What do the servants know?

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