Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage (review)

Reviews131 American" as identity categories with meanings specific to the social and political contexts in which they are articulated appears to have had an influence on Black Theatre. Other contributions to Black Theatre—most, though not all ofwhich,were written for this volume—come from Nobel laureates Derek Walcott and WoIe Soyinka, stalwarts of the black literary tradition such as Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, contemporary dramatists Keith Antar Mason and awardwinning playwright-producer-director George C. Wolfe, and highly regarded literary scholars such as William W. Cook and Keith L.Walker.Walcott's "Overture " to What the Twilight Says (1998) sees recent performances ofCarnival in Trinidad not as true theater but as "the art of brochure" (105), folk forms corrupted by politics and commerce that are displayed for the sake of tourists. Deborah Wood Holton's essay explicates the role of the dramaturg using the figure ofthe cartographer.And Cook contributes greatly to the study ofAugust Wilson by identifying how bearing witness to memories and experiences of disruption, in a communal context,functions as a blueslike"logotherapy" (391), an "eruption of words" (395) that is ritualized within Wilson's plays. Published before that playwright's death, this volume is a fitting tribute to Wilson and more.A book ofsuch scope would be well served by an index, however ("There oughtta be a law ..." ), without which it is much harder to trace the citations and influence of Harrison's Nommo. Nevertheless, Black Theatre remains a powerfully useful resource. Dramatists and scholars of the history of theater and ofAfrican and African-American studies will find it useful because it takes on the nuts-and-bolts-type work ofexplicating African-derived cultural traditions and provides specific examples of their influence on and continuation within dramatic works of the African diaspora. Jeffrey Allen Tucker University ofRochester Ken Jackson. Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital andtheShakespearean Stage.Newark:UniversityofDelaware Press, 2005. Pp. 309. $57.50. What makes Ken Jackson's study ofBethlem 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 132Comparative Drama own sympathies for the mentally insane, that Bethlem Hospital, for all its entertainment value, was first and foremost a place ofcharity. It was designed, he reminds us, to elicit charitable donations, and ifvisitors 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 oftouring a madhouse with the benevolent gesture of sponsoring itspatients; ourpost-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 little or no physical contact between givers and their recipients.) But Bethlem Hospital, he contends , was a place where charity and spectatorship intersected; madmen were housed and publicly displayed, both separated from and integrally related to Tudor/Stuart society. The author offers an articulate summary ofthe contested place ofBethlem Hospital in Renaissance England, and ofthe contested concept of"charity" in a Protestant society. He condenses complex historical evidence to comprise a lucid account of local governments' attempts to maintain management of the madhouse , even as the 1598 Poor Laws threatened to grantjurisdiction increasingly to Church and Crown. Jackson highlights a move by King James in 1618 to replace the hospital's keeper ofsome nineteen years with his own court physician , in what seems a transparent attempt to exercise court control from inside Bethlem's walls. That Londoners stubbornly resisted this and other national efforts to centralize and regulate both the hospital and its charitable contributions runs counter to conventional interpretations ofBethlem as an emblem of state authority and power, a view largely predicated on Michel Foucault's tacit assessment of Bethlem Hospital as an English precursor to the eighteenthcentury hôpitauxgén...