Томас Беттертон: Англия сахнасының көрнекті актерi

17th century English actor

Thomas Betterton (August 1635 – 28 April 1710), the leading male actor and theatre manager during Restoration England, son of an under cook to King Charles I, was born in London.

Betterton was born in August 1635 in Tothill Street, Westminster. He was apprenticed to John Holden, Sir William Davenant's publisher, and possibly later to a bookseller named John Rhodes, who had been wardrobe keeper at the Blackfriars Theatre. In 1659, Rhodes obtained a license to set up a company of players at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane; and on the reopening of this theatre in 1660, Betterton made his first appearance on the stage. Betterton's talents at once brought him into prominence, and he was given leading parts. On the opening of the new theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1661, Davenant, the patentee of the Duke's Company, engaged Betterton and all Rhodes's company to play in his The Siege of Rhodes. Also in 1661 he played Prince Alvaro in Davenant's Love and Honour. Betterton, besides being a public favourite, was held in high esteem by Charles II, who sent him to Paris to examine stage improvements there. According to Cibber, after his return to England, it was the first time that the shifting scenes replaced tapestry in an English theatre. In 1662 he married the actress Mary Saunderson (died 1712). She started her professional career playing some major female roles in Shakespeare's plays. She and her husband Thomas Betterton shared the stage in a production of Hamlet, in which she played Ophelia, opposite to Betterton's Hamlet. In appearance he was athletic, slightly above middle height, with a tendency to stoutness; his voice was strong rather than melodious, but in recitation it was used with the greatest dexterity. Pepys, Pope, Steele, and Cibber all bestow lavish praise on his acting. His repertory included a large number of Shakespearian roles, many of them presented in the versions adapted by Davenant, Dryden, Shadwell and Nahum Tate. Even though those adapted versions did not receive critical acclaim, they did not harm or shadow Betterton's acting either. Still, his performances were largely praised. There was a period of time when the size of theatre audience started to reduce, in order to revive people's interest in theatre, he invented new stage machines at Dorset Garden Theatre, transposed The Prophetess into an opera, and introduced French singers and dancers to the Restoration stage. During his time, with the exception of William Mountfort, who gained a versatility in terms of portraying roles, most of Betterton's contemporary actors deliberately restricted themselves to certain popular character types. However Betterton had more than 120 different roles from the genres such as heroic drama, Jonsonian comedy, comedies of manners, tragicomedies by Beaumont and Fletcher, and tragedies, comedies and histories by Shakespeare. At the age of seventy five, he claimed, "He was yet learning to be an actor." The first acting guide published in English was The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton, which was mainly a pastiche from French rhetoric manuals with passages borrowed from English plays. Betterson's innovation in scenery and theatre management, and his contributions to theatre making shaped the culture of English theatre. Betterton performed to within fifteen days of his death. Three days before his death at seventy five, he made his last appearance on the stage in 1710, as Melantius in The Maid's Tragedy. He died shortly afterwards, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. From his debut as an actor in 1659 to his last appearance in 1710, his fifty year career stretched nearly to the end of Stuart Dynasty. Thomas Betterton's death marks the end of a generation.

Betterton is portrayed by Tom Wilkinson in the 2004 film Stage Beauty. Wilkinson was in his mid 50s at the time, yet the film is set around 1662, when Betterton would have been younger than 30.