Verbruggen, with his voice like a cracked drum, or idle Powell, with his lazy stage-swing, might aspire to the sovereignty; but they were slow to believe in Booth, who was not the only young actor who was shaded in the setting glories of the sun of the English theatre.
When Colley Cibber first appeared before a London audience he was a "volunteer" who went in for practice; and he had the misfortune, on one occasion, to put the great master out by some error on his own part. Betterton subsequently inquired the young man's name and the amount of his salary; and hearing that the former was Cibber, and that, as yet, he received nothing, "Put him down ten shillings a week," said Betterton, "and forfeit him five." Colley was delighted. It was placing his foot on the first round of the ladder; and his respect for "Mr. Betterton" was unbounded. Indeed there were few who did not pay him some homage. The King himself delighted to honour him. Charles, James, Queen Mary, and Queen Anne, sent him assurances of their admiration; but King William admitted him to a private audience, and when the patentees of Drury Lane were, through lack of general patronage, suggesting the expediency of a reduction of salaries, great Nassau placed in the hands of Betterton the licence which freed him from the thraldom of the Drury tyrants, and authorised him to open the second theatre erected in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Next to his most sacred Majesty, perhaps the most formidable personage in the kingdom, in the eyes of the actors, was the Lord Chamberlain, who was master of the very lives of the performers, having the absolute control of the stage whereby they lived. This potentate, however, seemed ever to favour Betterton. When unstable, yet useful, Powell suddenly abandoned Drury Lane, to join the company in Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Chamberlain did not deign to notice the offence; but when, all as suddenly, the capricious and unreliable Powell abandoned the house in the Fields, and betook himself again to that in the Lane – the angry Lord Chamberlain sent a "messenger" after him to his lodgings, and clapped the unoffending Thespian, for a couple of days, in the Gate House.
While Powell was with Betterton, the latter produced the "Fair Penitent," by Rowe, Mrs. Barry being the Calista. When the dead body of Lothario was lying decently covered on the stage, Powell's dresser, Warren, lay there for his master, who, requiring the services of the man in his dressing-room, and not remembering where he was, called aloud for him so repeatedly, and at length so angrily, that Warren leapt up in a fright, and ran from the stage. His cloak, however, had got hooked to the bier, and this he dragged after him, sweeping down, as he dashed off in his confusion, table, lamps, books, bones, and upsetting the astounded Calista herself. Irrepressible laughter convulsed the audience, but Betterton's reverence for the dignity of tragedy was shocked, and he stopped the piece in its full career of success, until the town had ceased to think of Warren's escapade.
I know of but one man who has spoken of Betterton at all disparagingly – old Anthony Aston. But even that selfish cynic is constrained so to modify his censure as to convert it into praise. When Betterton was approaching threescore years and ten, Anthony could have wished that he "would have resigned the part of Hamlet to some young actor who might have personated, though," mark the distinction, "not have acted it better." Aston's grounds for his wish are so many justifications of Betterton; "for," says Anthony, "when he threw himself at Ophelia's feet, he appeared a little too grave for a young student just from the University of Wittenberg." "His repartees," Anthony thinks, "were more those of a philosopher than the sporting flashes of young Hamlet;" as if Hamlet were not the gravest of students, and the most philosophical of young Danes! Aston caricatures the aged actor only again to commend him. He depreciates the figure which time had touched, magnifies the defects, registers the lack of power, and the slow sameness of action; hints at a little remains of paralysis, and at gout in the now thick legs, profanely utters the words "fat" and "clumsy," and suggests that the face is "slightly pock-marked." But we are therewith told that his air was serious, venerable, and majestic; and that though his voice was "low and grumbling, he could turn it by an artful climax which enforced an universal attention even from the fops and orange-girls." Cibber declares that there was such enchantment in his voice alone, the multitude no more cared for sense in the words he spoke, "than our musical connoisseurs think it essential in the celebrated airs of an Italian Opera." Again, he says, "Could how Betterton spoke be as easily known as what he spoke, then might you see the Muse of Shakspeare in her triumph." "I never," says honest Colley, "heard a line in tragedy come from Betterton, wherein my judgment, my ear, and my imagination were not fully satisfied, which, since his time, I cannot equally say of any one actor whatsoever." This was written in 1740, the year before little David took up the rich inheritance of "old Thomas" – whose Hamlet, however, the latter actor could hardly have equalled. The next great pleasure to seeing Betterton's Hamlet is to read Cibber's masterly analysis of it. A couple of lines reveal to us the leading principle of his Brutus. "When the Betterton-Brutus," says Colley, "was provoked in his dispute with Cassius, his spirit flew only to his eye; his steady look alone supplied that terror which he disdained an intemperance in his voice should rise to." In his least effective characters, he, with an exception already noted, excelled all other actors; but in characters such as Hamlet and Othello he excelled himself. Cibber never beheld his equal for at least two-and-thirty years after Betterton's death, when, in 1741, court and city, with doctors of divinity and enthusiastic bishops, were hurrying to Goodman's Fields, to witness the Richard of the gentleman from Ipswich, named Garrick.
During the long career of Betterton he played at Drury Lane, Dorset Gardens, Lincoln's Inn Fields (in both theatres), and at the Opera-house in the Haymarket. The highest salary awarded to this great master of his art was £5 per week, which included £1 by way of pension to his wife, after her retirement in 1694. In consideration of his merits, he was allowed to take a benefit in the season of 1708-9, when the actor had an ovation. In money for admission, he received, indeed, only £76; but in complimentary guineas, he took home with him to Russell Street £450 more. The terms in which the Tatler spoke of him living, – the tender and affectionate, manly and heart-stirring passages in which the same writer bewailed him when dead, – are eloquent and enduring testimonies of the greatness of an actor, who was the glory of our stage, and of the worth of a man whose loss cost his sorrowing widow her reason.32 "Decus et Dolor." "The grace and the grief of the theatre." It is well applied to him who laboured incessantly, lived irreproachably, and died in harness, universally esteemed and regretted. He was the jewel of the English stage; and I never think of him, and of some to whom his example was given in vain, without saying, with Overbury, "I value a worthy actor by the corruption of some few of the quality, as I would do gold in the ore; I should not mind the dross, but the purity of the metal."
The feeling of the English public towards Betterton is in strong contrast with that of the French towards their great actor, Baron. Both men grew old in the public service, but both were not treated with equal respect in the autumn of that service. Betterton, at seventy, was upheld by general esteem and crowned by general applause. When Baron, at seventy, was playing Nero, the Paris pit audience, longing for novelty, hissed him as he came down the stage. The fine old player calmly crossed his arms, and looking his rude assailants in the face, exclaimed, "Ungrateful pit! 'twas I who taught you!" That was the form of Baron's exit; and Clairon was as cruelly driven from the scene when her dimming eyes failed to stir the audience with the old, strange, and delicious terror. In other guise did the English public part with their old friend and servant, the noble actor, fittingly described in the licence granted to him by King William, as "Thomas Betterton, Gentleman."
