Service, imitation, and social identity in Renaissance drama and prose fiction (William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Deloney, Thomas Nashe, Ben Jonson)

By investigating the mutual imitations of servants and masters in plays and fictions by Shakespeare, Dekker, Deloney, Nashe, and Jonson, this dissertation conceives of early modern service as a mimetic practice. The category of mimesis joins social and literary forms and opens new lines of inquiry into the intersections of literary imagination and social structures. Service was socially pervasive and a source of cohesion in early modern England, encompassing figures as diverse as courtiers, ladies in waiting, house servants, apprentices, and rogues. In exploring how mimetic service encouraged cross-class identifications, this dissertation shows that it also made possible new formations of social identity. Service and mimesis thus form an interpretive crux where different modes of assigning identity collide, a point that critics of service have largely neglected. These social modes correspond to the literary modes of prose fiction and drama, as both mediums use mimetic service to reflect on their own representational structures and define their relationships to readers and audiences.; In Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona and Comedy of Errors, the focus of chapter one, as well as in contemporary service manuals, servants provide mimetic records of their masters, even as they alter or mis-perform the texts of their masters, de-stabilizing concepts of mastery and elite identity. In likening a book's pages to page-boys, Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, the subject of chapter two, displays how the copying functions of both the servant and text unsettle the foundations of aristocratic mastery and substitute a contingent and episodic model of identity. Chapter three investigates how shoemakers in Deloney's prose fiction The Gentle Craft and Dekker's drama The Shoemaker's Holiday project a fantasy of servants solidifying fluid urban communities. Chapter four treats Jonson's The Alchemist, arguing that it unexpectedly parallels romance and satire and suggests that the roguish servant aids the London community by perpetuating its collective desire for social mobility. Chapter five shows how The Winter's Tale uses courtly service as practiced by both courtier and rogue characters to generate public and political reform, thus demonstrating the influence of marginal identities on courtly subjects.