SOURCE: Jason, Philip K. “The Distinction of Otway and Betterton.” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 2, no. 1 (summer 1987): 6-18.

[In this essay, Jason proposes that the working relationship between Thomas Otway and the actor Thomas Betterton influenced the writing of Otway's successful Don Carlos.]

Human destinies are often imagined as the conjunction of the traits of individuals with circumstance: men and moments. We understand the works of our intellectuals and artists to be both willed and inevitable, inspired and shaped by conditions. Often we find an even more complex amalgam of forces in which human destinies are intertwined and individuals become for one another a significant part of the web of circumstance. One talent and set of inclinations is whetted against another. In such cases, artworks are the product of not only the talent and the times, but also the driving influence of another talent. In collaborative arts, like theatre, this is especially true. While the text of a play comes down to us as the unique achievement of its author, an achievement shaped by genius, determination, a vision of life, an understanding of conventions and of audiences,—it may have been the product of even more than that.

In a period like the English Restoration, plays were written for acting companies, and the style and special skills of the available players informed the imagination of any practical playwright. Thomas Otway composed his works for the players of the Duke's Theatre at Dorset Garden headed by Thomas Betterton. The linked careers of these two men—Otway and Betterton—formed a pattern of dynamic interaction in which the peculiar flavor of Otway's major achievements, The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd, grew out of Otway's grasp of and affinity for the particular manner of Betterton's acting style. And that acting style, in turn, came to its full perfection through the challenge of roles that could ideally reveal it: roles like Jaffeir.

If we set each of these two artists into a general overview of dramatic writing and acting during the Restoration period, we will see that each shared much with his contemporaries. But we will also see that each attained notable distinctions as well, and that these distinctions ran along parallel lines.

The heroic drama of the Restoration was a short-lived but immensely popular and powerful mode. Drawn in part from native strands, in part from the beloved French fashions of the newly restored monarchy, and in part from an adaptation of epic theory, it was a patently unrealistic drama that consciously kept a great distance between the world its audiences knew and the world it created. It is in this sense, perhaps, that such a drama can be called neo-classical: it did not confuse art with life. Even in the hands of Dryden, its foremost exponent and theoretician, it became a theatre of excess. In James Sutherland's words:

When the Restoration playgoer went to the theatre to see a tragedy or a heroic play he sat down in his seat knowing that he was about to take leave of the real world; that the characters would be kings and queens, intriguing statesmen, and bloody, treacherous villains; that the action would be remote in time, or place, or both; and that the dramatist had no intention whatever “to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men”, but that his characters would address each other in blank verse or rhymed couplets, and in a poetic diction at once exclamatory, declamatory, and grandiloquent.¹

This was an audience-oriented drama, one which employed every trick of spectacle, high-strung passion, vivid verbal music, and whatever else would sustain excitement—whether it be probable or not.

Heroic drama proper was cast in the heroic couplet. This was not merely because it was the verse form found appropriate for epic material (particularly the major Restoration translations of classical epics), but also because the couplet lent itself to the requisite transfiguration of speech into something exalted, powerful, and intense. As Anne Righter has reminded us, the Restoration period provided a form of tragedy that was “less serious than its comedy.”² While Restoration comedy warns against excess and fosters balance and adjustment, much of the heroic drama flatters excess and is fashioned in terms of extreme polarities; it “presents a world of absolutes, of black and white without any mitigating shades of grey.”³ What better vehicle for the embodiment of this illusion than the ringing couplet rhyme? The heroic drama, in all its extravagance, courted the new vogue for opera: it was opera without a score, casting its spell with torrents of verse.

