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Chapter One • Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship Performing Service in The Comedy of Errors and The Two Gentlemen of Verona While it once was conventional to designate Shakespeare’s early plays as belonging to his “apprenticeship,” that period of his career when “he still has much to learn about the mechanics of his craft,”1 most critics have stopped derogating these works as immature and have begun to analyze them more seriously on their own terms. At this point, we might do well to reclaim the positive valences of what a nineteenth-century French scholar called “les années d’apprentissage” or a late-twentiethcentury scholar his “prentice work.”2 The past few years have brought new recognition of how embedded the theater was in the guild system; young players and others who trained for careers in the theater did not entertain simply a metaphoric relation to apprenticeship but often served actual apprenticeships. This chapter is framed by the supposition that through his associations with theatrical apprenticeship in the first stages of his career, Shakespeare was particularly attuned to the servant’s position . This framing reveals how the early comedies The Comedy of Errors (1591–94) and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592–93) develop an aesthetics of service in the theater. These two plays establish how servants acting for masters might become servants acting as masters. The chapter explores several implications of this representational instability. First, the servant’s position is defined as both aesthetic and influential. Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen portray servants as textual inscriptions that begin to author themselves and their masters, as players who skillfully misperform their masters’ commands, and as exemplars whom their masters imitate. These plays investigate the potential for service to spur social mobility, but they do so without dramatizing mobility for servants themselves. Instead, the agency servants display leads to a second point about social identities: 27 when servants misrepresent their masters, mastery loses a stable foundation , and the patriarchal hierarchy that supports mastery likewise weakens. The texts reveal more about the insecurities of elite identity at two key sites for their formation—the court and the city—than they do about empirical servant identities. In moving from Comedy of Errors to Two Gentlemen, I trace a deepening investment of elite identity in the subject positions that service makes available. In Comedy of Errors, the twin Dromios have a flat, textualized quality, an effect only enhanced by the fact that they are identical “copies,” down to their shared name. Yet the Dromios defy their status as static material texts by rewriting and (mis)performing their masters’ texts. Two Gentlemen features servants who similarly offer disruptive imitations of their masters. The play explores servant agency most intensely in the plot of Julia, a courtly woman who impersonates a page boy and thereby reconstructs herself as a layered composite of servant and mistress. In her disguise, Julia offers the play’s most successful assertion both of mastery and service. Shakespeare suggests that aesthetic service violates hierarchical class and gender distinctions and redefines mastery in more provisional, less absolute terms. The final point of the chapter is that in showing how servants’ representations move between the copy and the original, reproduction and production, imitation and transformation, Shakespeare sketches a blueprint for drama. The model of aesthetic service that emerges from Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen aligns drama with Sidney’s theory of poetic mimesis, which envisages poetry as deriving its creative power from its imitative faculties. Yet this same model also lends drama a mixed identity, aligning it with low or marginal influences associated with service and with the socially mixed, even disreputable, sixteenthcentury public theater. The plays announce drama’s ability, analogous to the servant’s, to imitate and alter theatrical audiences, a mimetic process that puts an apprentice in the theater in the position of a master and, through that very identification, renders fragile the position of a gentleman playgoer. Sidney suggests that plays, like other forms of poetry, deploy the transformative component of mimesis to generate a superior , ordered version of the social world; by contrast, Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen suggest that the theater uses that transformative component to confuse further the categories of an already unidealized social world. These plays, still critically underregarded, make a radical statement about drama: its connections with the submission and abjectness of service are not a limitation but a source of aesthetic invention and resourcefulness that dismantles entrenched social and subjective 28 Chapter...

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