Abstract
The staff of the great noble households of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were organized according to a strictly hierarchical scheme.1 Occupying the lower positions were the ‘yeomen’ servants such as grooms, stable-hands, waiters, footmen and musicians. At the upper levels could be found the ‘gentlemen’ servants responsible for household government: the steward, chamberlain, comptroller, receiver, secretary and gentleman usher all fell into this category. Collectively, these senior servants made up the lord’s ‘chief officers’.2
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Notes
Felicity Heal, ‘Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household’, in Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds, Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (Minneapolis and London, 1996 ), pp. 179–80.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester, 1984), I.i.3.
Henry Glapthorne, The Lady Mother, ed. Arthur Brown, Malone Society (Oxford, 1958 [1959]), II.i.588–94.
Ben Jonson, The Complete Plays, ed. G. A. Wilkes, 4 vols (Oxford, 1981–2), vol. I, III.v.13–21.
George Chapman, The Comedies, ed. Allan lloladay (Urbana, Chicago and London, 1970), III.ii.162.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA, 1990 ), pp. 157–8.
Frank Whigham, Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge, 1996), p. 191.
Richard Brome, The Northern Lasse, ed. Harvey Fried (New York and London, 1980), IV.i.127–35.
James Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, ed. Ronald Huebert (Manchester, 1986), II.i.121–30.
Richard Brome, A Mad Couple Well Match’d, ed. Steen H. Spove (New York and London, 1979), III.i.95–7.
Robert Parker Sorlien, ed., The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–1603 (Hanover, 1976), p. 48.
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 76–8, 177–82.
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© 1997 Mark Thornton Burnett
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Burnett, M.T. (1997). The Noble Household. In: Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380141_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230380141_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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