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 2 - Look, my lord, it comes
Betterton’s Hamlet
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
Saturday 24 August 1661 was for Samuel Pepys a day of two prodigies. In the morning he was called away from business ‘to see the strange creature that Captain Holmes hath brought with him from Guiny’ – ‘a great baboone’, so uncannily human that Pepys doubted it was ‘a Species’ rather than ‘a monster got of a man and a she-baboone’. He thought it understood English and ‘might be tought to speak or make signs’. After a liquid lunch he went ‘straight to the Opera’ for a second epiphany. He saw ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, done with Scenes very well’. But the novelty of stage pictures was not the highlight when ‘above all, Batterton did the Prince’s part beyond imagination’.
It was no commonplace adulation. Pepys regularly mulled over the difference between stage and page, sometimes attempting both at once – disliking Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, he reflected that ‘my having a book I believe did spoil it a little’. Peter Holland has shown how his viewing habits improved with exposure to live theatre, and Betterton’s Hamlet was a milestone on the journey. ‘[B]eyond imagination’, it was less foreseeable than hours with the text had suggested. Illuminating previously unseen meanings, it compelled reassessment of what any performance could achieve. Opposed in linguistic competence to Holmes’s ‘baboone’, Betterton’s Hamlet helped transform Pepys’s appreciation of another suspect ‘Species’, when a mere actor could out-do the best efforts of the gentleman reader. By 1668, Betterton’s Hamlet was so impressive that it collapsed any taxonomy that distinguished text from performance: ‘mightily pleased with it; but, above all, with Betterton, the best part, I believe, that ever man acted.’
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- Information
- Thomas BettertonThe Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage, pp. 7 - 23Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010