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Elizabeth Watson's Childhood: Biographical Notes on a Restoration Actress
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
The editors of A Biographical Dictionary of Actors … in London, 1660–1800 have overlooked an episode in the life of the popular late-Restoration actress Elizabeth Watson Boman which may help explain her rapid rise to the position of a principal actress in the United Company. Thomas Southerne tells us that after the death of her father in 1691, Elizabeth Watson was adopted and trained as a player by the great actor Thomas Betterton. However, from new evidence it appears that the childless Thomas and Mary Betterton, who often acted as surrogate parents to young actresses and the orphaned children of friends, had assumed the roles of Elizabeth's guardians before this date, perhaps as early as 1686.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1978
References
NOTES
1 A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in.London, 1660–1800 by Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, 12 Vols. (Carbondale, 1973–), II, 201.
2 Biographia Britannica, II (London, 1747), 776.
3 Much has been written of the adoption by the Bettertons of young Anne Bracegirdle and other actresses, but in 1696 they also assumed the trusteeship of the son of the deceased actor William Smith. See Smith's will, PRO, Prob. 11/433, c. 7589.
4 PRO, Prob. 11/409. See Cundall, Frank, The Governors of Jamaica in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1936), 118–123Google Scholar, for a short biography of Sir Francis Watson.
5 H.M.C., Marquess of Downshire, I, Part I, 52. In a personal letter, Miss A. Green, Berkshire County Archivist, reports that the petition from Betterton has been lost.
6 Bondor to Trumbull, 10 December 1685, Downshire, I, Part I, 73.
7 PRO, State Papers, Foreign Series, France, f. 147.
8 Berkshire Record Office, Trumbull Miscellaneous Correspondence, XXIC, 7.
9 Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Correspondance politique d'Angleterre, 158, f. 80. There is yet another extant letter in this chain written by John Mounsteven to Trumbull on 11 March 1685/6 which notes that as of that date, the Watson matter was unresolved. (Downshire, I, Part I, 134).
10 Biographia Britannica, II, 776; Glidon, Charles, The Life of Thomas Betterton (London, 1710), 11Google Scholar; The Registers of Marriages of St. Mary le Bone, Middlesex, 1668–1754, ed. by Bruce Bannerman (London, 1917), I, 192.
11 Hook, Lucyle, “Anne Bracegirdle's First Appearance,” Theatre Notebook, XIII (1959), 133–136Google Scholar; on Mary Porter, see Fyvie, John, Tragedy Queens of the Georgian Era (London, 1908), 60–64.Google Scholar