Page 80 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

STAGE-HISTOR Y kxiii

many others. He went on acting it for nearly fifty years,
until, indeed, Tony Aston, and perhaps others, thought
him too old and stiff and grave; but his last recorded
performance, which was given at the Haymarket on
September 20,1709, when he must have been between
71 and 74 years old, drew from Steele this commenda-
tion in the Tatlen 'Had you been to-night at the play-
house, you had seen the force of Action in perfection:
your admired Mr Betterton behaved himself so well,
that, though now about seventy, he acted youth, and by
the prevalent power of proper manner, gesture, and
voice, appeared through tie whole drama a young man
of great expectation, vivacity, and enterprize.' The last
words give a hint of his reading of the part—not as a
languid, ineffectual dreamer. 'When I acted the Ghost
with Betterton,' said Barton Booth, 'instead of my awing
him, he terrified me.' Cibber records his mixture, in that
scene, of terror with filial reverence and impatience to
know the truth; he was 'manly, but not braving; his
voice never rising into that seeming outrage or wild
defiance of what he naturally revered.' Davies quotes
the statement that on the appearance of the Ghost
Betterton's face turned suddenly 'as pale as his neck-
cloth,' and that he trembled all over. That white neck-
cloth, with bands, his full-bottomed wig, cocked hat and
black clothes gave him the appearance often called
'clerical,' but meant to signify a scholar.
In that first production at Lincoln's Inn Fields
Ophelia was acted by Mrs Sanderson (afterwards Mrs
Betterton), Horatio by Harris, the Ghost by Richards,
Polonius by Lovel, the First Gravedigger by Cave
Underhill, the King by Lilliston, and the Queen by
Mrs Davenport. If the quarto edition of 1676 is (as
Mr Hazelton Spencer argues in his Shakespeare Im-
proved) the text prepared by D'Avenant for his stage, it
can be seen from it and from the quartos of 1683,1695
and 1703 that during the Betterton period Hamlet was