The Coliseo of Mexico City: a public theatre owned by the Indians' hospital, and the accounts that prove it

Mexico City had a purpose-built, permanently roofed public theatre standing in the cloister of the Hospital Real de Naturales before 1673, roughly seventy years before Madrid roofed its own corrales. It was not merely near the hospital: it was the hospital's property and one of its largest revenues, judged by an oidor who sat as judge of hospitals, and its actors' contracts obliged them to play free performances for the hospital's altar wax and for burying their own dead.