Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture - (Early Modern Literature in History) by M Burnett (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Drawing upon archival material as well as the drama, popular verse and pamphlets, this book reads representations of masters and servants in relation to key Renaissance preoccupations. Apprentices, journeymen, male domestic servants, maidservants and stewards, Burnett argues, were deployed in literary texts to address questions about the exercise of power, social change and the threat of economic upheaval. In this way, writers were instrumental in creating servant 'cultures', and spaces within which forms of political resistance could be realized.

Review Quotes

'...an impressive work which sifts through a wealth of material...the arguments he advances about what the master-servant relations reveal about early modern English society's attitudes toward class, power, and sexuality make this work [incisive and useful to students of the Renaissance]...his treatment of masters and servants in early modern British culture is...quite masterful.' - Julie H. Kim, Early Modern Literary Studies

'...our most compelling study yet of the ways in which service was represented in the cultural documents of early modern England.' - Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare Quarterly