ABSTRACT
In the decades around 1600, healers and performers, and their striving towards increasing economic prosperity and professionalism, were richly intertwined. On mainland Europe, itinerant theatrical and medical economies did not merely overlap, but were so interdependent that one cannot usefully be considered without the other. The most visible and public economic interface between healing and performance is offered by early modern charlatan or quack troupes, many of whom aimed to seamlessly integrate their medical practice or trading with their performances.1 For the English actors considered in the previous chapter, trading activities were supplementary to their performances, carried out in different times and places from them, and non-medical. The most common type of commercial activity associated with itinerant French and Italian acting troupes was quackery. On their stages, healing was performance. Especially when they harnessed the healing power of music and laughter, performance often also became their most effective medicine. Quacks were the least respectable and respected early modern healers. Situated on a broad continuum seamlessly bridging the gaping chasm between the solidly respectable municipal merchant or medical practitioner and reviled, rootless mountebanks and beggars, quacks combined, in widely varying proportions, three elements: the medical, the itinerant and the theatrical. Quack activity involved the broad health areas of healing, hygiene and cosmetics. Some quacks sold herbs, drugs, pharmaceuticals, patent medicines and other portable products. Others also provided services, prescribing and administering medications and treatment to patients, either for a variety of ailments or as specialists. Some travelled the length and breadth of Europe, from one annual fair or public spa to another, many stayed within their own country or region, or travelled only intermittently.
