From mountebanks to learned physicians: performing the art of healing onstage and off

Beginning with an historical account of the practice of healing in early modern England, as it unfolds in the treatises by John Cotta, Johann Oberndorf, Edward Jorden, and James Primrose, this essay aims at exploring the competing attitudes present in the medical culture of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century by focusing on the distinction between “True Physition[s]” (Oberndorf, The anatomyes of the True Physition, and the counterfeit mounte-bank, 1602) and “ignorant practisers” (Cotta, A short discoverie of the unobserved dangers of seuerall sorts of ignorant and unconsiderate practisers of Physicke, 1612) and therefore on the interfusion of medical rituals both onstage and off. With the aim to show how dramatists responded to these issues, it moves from the contemporary debate over the changing social roles of healers and their approach to medical activity to six dramatic texts: Samuel Daniel’s The Queen’s Arcadia (1605), Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606), The Mountebank’s Masque (1618), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623), Philip Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1623), and A Very Woman or, the Prince of Tarent (1634)