ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the Bethlem Hospital's role in the affairs of the city during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It discusses the early modern topicality of visual uncertainty and ocular skepticism, before returning to the staged world of Bedlam to expose the plays at once to light and deliberately occlude the complexities and controversies of charitable work in the of urban social welfare. The failure to recognize human need, while demonstrating a capacity to pervert the social objectives of charitable work by adopting arbitrary forms of punitive regulation, constituted another topical transgression of communal solidarity. The complex occlusion of charity curiously emerged on stage as a failure to see and provoked additional fears of what being observed actually entailed in establishments like Bedlam. In this sense, the complex dramatic representation of asylum can be read as a peculiar sensory critique that challenges the highly conspicuous display of urban practices related to prescriptive ideologies of institutional support and welfare.