Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama

Natasha Korda, Michelle M. Dowd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409410775
• eBook ISBN: 9781134783113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Text
• Introduction: Working Subjects
• 1 Mythos of Labor: The Shoemaker’s Holiday and the Origin of Citizen History
• 2 Citizens and Aliens as Working Subjects in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday
• 3 Staging Alien Women’s Work in Civic Pageants
• 4 Osmologies of Luxury and Labor: Entertaining Perfumers in Early English Drama
• 5 Englishmen for My Money: Work and Social Conflict?
• 6 Will Kempe’s Work: Performing the Player’s Masculinity in Kempe’s Nine Daies Wonder
• 7 The Rogues’ Paradox: Redefining Work in The Alchemist
• 8 Desiring Subjects: Staging the Female Servant in Early Modern Tragedy
• 9 Domestic Work in Progress Entertainments
• 10 “You take no labour”: Women Workers of Magic in Early Modern England
• 11 Raising Mephistopheles: Performative Representation and Alienated
• 12 Custom, Debt, and the Valuation of Service Within and Without Early Modern England
• 13 The Comic-Tragedy of Labor: A Global Story
• 14 Labor and Travel on the Early Modern Stage: Representing the Travail of Travel in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus and Shakespeare’s Pericles
• Afterword: Early Modern Work and the Work of Representation
• Selected Bibliography
• Index