Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital and the Shakespearean StageThis 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. Seeing the mad poor living in squalor moved people to give; that some spectators also laughed at this show may complicate, but does not contradict, Bethlem's charitable function. In contrast to our popular understanding of charity, which generally involves the efforts of the givers to at least mask any feelings of contempt for recipients, early modern charitable impulses coexisted easily with a clear disgust for and a- willingness to laugh at the recipients of charity. |
Contents
| 11 | |
A pastime That Can prompt us to have mercy Putting Malvolio Ben Jonson? in a Dark Room | 46 |
Though this be madness yet there is method int Poetaster Satiromastix and Shakespeares Defense of the Popular Stage in Hamlet | 79 |
A very piteous sight The Magnificent Entertainment The Honest Whore Part One The Honest Whore Part Two | 106 |
Making Bethlem a Jest and Conceding to Jonson in Westward Ho Eastward Ho and Northward Ho | 132 |
I know not Where I did lodge last night? Shakespeares King Lear and the Search for Bethlem Bedlam Hospital | 154 |
Twin shows of madness John Websters Stage Management of Bethlem in The Duchess of Malfi | 183 |
Shadows and Shows of Charity The Changeling The Pilgrim and the Protestant Critique of Catholic Good Works | 204 |
Foucault was right? | 235 |
Notes | 263 |
Bibliography | 292 |
Index | 303 |
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Popular passages
Page 24 - The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of Imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as Imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Page 95 - I'll leave you till night: you are welcome to Elsinore. Ros. Good my lord ! [Exeunt Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Ham. Ay, so, God be wi' you : — Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I ! Is it not monstrous, that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit...
Page 173 - Not where he eats, but where he is eaten : a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet : we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots...
Page 180 - Not to a rage. Patience and sorrow strove Who should express her goodliest. You have seen Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears Were like, a better way.
Page 58 - So in every human body, The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood, By reason that they flow continually In some one part, and are not continent, Receive the name of humours. Now thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition : As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his effects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour.
Page 171 - Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these...
Page 189 - tis fittest. Cor. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty? Lear. You do me wrong, to take me out o' the grave. — Thou art a soul in bliss ; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.
Page 94 - Do you hear, let them be well used ; for they are the abstract, and brief chronicles, of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph, than their ill report while you live. Pol. My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
Page 168 - scape, I will preserve myself; and am bethought To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury, in contempt of man, Brought near to beast...
Page 25 - But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy's images, And grows to something of great constancy ; But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage G - Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series |
| Author | Kenneth S. Jackson |
| Publisher | University of Delaware Press, 2005 |
| ISBN | 0874138906, 9780874138900 |
| Length | 309 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |