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COPYRIGHT 2006 www.wmich.edu/compdr
Ken Jackson. Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Pp. 309. $57.50.
What makes Ken Jackson's study of Bethlem Hospital and Bedlam dramas particularly convincing is his own experience as a health professional in various mental institutions. The author's proximity to mad patients (he wrote much of the book during his night shifts) lends his work a credibility and sensitivity often lacking in purely historical and/or literary approaches to Renaissance madness. Especially striking is Jackson's argument, doubtless informed by his own sympathies for the mentally insane, that Bethlem Hospital, for all its entertainment value, was first and foremost a place of charity. It was designed, he reminds us, to elicit charitable donations, and if visitors to the hospital were confused, disgusted, or amused by what they saw, such feelings did not eclipse their charitable acts. Contemporary readers may find it difficult to reconcile the exploitative practice of touring a madhouse with the benevolent gesture of sponsoring its patients; our post-Enlightenment sensibilities dictate that we hide any impulse to scorn or laugh openly at those less fortunate than ourselves. (Jackson suggests that our efforts to avoid such improper responses to madness are perhaps why today's charitable acts typically involve...
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