This dramatic child of the Restoration, born almost with the renewal of the monarchy itself, reached its heyday about 1670 and then began a slow but steady decline: first in esteem, then in popularity. It continued to hold audiences for some time after its essential hollowness and its propensity for the ludicrous had been brilliantly exposed by Buckingham in The Rehearsal (December 1671). Indeed, there were revivals of rhymed heroic plays even after Otway's brief career had ended in the mid-1680s. Even though the work of Otway (and some of his contemporaries) signalled a shift in (and toward) sensibility, the serious drama of the late seventeenth century continued to carry with it much of the extravagance of the more and more unfashionable heroic play. Still, by 1688, the Prologue to Shadwell's The Squire of Alsatia looked back on a time conceived as having passed:

Soon after this came Ranting Fustian in,
And none but Plays upon the fret were seen:
Such Roaring Bombast stuff, which Fops would praise,
Tore our best Actors Lungs, cut short their days.(4)

Such plays demanded—or did they assume?—a certain style of acting.

Alan S. Downer, in his seminal essay on the history of Restoration and eighteenth century acting style, postulates four schools of acting beginning with a school of Betterton. He labels this school, which he dates 1660-1710, a “school of nature, insofar as the drama of the time allowed.”⁵ This is an important qualification, one which throws much of the rest of his discussion into doubt. Downer recognizes that the new heroic drama of the period “would hardly permit naturalism in its actors” and suggests that Betterton's acting style was one that flourished primarily in “revivals of the earlier romantic plays,” and, of course, in revivals of Shakespeare. The contemporary comment on acting style, quite readily gleaned from the prologues and epilogues, builds a picture of rant and excess—a picture that Downer paints in his discussion of the next generation, the school of Cibber, Booth, and Wilks. John Harold Wilson brings Downer's first two schools together, focusing on the shared features of musicality of delivery and insisting, plausibly, on a dominant mode characterized by rant, cant, and tone.⁶ Such a mode cannot be called “naturalistic” except in the special sense that it was natural to the drama that it brought to life.

Recent discussions of Restoration acting tend to run down two paths, depending on whether the historian chooses to build his case from the examination of contemporary descriptions of performance or from the examination of theoretical discourse. The former materials suggest an age of excess, artificiality; the latter an age of conventionalized naturalism. My own view is that we have here simply a contrast between the real and the ideal, a contrast predicated by the sources consulted. However, almost all commentary on the “real” Betterton reads very much like a formulation of the ideal.

Bertram Joseph, a spokesman for the existence of a naturalistic school, makes some careful introductory remarks in his study of The Tragic Actor: “The ideals of acting in Betterton's day do not seem to have differed in essence from those of the pre-Restoration period.” He admits to the possibility of chanting and declamation being popular acting modes, but insists that “restraint was not undervalued.”⁷ The question is, where was restraint to be found? Whatever may have been valued, a good deal else seems to have been tolerated and encouraged.

David Savran puts matters in a sane perspective when he reminds us that “the emerging convention is always the one identified with nature.”⁸ But he also offers the following truism: “Nature enters the theatrical system in the force of illusionism which negates the theatrical context” (p. 135). Nothing about the heroic drama and much of the later eighteenth-century tragedy “negates the theatrical context.” Indeed, the theatrical context—an obsessive theatricality—is its very essence. To act “well” in a play like Tyrannic Love is to partake of this essence.⁹

Into this theatrical condition, one in which the vogue of the heroic drama was still strong, but had begun to wane, entered the young playwright, Thomas Otway. Betterton, by the time of Otway's emergence, had been long established as the paramount player of his time. His career had begun with the Restoration, and he had first come to fame in revivals of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays—making his mark in Massinger's The Bondman and, especially, in Hamlet.¹⁰ He had been weathering the years of chant, rant, and cant, no doubt performing in a manner that was in keeping with the nature of such plays, yet managing to distinguish himself even in these. But his true art shown in the older plays, particularly those of Shakespeare. He reestablished Shakespeare's major tragic roles as the highest tests of the actor's art. By the 1670s, Betterton's role in the theatrical world was many-sided. He was effectively the manager of the Duke's Company, which had moved into its new Dorset Garden Theatre in December of 1671. Betterton was involved in the choosing and casting of plays, overseeing rehearsals, and training apprentices to the stage. Otway, on the other hand, was just starting out.

