Thomas Betterton
Thomas Betterton

Author: David Roberts

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-17

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1107310512

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Restoration London's leading actor and theatre manager Thomas Betterton has not been the subject of a biography since 1891. He worked with all the best-known playwrights of his age and with the first generation of English actresses; he was intimately involved in the theatre's responses to politics, and became a friend of leading literary men such as Pope and Steele. His innovations in scenery and company management, and his association with the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare, helped to change the culture of English theatre. David Roberts's entertaining study unearths new documents and draws fresh conclusions about this major but shadowy figure. It contextualizes key performances and examines Betterton's relationship to patrons, colleagues and family, as well as to significant historical moments and artefacts. The most substantial study available of any seventeenth-century actor, Thomas Betterton gives one of England's greatest performing artists his due on the tercentenary of his death.

Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1695-1708
Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1695-1708

Author: Judith Milhous

Publisher: Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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This thoroughly new investigation into the theatre management competition be­tween the Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields companies revises the established view of Thomas Betterton's manage­ment abilities by documenting the fact that his competition with the Drury Lane company made both an immediate and a permanent change in the course of Brit­ish drama. Judith Milhous's meticulous investiga­tion of an astonishing range of reference which includes unpublished and partial­ly published documents in the Public Record Office of London, The British Library, and the Harvard Theatre Col­lection allows her to present a fresh as­sessment of the chaotic events of the 1695-1708 period and of the compe­tence of Thomas Betterton as manager of Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. The breakaway of Betterton and some of the older actors from Drury Lane in 1695, the flood of new plays at the turn of the century, the rivalry between the new acting company at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Drury Lane, and the result­ing competition for the playgoers' atten­tion spawned an extravaganza of singers, jugglers, animal acts, and double bills. Despite great difficulties, Milhous shows, Betterton was able to bring about an accommodation that permitted the two acting companies to enjoy a period of modest prosperity and to exert a continuing influence on English drama and the organization of theatrical production. This careful study of shifts, devices, and the fortunes of the years of rivalry between acting companies provides stu­dents of English theatre history and dra­ma with invaluable new insights into the practical factors that influenced the history of drama.