Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on dates and texts
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Look, my lord, it comes
- Chapter 3 An obstinately shadowy Titan
- Chapter 4 An actor of London: early years, 1635–1659
- Chapter 5 A walk in the park
- Chapter 6 In the Duke’s Company, 1660–1663
- Chapter 7 Equal with the highest
- Chapter 8 Actor management
- Chapter 9 In the Company of the Duke
- Chapter 10 Union
- Chapter 11 Back to the future
- Chapter 12 Books and pictures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 12 - Books and pictures
Betterton and the Chandos Portrait
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on dates and texts
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Look, my lord, it comes
- Chapter 3 An obstinately shadowy Titan
- Chapter 4 An actor of London: early years, 1635–1659
- Chapter 5 A walk in the park
- Chapter 6 In the Duke’s Company, 1660–1663
- Chapter 7 Equal with the highest
- Chapter 8 Actor management
- Chapter 9 In the Company of the Duke
- Chapter 10 Union
- Chapter 11 Back to the future
- Chapter 12 Books and pictures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Jacob Hooke, bookseller, was instructed to draw up the auction catalogue, and copies of Pinacotheca Bettertonaeana (Betterton’s picture gallery) were left in favourite coffee-houses for friends, collectors and dealers: St James’s, near the Palace, where Steele sometimes wrote The Tatler; Mr Ellar’s at Westminster Hall, Will’s in Cornhill, Mr Squire’s in Fuller’s Rents, where the ill-fated Medbourne had hung out. The sale took place at Betterton’s Russell Street lodgings on 24 August 1710, the forty-ninth anniversary of his first Hamlet. It was not an instant success, so a further sale was advertised in December.
Hooke did not often deal with pictures. His six other sale catalogues of the period were named ‘bibliopolii’ or ‘officina’ for the collections of the booksellers Christopher Hussey and William Shrewsbury, and ‘bibliotheca’ for the libraries of gentlemen such as John Ray, FRS and Charles Bernard, the Queen’s Sergeant-Surgeon. Among other catalogues up to 1800, ‘bibliotheca’ is by far the most common term and ‘pinacotheca’ so rare that it features nowhere among the titles in Eighteenth Century Collections Online. If Pinacotheca Bettertonaeana signalled rarity value, it also spoke of gentility precariously poised between the trade credentials of the bookseller and the gentlemanly company of Hooke’s other clients. For Hooke, Betterton was not the ‘late eminent Tragedian’ of Gildon’s Life, merely ‘that Celebrated Comedian, lately Deceas’d’. Yet the Longleat letter shows him as part of a network of connoisseurs that included aristocrats such as Lord Weymouth, anxious both to augment and share their collections, even with actors.
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- Information
- Thomas BettertonThe Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage, pp. 173 - 183Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010