FORMS OF SERVICE: THE POETICS OF COMMUNITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

This dissertation examines how the concept of service shapes representations of community in texts drawn from four key early modern genres: tragedy, court-masque, travel journal, and epic poem. As a condition of bondage central to early modern social experience, service crucially mediated agency and communal identity in both domestic and cross-cultural contexts. Generically varied as they are, early modern tragedy, masque, travel-journal, and epic all share a profound concern with the founding imperatives of communal life. In the texts I study, this concern manifests itself through an exploration of service as an inherently social, but not necessarily sociable concept. Thus, juxtaposing dystopian social critique with utopian idealism, Shakespeare and Middleton’s tragedy, Timon of Athens (1607), presents the break-down of service-relationships as symptomatic of a general ethical crisis affecting the Athenian civic body. Ben Jonson’s royal masque, Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621), also mines the discourse of service to explore competing visions of national community. Service mediated the representation of communal identities in cross-cultural contexts too, as I find in my work on Sir Thomas ii