Separate theaters : Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital and the Shakespearean stage
"This book seeks to update the still standard reference on the topic of London's notorious psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, and the Shakespearean stage - Robert Reed's Bedlam on the Jacobean Stage (1953) - by challenging its assumption that Bethlem was a house of horrors that showed its patients to visitors for entertainment, a practice supposedly then depicted on the stage to please "primitive" tastes. As the recent History of Bethlem has suggested, the hospital was first and foremost a charity, one that showed its patients to elicit alms for the mad poor."
Criticism, interpretation, etc
309 pages ; 24 cm
9780874138900, 0874138906
55981535
A pastime that can prompt us to have mercy : putting Malvolio (Ben Jonson?) in a dark room
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't : poetaster, satiromastix, and Shakespeare's defense of the popular stage in Hamlet
A very piteous sight : the magnificent entertainment, The honest whore, part one, The honest whore, part two
Making Bethlem a jest and conceding to Jonson in westward ho, eastward ho, and northward ho
I know not/ where I did lodge last night : Shakespeare's King Lear and the search for Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital
Twin shows of madness : John Webster's stage management of Bethlem in The duchess of Malfi
Shadows and shows of charity : the changeling, the pilgrim, and the Protestant critique of Catholic good works
Foucault was right?
Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Loyola University of Chicago