As we might expect, Otway's first dramatic piece was in the heroic mode. Alcibiades, first performed in September of 1675, is a weak play, among the weakest of its kind. In spite of being in fashion, and in spite of having Betterton and Mrs. Barry in the principal roles, its was not a success. The versification is something to stumble over, not to sing out with elegance and grace:

Of all my Courage or my Sword shall do,
I the success must to your influence owe;
The honour and the justice of your cause,
So glorious are, Fate must from them take Laws.(11)

(I, 240-244)

Speech may be artificial without being as impossible as this. What will become one of Otway's characteristic themes, the strained friendship between two men, is introduced here. There are a couple of strong scenes, and a bit of the dagger-play that Otway will use so brilliantly in Venice Preserv'd, but on the whole Otway's first effort is undistinguished apprentice work.

Don Carlos, first acted in July of 1676, shows a marked advance. Suddenly, Otway has moved to the front ranks of serious dramatists. Though this play, too, is formally in the heroic mode, the language has changed: supercharged rhetoric has been subdued and replaced by something much closer to the “language of nature and passion.”¹² The play was a grand success, the most successful modern tragedy of its time, and it made Otway's reputation. It is hard to account for this sudden growth in Otway's abilities. Maybe it is only sheer genius bursting through after the first clumsy, imitative work of Alcibiades. Or maybe we can imagine Otway already having some sharper sense of the players in the Duke's Company under the influence of Betterton. As Sutherland states, “the play has dignity and restraint where most of Otway's contemporaries would have had neither, and it has many touches of natural feeling” (p. 79). Some of that feeling, indeed, may have come “by consulting nature in his own breast” (Dr. Johnson's phrase) and finding there his love for Mrs. Barry, the incarnation of his heroines. What must be mentioned here—and we will come back to it again—is that the most frequently noted trait of Betterton's playing was just this restraint characteristic of Otway's best work.

We will pass over Otway's next three plays quickly, as they do not aid our concern with Otway's development as an original tragic dramatist. Titus and Berenice (from Racine) and The Cheats of Scapin (from Moliere) premiered together in December 1676. The first, a shrunken tragedy, was not revived. It was the last work in which Otway practiced the heroic couplet. The second, a farce, was quite successful. Otway's next play, Friendship in Fashion (April 1678), was his first original comedy. It is undistinguished and does not in any way add to his reputation. Each of these plays gave Otway greater familiarity with the stage and the players of Duke's Company (and especially with Mrs. Barry, who had a part in each one).

Caius Marius, mounted in October 1679, provided Otway with a new challenge that he met with only partial success. It has the flavor of a hastily-written piece, especially in its structure—a weak blend of Plutarch's and Lucan's histories of Marius with some materials from Romeo and Juliet. Strangely enough, the play had some popularity and kept Shakespeare's masterpiece off the stage for a while. Our interest with it is as Otway's first venture in dramatic blank verse. Here we can agree with J. C. Ghosh that Otway's initial handling of this medium is “stiff and monotonous” (p. 46). Perhaps, in his insecurity over the new verse form, he became too dependent on Shakespeare's material. Caius Marius was simultaneously a bit of experimentation and a potboiler for Otway. Not in itself strong, it helped prepare the way for his two greatest works.

With The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd, Otway fulfilled his destiny. Though only the latter work will be discussed here, many of the observations that follow might be made about the former as well. In this discussion, it will be necessary to review and find objection to a few points made in Aline Mackenzie Taylor's challenging study, Next to Shakespeare: Otway's “Venice Preserv'd” and “The Orphan” and Their History on the London Stage. Taylor's general assertion is one that I share: “Otway intended his verse to be spoken by certain actors in Betterton's Company; it was adapted to a particular style of acting; its full effect can be recaptured only by conjuring up the conditions under which it was originally delivered.”¹³ But my conjuring is somewhat different from hers. Before taking a further look at Restoration acting style and the distinction of Betterton, we must give some brief consideration to the distinction the playwright Otway achieved in his last tragedy.

