(b London, 1635; d London, 28 April 1710). English actor, manager and opera director. Generally regarded as the greatest English actor before Garrick, he played a key role in the invention of Semi-opera. In 1668 he became co-manager of the Duke's Company, which was already featuring plays with musical interludes, many of them set by Matthew Locke. In 1671 the troupe moved into the new Dorset Garden Theatre, specially equipped with the machines necessary for opera. Betterton visited Paris to study stagecraft and may have seen the famed comédies-ballets of Lully and Molière. He then produced a series of musical extravaganzas, or semi-operas: adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth (1673, music by Locke) and The Tempest (1674, music by Locke, Humfrey and others), Thomas Shadwell's Psyche (1675, music by Locke) and Charles Davenant's Circe (1677, music by John Banister (i)). In addition to coordinating the production and devising the scenery, Betterton often acted the protagonists, roles that never required singing.
In late summer 1683 Charles II sent Betterton – now manager of the United Company, an amalgam of the former Duke's and King's companies – back to Paris to engage Lully and the Académie de Musique to produce a tragédie lyrique to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Restoration. When this proved impossible John Dryden was commissioned to provide a libretto for setting by Luis Grabu. Originally this was to have been a semi-opera, King Arthur, with a sung prologue, but the latter was expanded into a full-length, all-sung opera, Albion and Albanius. After this failed, no new musical work was attempted until 1690, when Betterton turned Philip Massinger and John Fletcher's The Prophetess (or Dioclesian) into a semi-opera; with music by Henry Purcell this proved a great success. He was probably also responsible for the adaptation of The Fairy Queen (1692). In 1694 he was paid £50 to adapt and stage Sir Robert Howard and Dryden's The Indian Queen, but any further involvement in Purcell's last semi-opera was prevented by the Actors' Rebellion: in spring 1695 Betterton and a group of senior colleagues left the United Company and set up a makeshift theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. He continued to produce musical plays, even an occasional semi-opera, and in 1700 staged the first public production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas woven into an adaptation of Measure for Measure.
C.R. Rathke: The Career of Thomas Betterton as a Shaping Force of the Restoration Playhouse and the Restoration Drama (diss., Tulane U., 1976)
J. Milhous: Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708 (Carbondale, IL, 1979)
C. Visser: ‘French Opera and the Making of the Dorset Garden Theatre’, Theatre Research International, vi (1981), 163–71
J. Milhous: ‘The Multi-Media Spectacular on the Restoration Stage’, British Theatre and the Other Arts 1660–1800, ed. S.S. Kenny (Washington DC, 1984), 41–66
C.A. Price: Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, 1984)
J. Muller: Words and Music in Henry Purcell's First Semi-Opera ‘Dioclesian’ (Lewiston, NY, 1990)
CURTIS PRICE/MARGARET LAURIE