What do the servants know?

Lyons, P. (2010) What do the servants know? In: Gill, C. (ed.) Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–1737: From Leviathan to Licensing Act. Ashgate: Burlington, VT., pp. 11-32. ISBN 9781409400578

Abstract

English theatre of the Long Restoration (1660–1737) developed a distinctive stage presentation of servant roles, and attributed to servants aptitude and knowledge far beyond contemporary social codes and conventions. This paper examines the protocols underlying the construction of stage servants across the last four decades of the seventeenth-century, and then analyses how these roles and protocols suddenly mutate in the new bourgeois theatre of the early eighteenth-century, in parallel with a shift in philosophy as the dominance of Thomas Hobbes’s universalism was displaced by more class-inflected positions grounded in the thought of John Locke.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Additional Information: Used by permission of the Publishers from 'What do the servants know?', in Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650-1737 edited by Catie Gill (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 11-32. Copyright © 2010.
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Lyons, Mr Patrick
• Authors: Lyons, P.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Publisher: Ashgate
• ISBN: 9781409400578
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2010 Ashgate
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced with the permission of the publisher

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