Serving like a free man: Labor, liberty, and consent in early modern English drama

Although early modern England was centrally organized by hierarchies of service, the drama of the period repeatedly explores the paradox of free service : service without reward, service by free consent, service as itself a form of liberty. This dissertation argues that the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and of Roman comedy as it was translated and adapted in the Renaissance, staged the problem of conceptualizing service as simultaneously a form of constraint and of liberty. Chapter One explores Renaissance translations of the servus to argue that the idea of serving like a free man is encoded in the philological contradictions of the servus. As a primary locus for the enactment of servi, the early modern schoolroom also comes to determine the reception and ideological re-imagining of the servus. Chapter Two moves to the English languages of service to suggest that the tension between liberty and constraint resonant in the language and material forms of livery is an exemplum of and metonym for the larger paradox of free service in early modern England. Chapter Three returns to another classical slave, the famulus, to argue that the shift in the understanding of the family in Renaissance England—from a community based on service to one predicated on consanguinity—allows early modern dramatists to explore the servant\u27s capacity for free consent, affective intimacy, and willing service. Chapter Four finally turns to the figure of the freed slave, or libertus, to suggest that this classical character in fact provides a dramatic and conceptual model for early modern—and later, early American—notions of free service. Even as the libertus articulates free service as alternately nostalgic and fictional, consensual and coerced, a form of servitude and a paradoxical means to emancipation, he also rethinks notions of liberty as provisional, revocable, and contingent