We can begin to come to terms with the distinction of Otway by turning once again to Sutherland: “The writers of Restoration tragedy continually confront us with emotional conflicts and dilemmas in which we are either not interested, or in which we simply cannot believe. It is an indication of Otway's firmer grasp of reality that the dilemma in which Jaffeir finds himself … is both credible and distressingly actual” (p. 80). In addition, “Otway may be praised for his touching simplicity, and for his avoidance in general of that declamatory utterance which describes rather than expresses emotion” (p. 80). These are cautious and relative distinctions, but they are important ones, and, for this reader, they are more accurate than Wallace Fowlie's claim that the characters in Venice Preserv'd were parts of a “linguistic machine” in which “declamation substituted for tragic psychology.”¹⁴ Critics like Fowlie seem to have held Otway hostage to safe generalizations about the serious drama of this period without sensing Otway's gradual emergence from the stereotype.

Even the informative and thorough mid-eighteenth century drama critic and theorist, John Hill, told readers that the plays of Otway (and Rowe) had “many parts that will bear this ostentatious, formal, and oratorial manner of recitation, for they are florid, pompous, and descriptive.”¹⁵ But we always have to ask, “compared to what?” Which plays? Which parts? Certainly, even at his best, Otway was touched by the less attractive tendencies of the age in which he wrote; what is important is that he worked his way toward restraint, naturalness, and credibility without losing dramatic vitality. As we have seen, Otway moved in this direction in two stages: first by perfecting the fashionable rhymed couplet vehicle, and then by mastering the medium of blank verse. And, while never ceasing to be theatrical, Otway became less and less dependent on theatricality for its own sake.

It was Charles Gildon, in his Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (London, 1710), who recorded Betterton's claim that he and Mrs. Barry made it a practice “to consult e'en the most indifferent Poet in any Part we have thought fit to accept of” (p. 16). This brief passage suggests two important points: that the principal players often worked closely with their playwrights, and that those playwrights would be wise to create roles that such influential actors would think fit to accept. After all, through most of the Restoration period there were only two places for the author to go with his script; and, for the thirteen or so seasons of the United Company, there was only one.

Many playwrights worked specifically for one or the other of the two patent houses, sometimes under contractual arrangements. While we have no evidence that Otway had such a contract, we do know that during his short career as a playwright his ten plays were all performed by the Duke's Company headed by Betterton and that each one made its first appearance at the lavishly decorated and technically advanced Dorset Garden Theatre. By the time Otway was preparing The Orphan (February 1680) and Venice Preserv'd (February 1682) for the stage, he had become intimately familiar with the various talents of the players in this troupe. He had already given them, and they him, some important successes. By the time of Venice Preserv'd, Otway had even managed to have his only success in comedy—The Soldier's Fortune (June 1680). For Otway, writing for the stage had come to mean writing for Betterton and his crew.

We can imagine Otway visiting his friend Betterton to keep him apprised of the progress he was making on his new play and, perhaps, to ask for advice and approval. Betterton, long-ensconced in his special quarters within the Dorset Garden theatre building had, since the death of Sir William Davenant, been in charge (along with Henry Harris) of the practical management of the Duke's Company. He had already originated major roles in seven of Otway's plays, so the two men had no doubt developed a sound working relationship and a mutual admiration for one another's respective talents.¹⁶ Betterton's word was, I'm sure, the necessary and sufficient cause for the young Charles Davenant to officially accept the play. After securing a license from the Master of the Revels, the Duke's Company was ready to prepare Venice Preserv'd for the stage.

At some point, Otway or Betterton would have read the new play to the assembled company. Most of the parts, of course, had been cast by Otway as he imagined and composed the play; yet, a number of others would have to be decided upon, causing, perhaps, some late adjustments in the play itself. In the role of Jaffeir, Betterton would have his greatest contemporary vehicle. Only Otway could have written it; and only for Betterton could it have been written.

Who was Betterton, the actor? What did he share with his age, and what was his distinction?

