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. 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.
