Treating the Public: Charitable Theater and Civic Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Racheal Ball (review)

Racheal Ball takes a refreshing vantage point on early modern Atlantic theater: the intersections between public health, charity, and theatrical performances. Her ambitious book spans multiple sites in the Spanish and Anglophone colonial Atlantic and is divided into chapters that compare Madrid and London, Seville and Bristol, Mexico City and Dublin, and Puebla de Los Angeles and Williamsburg, rounded off by a concluding chapter on antitheatrical sentiment in the Atlantic world.

Ball's imaginative linkage of public health and theater pays dividends in the Spanish and Spanish colonial contexts, but this angle is far less illuminating for understanding the Anglophone theatrical and philanthropic worlds, both in the metropole (London and Bristol) and the colonies (such as Williamsburg). Ball intriguingly excavates previously lost connections between public health, theater, and local politics in Spanish and Spanish colonial sites. I learned a great deal, for example, about the fascinating interplay in the Spanish metropole and empire between religiously-founded institutions, the established church, and performances. To offer just one example: as Bell uncovers, in Madrid, the confradías, or Catholic confraternities, "helped to fund hospitals, orphanages, and dowries to enable the marriages of poor girls" (22). These confraternities, which undergirded the establishment of hospitals in the mid-to late sixteenth century—such as the Hospital de la Pasión, "designated for the care of the sick and poor women" (22)—also "received the exclusive right to put on performances during Corpus Christi to raise funds for their charitable funds and hired acting troupes to do so." (22). In all of her coverage of Spanish and Spanish colonial sites, these kinds of revelations abound, bespeaking a tour de force of original research.

Regrettably, Bell is unable to find evidence of comparable intersections in her Anglophone sites, which makes for, in Ball's own words, an "asymmetrical comparative analysis of the ways that urban dwellers experienced and used theater as a social cultural, and economic institution" (11). Ball's analysis is indeed asymmetrical. Her valiant attempts at pan-Atlantic analysis fall short not only because her Anglophone sites—Dublin, Bristol, London and Williamsburg— earn very scant pages in the supposedly comparative chapters in which they appear, but also because there is a dearth of any strong linkages in these sites between public health and theatre. For example, in Chapter 4 (106-129) on commercial drama in Puebla and Williamsburg, Ball devotes a mere four pages to Williamsburg, pages in which the theme of public health is conspicuously absent. Dublin, Bristol, and London also merit similarly meagre coverage. This imbalance continues throughout the book's cursory three-page conclusion, which focuses disproportionately on the Spanish and Catholic theaters of her concern. In sum, the problem is not merely that Ball's coverage is asymmetrical, as she acknowledges. Rather, a more profound problem is that the Anglophone/Spanish sites simply do not wield a fruitful comparison of institutionalized intersections between public health and theater, which exist in the Spanish but not the Anglophone world.

One way Ball might have remedied this fundamental asymmetry of evidence and still worked comparatively would have been to focus less on the institutionalized health/theater connections, and more on the performances themselves. Indeed, even in Ball's Spanish sites—Madrid, Seville, Mexico City and Puebla—it would have been instructive to learn more about the plays themselves: Did the content of the plays make philanthropic pleas? Were they performed with prologues/epilogues appealing, perhaps, for funds? What about advertisements for public health funding, linked to theatrical performances? How were the plays advertised? These content-driven questions could have been applied to the Anglophone performances, and perhaps provided better comparative fodder. Religiously driven anti-theatricalism might have been another fruitful comparative angle, but Ball treats this important topic in one sparse chapter that is discrete from the rest of her analysis. She could, instead, have woven this crucial...