Abstract
Reviewed by: Alexander Samson, University College London, UK
This comparative study of theatre in Spain, England and their worlds (Mexico City, Puebla, Dublin and Williamsburg) seeks to understand theatre as an urban phenomenon, a defining feature of the political, cultural and social life of the early modern Atlantic. It departs from a fundamental asymmetry between these two traditions. On the Spanish-speaking side, public theatre served municipal authorities to fund hospitals and subsidize public health, an intimate connection between charity and entertainment that provided one of the main counter-arguments against its numerous detractors, who excoriated immoral, vain and corrupting entertainments.
The exploitation of original documents from archives in Seville (Archivo Municipal and Archivo de Protocolos), Madrid (Archivo de la Villa and Archivo Regional de la Comunidad) and Puebla (Archivo del Ayuntamiento) are its most original and interesting contribution. The fundamental strength, and perhaps in other ways a weakness, of Treating the Public is its historical rather than literary perspective. The Anglophone world did not produce similar archival riches, with fewer theatres, a relative paucity of sources, few not already exploited, in part due to its different institutional frameworks. Contrasts abound more than comparison. In the Spanish Atlantic, companies competed for leases and an expanding commercialization of theatre included contracts such as that granted to Francisco Briceño in March 1587 by the Hospital de la Pasión granting him a monopoly on the sale of fruit, wine and aloja, a sweet drink resembling mead, at Madrid’s two permanent corrales. Leonardo de Galdiano y Croy’s figures from a 1677 tract on the capital’s hospitals and ‘casas de recogimiento’ underline the benefit to public health. They showed that the year before, of 9807 who had sought relief from poverty, hunger and disease, 8278 had been cured, 967 had died, and 562 remained in their care at year’s end; an apparently remarkably effective system of treatment for the time. Seville’s purpose-built Coliseo, which burnt down three times in the seventeenth century, was rebuilt at the expense of an acting company manager, Laura de Herrera, in exchange for 40 years rent-free use. Unlike in Madrid, where cofradías mediated between the hospitals and theatre, in Seville takings went directly into the city’s coffers, hence their reliance in economically straitened times on private investment such as this.
Theatre in Mexico City grew out of religious celebrations like Corpus Christi and had been pressed into the service of evangelization and religious education. Many performances took place in conventual patios such as the Royal Indian Hospital, rebuilt in the 1640s following floods in 1629 that had led most theatrical activity to move to the nearby city of Puebla. There, an ambitious carpenter, Juan Gómez Melgarejo had won a monopoly from the city council in 1602 for six years for a theatre he had constructed in properties leased in 1599. Two acting troupes were competing for use of the space by 1603, which continued to operate into the late 1660s, when his son took over the business, despite a number of attempts to edge him out.
Accounts of theatre in Bristol, Dublin and indeed Williamsburg are far briefer, reflecting both the comparatively small scale of the theatre business as well as the gaps in the evidence. The port city of Bristol saw occasional performances in the sixteenth century in a variety of ad hoc spaces, before a playhouse appears to have been established in Wine Street. In Dublin private performances for noble audiences were the main form of dramatic entertainment before the Lord Lieutenant, Thomas Wentworth’s arrival in 1633, and the establishment of a permanent theatre at Weburgh Street by 1637. James Shirley became Dublin’s resident playwright between 1636 and 1640, penning at least four plays there.
Contrasts can of course be drawn between theatre in Madrid and London, from the playing spaces (within the city itself in the case of the former metropolis, outside the liberties of the latter along an insalubrious fringe south of the river) to the centrality of theatre to the life of the city, with the Spanish city able to support 12 acting companies by 1615, hungry for a never-ending supply of new plays, while in England by the 1620s and 1630s few new plays were being commissioned.
Colonial theatre in Dublin cannot really be compared with Mexico City, where the growing self-confidence of a colonial society and criollo elite pushed the relation with the metropole from emulation to competition. The established theatrical culture of the city of Puebla, with a population already numbering nearly 100,000 when the first documented performance in Britain’s North American colonies took place in 1665 in Virginia, cannot really be compared to Williamsburg, whose population numbered little more than 1400 as late as 1782.
The incredibly rich documentation that pervades this book underlines that Anglophone theatrical and civic culture is the poor cousin of a richer, more varied and voluminously documented Spanish-language tradition. Despite references to the work of Walter Cohen, Louise Fothergill-Payne and Ivan Cañadas, their comparative arguments are not explicitly discussed, and omissions of bibliography on the Golden Age comedia and English Renaissance drama are not entirely explicable considering the historical lens adopted.