Elite Female Servants in Early Modern English Drama: Gender, Race, and Status in Service

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis attends to the figure of the elite female servant in early modern English drama (1590-1625). There has been a critical tendency to homogenise female servant characters as lower status, and as a result the complexity of their social position within the household has not always been fully understood. In this thesis, I recognise the elite status of many female servant characters, analysing them through the broader frameworks of early modern service and social status. In doing so, I offer fresh readings of a range of both canonical and non-canonical plays, as well as new insights into the ways in which playwrights dramatised identities shaped not only by status, but also by time, gender, and race.

Chapter One analyses the temporal concept of ‘waiting’ in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII and Fletcher’s A Wife for a Month to examine the specific relationship elite female servants have with time, and the ways in which waiting in service can both hinder and enable these characters to construct their futures. Chapter Two considers the elite female servants in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling and Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well to explore how status, sexuality, and the economy intersect through these characters. Chapter Three develops this intersectional approach to analyse the interplay of race, gender, and status as represented by the figure of the elite Black female servant in John Webster’s The White Devil, John Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta, and William Percy’s forgotten manuscript, A Forrest Tragedye in Vacunium. Chapter Four brings two of Shakespeare’s anomalous elite female servant characters, Emilia in Othello and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, into critical dialogue to demonstrate how paying attention to the nuances of status and of service can dramatically reshape how we read and perform these characters, as well as how we understand the drama and culture of the early modern period.
Date of Award1 Nov 2023
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • King's College London
SupervisorSarah Lewis (Supervisor), Gordon McMullan (Supervisor) & Hannah Crawforth (Supervisor)

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