The area around Covent Garden, Shaftesbury Avenue and Haymarket is London’s Theatreland. We have several London walks that explore this area and in the course of those walks we highlight the lives of many famous, and not so famous, actors from stages past.

Today is the anniversary of the death of Thomas Betterton, who died on 28th April 1710. On our London walk around Covent Garden we stop outside London’s oldest theatre, The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

We explain how Charles 11, having been restored to the English throne in 1660, reintroduced theatrical performances into London and laid the foundations for the founding of this theatre.

He also introduced another theatrical innovation in that it was during his reign that actresses first started appearing on the English stage. It was in this exciting theatrical world that Thomas Betterton began his acting career and his story is covered on several of our London walks in theatreland.

The great actor Thomas Betterton (1635-1710) was hardly leading man material. He cut a somewhat clumsy figure. His head was large and stubby. He had tiny eyes and a face scarred by the ravages of smallpox. His neck was thick, his shoulders bent and his hands rarely rose above his waist. He was overweight, bordering on the obese, he couldn’t dance and his natural voice was deep and grumbling.”Yet,” as one biographer wrote, “he could tune it [his voice]by an artful climax which enforced universal attention even from the fops and orange-girls”

It was said of him that when he played in Hamlet he often frightened the ghost! Betterton normally had a ruddy complexion, but once the ghost appeared this complexion would turn deathly pale. Trembling all over he would simulate a frightened man so successfully that spectators shuddered.

The first time that the actor Barton Booth (1681-1733) played the ghost to Betterton’s Hamlet he was struck with such horror by the other man’s acting that he could not speak his part.

The actor Robert Wilks (1665-1732) was also tongue-tied on the first occasion he appeared with Betterton. They were playing in The Maid’s Tragedy, and the dignity of Betterton was so awe- inspiring that Wilks became confused.Noting his discomfort  Betterton remarked : “Young man, this fear does not ill become you — a horse that sets out at the strength of his speed will soon be jaded.”

Thomas Betterton, was born in Tothill Street, Westminster, in 1635. His father was an under-cook in the household of Charles I. Betterton  appears to have received a good education, but his father’s limited finances meant that he was unable to set his son up in a profession.

Betterton was, therefore,apprenticed to a bookseller named Rhodes, who had been keeper of the wardrobe to the comedians in the Blackfriars Theatre.

Thus Betterton began his connection with the stage and he became an actor at some time around 1656 in Sir William Davenant’s company.

When, soon after the Restoration of Charles 11, stage plays were licensed, patents were granted to two companies called “The King’s” and “The Duke’s.” The former played at Drury Lane and the latter at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the site of which we cover on our Legal London walks.

Betterton belonged to the company of the Duke of York, and he acted so well that he was sent to Paris by King Charles II to study stage scenery and introduce theatre improvements into England.

In 1670 Betterton married Mrs. Saunderson, a player in the same company.

Twelve years later the King’s and the Duke’s companies were amalgamated, and Betterton was now acknowledged as the best performer of his day.

He particularly excelled in Shakespearean parts, though some of his contemporaries declared that he was merely an imitator of some of the great actors he had seen in his youth.

Although always popular with the public, Betterton was not well treated by the patentees of the theatre at which he played. In 1695 he resolved to run his own company and he duly opened a new theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Unfortunately this failed as did a second theatre he opened on Haymarket.

By the time Betterton had reached his early 70’s his health was failing and he was poverty-stricken. London society, however, too pity on him,and a benefit performance was arranged on his behalf.

At that benefit, which took place in 1709, Betterton acted in Love for Love, supported by many of his old colleagues who had gone into retirement.

A poignant moment occurred on the stage when Mrs. Bracegirdle and Mrs. Barry clasped him affectionately round the waist, while Mrs. Barry recited an epilogue which began :

“…So we, to former leagues of friendship true, Have bid once more our peaceful homes adieu,to aid Old Thomas and to pleasure you.”

The benefit raised the not unhealthy sum of £50. But the production had proved a great drain on Betterton’s failing health and, before the next season came round, he died on, April z8th, 1710.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey (which can be visited on our Westminster London walk). “I went to Westminster,” wrote Sir Richard Steele, “to see the last office done to a man whom I had always very much admired, and from whose acting I had received more impressions of what is great and noble in human nature than from the arguments of the most solid philosophers, or the descriptions of the most charming poets I had ever read.”