At Work in the Early Modern English Theater Valuing Labor [Hardcover]

Kendrick is willing to go father and be more explicitly in his Marxist analysis than has been typical of scholars writing on similar topics. Though this study is not the first to argue that the early modern period is more than simply a precursor to the development of oppositional classes during the industrial era, it makes a particularly thoughtful and often refreshingly polemical case that the absence of a fully formed bourgeoisie and proletariat during the period should not be confused with laborers' passivity to the commodification and alienation of their labor.Kendricks book provides the reader with a clear outlook about labor and laborers in the early modern English theatre.This book examines the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the perspective of the periods radically changing labor relations and the nascent emergence of the English working class. The book offers a new way to approach the period by situating drama at the intersection of early modern theater history and labor history.At Work in the Early Modern English Theater: Valuing Labor explores the economics of the theater by examining how drama seeks to make sense of changing conceptions of labor. With the growth of commerce and market relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England came the corresponding degradation and exploitation of workers, many of whom made their frustrations known through petitions and pamphlets. Poverty affected all sectors of society in early modern England and many laborers, even London citizens from more prosperous trades, could expect to experience periods of impoverishment. This group of precarious laborers included actors and playwrights, many of whom had direct connections to Londons more established trades and occupations.Scholars have argued that dispossessed laborers turned to other forms of labor in lieu of their traditional livelihoods, including brigandage, piracy, begging, and cozening. To this list of alternative communities and applicatil#6