Review of: Treating the public: charitable theater and civic health in the early modern Atlantic world

Rachael Ball’s Treating the Public is a study of playhouses and acting companies in both Spain and the Anglo-Atlantic world and their mission to fund charitable works in several Spanish and New World cities. The monograph deploys a comparative approach to analyze the development of public theater in the following urban settings: Madrid and London (chapter 1), Seville and Bristol (chapter 2), Mexico City and Dublin (chapter 3) and Puebla de los Ángeles and Williamsburg, Virginia (chapter 4). In the introduction, “Public Theater and Public Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World”, Ball questions previous monolithic studies of early modern theater and instead advocates for “a historical rather than literary perspective” while exploring “a more Atlantic World rather than national perspective in its asymmetrical comparative analysis of the ways that urban dwellers experienced and used theater as a social, cultural, and economic institution” (11)