Betterton is often thought of as a tragic or heroic actor, yet roughly a third of his known roles and nearly half his new ones were in comedy. It was an inclusive genre. He played schemers such as Maskwell in Congreve’s The Double Dealer and Goodvile in Otway’s Friendship in Fashion, boorish drunks like Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, and characters who could be both: Toby Belch and Falstaff. Towards the end of his career came creaking patriarchs such as Morose in The Silent Woman or Heartwell in Congreve’s The Old Bachelour, and when the chance came he even switched from Troilus to Thersites, but generally he avoided farce. As a rule, says Milhous, ‘he did not appear in Mrs Behn’s lighter plays, or in Ravenscroft’s frothy concoctions’, and the most enduring farce his company performed was written with another actor in mind. The rapid physicality and humiliation of farce were not for Betterton, nor its mockery of ‘the intellectualism and verbal wit of higher forms of comedy’, his preferred comic territory. Observing ‘nature’ was still paramount; in his Heartwell was ‘the Reluctance of a Batter’d Debauchee to come into the Trammels of Order and Decency: He neither languishes nor burns, but frets for Love’. As with Hamlet, Betterton found a tension between contradictory states that defined his character’s progression. His Heartwell was the more powerful for exploiting his stolid private self, showing him alienated from yet striving towards his immense reputation for ‘Order and Decency’.