As we can learn from many sources, during the Restoration period “Musical speech was assiduously cultivated, and was generally known as the ‘heroic tone.’”¹⁷ The actor's art, particularly in those heroic dramas of heavily ornamented verse and unending couplets, was in large part a matter of projecting the poetical qualities to the audience. Actors were trained (and Betterton did some of the training) to use the full range of their vocal instruments. According to Joseph, “a novice had to learn how to vary the pitch in elevation and cadence without becoming monotonous, without lengthening the words, and without chanting” (p. 30). In Gildon's aforementioned Life of Betterton, we have presented to us an alleged Bettertonian principle: “The Operation of Speech is strong, not only for the Reason or Wit therein contained, but by its Sound. For in all good Speech there is a sort of Music, with Respect to its Measure, Time, and Tune” (p. 32).

An excessive or improper musicality of speech could hold an audience in awe of the performer's sheer vocal dexterity, but mask the playwright's sense. Insufficient technique in this respect would communicate sense, but lose the poetic flavor. Ideally, sound and sense were organically related, both in the verse itself and in the actor's presentation of it. Ideally. But many heroic tragedies abandoned sense for sound, thereby encouraging actors to do the same.

According to Colley Cibber, Nathaniel Lee's ranting tragedy of Alexander gave just this type of encouragement. Cibber blamed the success of Lee's play for the “Corruption of so many Actors, and Tragic Writers, as were immediately misled by it.”¹⁸ But, in the same portrait, he praises Betterton's performance: “There cannot be stronger Proof of the Charms of harmonious Elocution, than the mad, even unnatural Scenes and Flights of the false Sublime it has lifted into Applause. … When these flowing Numbers came from the Mouth of a Betterton, the Multitude no more desired Sense to them, than our musical Connoisseurs think it essential in the celebrated Airs of an Italian Opera” (p. 63). But this does not mean that Betterton became the servant of rant. In fact, the main line of Cibber's discussion is that Betterton found a way of taming the excesses of the play, of toning down and underplaying the ridiculously extravagant while using his vocal abilities to good advantage. To the extent it could be done, he naturalized an unwieldy part.

Following Cibber once again, we come to the observation that Betterton's acting style and vocal abilities, while unsurpassed, lent “more spirit to terror than to the softer passions,” and were “of more strength than melody” (p. 69). Is Cibber simply undependable and contradictory, or can we find something useful here? We must remember that Cibber is striving for contrasts and that he is not, all of a sudden, suggesting that Betterton couldn't create melodious deliveries. The web of Cibber's observations (and those of other near-contemporaries) suggests that while Betterton could do everything well, his style and vocal expression would fare better in blank verse than in heroic couplets, and better yet when the quality of the blank verse was relatively subdued—its “music” at not too great a distance from that of speech (“For in all good Speech there is a sort of Music”). Betterton could give the full force of his art to something that in itself practiced restraint. I am ready to suggest, of course, that the blank verse of Venice Preserv'd was made for Betterton, and that the “temper'd Spirit” (Cibber, p. 61) of Betterton's playing gave Otway an image in his mind that became a major ingredient of his character, Jeffeir.

In Next to Shakespeare, Taylor writes: “Although his [Otway's] verse is as colloquial as it may be without becoming prose, there are long passages which undoubtedly provided ranting actors with an opportunity to step forward and declaim” (p. 72). If the subordination were reversed, I could almost agree. An energetic, flexible, but relatively unadorned blank verse dominates the play. There are some opportunities for rant, but there is little that demands a ranting performance. Otway's play maintains the old Elizabethan convention of ending scenes in double- or triple-rhyme, and he casts his comic scenes in prose. We must keep in mind that, in these ways and others, Venice Preserv'd is an imitation of Shakespeare written for a company whose leading player had his greatest fame in the roles of Hamlet and Othello. Also, we must remember the tradition that Betterton was heir to, pre-Restoration acting style as transmitted through Davenant who, in his youth, had collected such information from the earlier actors. Both men, it seems, are reaching back to the past, working against the contemporary grain.

Taylor insists that only a declamatory, formal style could handle Venice Preserv'd successfully. She maintains that the rants and rhymes are glaringly out of harmony with “natural verse” and with “natural acting” (p. 72). But this is to suggest that the bulk of the play is rant and rhyme, which it is not, and that nothing lies between the formal and the natural (if, indeed, these are opposites).

