The dust jacket description justifiably calls this ‘the most substantial study available of any seventeenth-century actor’. The implication that it is the first biography since Robert Lowe's in 1891 is, however, less justified, for it is hard to write a biography of Betterton: we simply do not know enough about his personal and domestic life. Roberts moves dextrously around this difficulty by giving over a chapter to the study of earlier quasi-biographies of the actor, particularly those of the eighteenth century, on which he is thoughtful and illuminating. Save for the final chapter examining Betterton's library and the Betterton portraits, the rest of his account is set firmly on the actor's career in the theatre.

Fortunately, where Lowe discussed Betterton's career in the context of a condensed history of the Restoration theatre, Roberts uses each of his chapters to focus on a specific topic: Betterton's perhaps most celebrated role, Hamlet; his status as an actor as brilliant in comedy as in tragedy; his involvement with Davenant in the shaping and development of the Duke's Company after the reopening of the theatres; his company relationship with Henry Harris in the early years; his central responsibility in maintaining the fortunes of the Duke's after Davenant's death; his position with respect to the complicated political and religious issues that bore on the London theatre before, during and after the Popish Plot; his role in the Union of the acting companies from 1682 to 1695; and his leadership of the troupe that in the autumn of 1694 broke away from the United Company and eventually set up at the Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre.

What little we do know of the actor's life outside the theatre is introduced where appropriate, but the emphasis is essentially on Betterton's stage work and the contexts in which it took place. Notwithstanding his subtitle, Roberts's emphasis is not wholly on acting, and he gives due weight to Betterton's importance as a theatre manager and a stage manager and underscores his pioneering work on English musical drama. Like Garrick, Betterton was an homme de théâtre: actor, theatre manager, stage manager, actor-trainer, dramatist and adaptor. He was, said his younger contemporary, Roger North, ‘the Chief ingineer of the stage’. In this regard perhaps a little more might have been said. English uses of Molière, Corneille and Racine have received much attention, but the influence on the Restoration theatre of Continental, particularly French (and indirectly Italian) scenic design and machinery has been comparatively little examined. Although Roberts touches on Betterton's contribution to the development of scenes and machines, and refers to his visit(s) to and contacts with the Parisian theatre, one would have welcomed a rather more searching account of what Betterton would have encountered in France, the ideas he brought back, and the extent to which these were accommodated to and modified for the English stage.

But such a minor point aside, this is an important book, and a valuable addition to the modest amount of modern writing we have on Betterton compared to that on the next great English actor–manager, David Garrick.