“The goal of ‘natural’ acting was,” as Savran argues, “absolute clarity and precision of action based upon ‘natural’ signs [gestures]. According to this process, the play of the actor would constitute a universal language, comprehensible to all mankind” (p. 160). All art, all acting, is “nature methodized” to one or another degree. In putting together the best contemporary evidence, Joseph asserts that Betterton was noted for his combination of restraint and power (p. 38). In fact, the power resided in the restraint. This restrained style, which included the absence of vagrant gesturing, in Betterton's performances allowed him to master the conventions by which the illusion of nature was pursued. Honest, intelligent, solidly masculine, commanding, and capable of effective underplaying, Betterton would have been a Jaffeir properly poised between hero and husband, exhibiting in turn the requisite dignity and tenderness—or perhaps Otway's Jaffeir was Betterton.

Of course, Venice Preserv'd is not merely a play for Betterton, but a piece in which each important role is shaped for one or another of the actors in the Duke's Company. Mrs. Barry's Belvidera and Mr. Smith's Pierre are demanding roles that added to the fame of these fine players. The parts of Antonio (for Anthony Leigh) and Aquilina (for Mrs. Currer) took advantage of the narrower skills of these popular, type-cast performers. But Jaffeir is the complex center of the play. The drama is one of his relationships with others (rather than with the audience), and, for all of its political pointing, Venice Preserv'd is finally a domestic tragedy (though less so than The Orphan), descended from Othello and the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, looking forward to the sentimental drama of the eighteenth century and the melodrama of the nineteenth while avoiding the worst tendencies of those as it had avoided the worst of its own age.

Subtlety, restraint, and a seeming naturalness were the distinctions of Otway (in his best work) and of Betterton. From the intense association between playwright and actor, Venice Preserv'd was born, a play in which the heroic style was modulated to the ideal combination of force and restraint that was Betterton. The distinction of the play—a distinction that continues to live—owes much to the distinction of the actor for whom its principal role was written. Otway's unique talent grew within a set of conditions—themselves undergoing change—that included this other, already fixed, talent of Betterton. Betterton, who had the wide-ranging skill to make any part his own, found in Jaffeir the part that was his own to begin with.

Notes

1. James Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 47-48.

2. Anne Righter, “Heroic Tragedy,” Restoration Theatre, eds. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1965; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1967), p. 135.

3. Righter, p. 145.

4. Rare Prologues and Epilogues, 1642-1700, ed. Autrey Nell Wiley (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940), p. 261.

5. Alan S. Downer, “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA, 58 (December 1943), p. 1005.

6. John Harold Wilson, “Rant, Cant, and Tone on the Restoration Stage,” SP, 52 (October 1955), pp. 592-98.

7. Bertram Joseph, The Tragic Actor (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959), pp. xii-xiii.

8. David Savran, “The Mask and the Face: Acting Theory of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,” Diss. Cornell University 1978, p. 137.

9. See Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), for the argument that naturalistic acting style prevailed in comic plays of the period.

10. See Judith Milhous, “An Annotated Census of Thomas Betterton's Roles, 1659-1710,” Theatre Notebook, 29(1975), pp. 33-43 and 85-94. Although Betterton's early career necessarily focused on revivals of Renaissance plays, the census indicates Betterton's constant interest in creating new roles, thus encouraging new plays to be written and produced.

11. The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh (London: Oxford University Press, 1932; rpt. 1968), I:108. Future references to Ghosh are to his introduction to this edition. I follow his outline of Otway's career.

12. Ghosh, p. 40.

13. Aline Mackenzie Taylor, Next to Shakespeare: Otway's “Venice Preserv'd” and “The Orphan” on the London Stage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 69.

14. Quoted in Edwin Duerr, The Length and Depth of Acting (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962), p. 192.

15. John Hill, The Actor: or, a Treatise on the Art of Playing, 2nd ed. (London: 1755), p. 245.

16. See Judith Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1695-1708 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979) for Betterton's managerial experience.

17. Hugh Hunt, “Restoration Acting,” Restoration Theatre, eds. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1965; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1967), p. 190.

18. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), p. 64. First published London, 1740.