Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in early modern England. The collection considers how drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.

Michelle M. Dowd is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro, USA. Natasha Korda is a Professor of English at Wesleyan University, USA.

Contents: Working subjects, Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda; Mythos of labor: The Shoemaker's Holiday and the origin of citizen history, Crystal Bartolovich; Citizens and aliens as working subjects in Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, John Michael Archer; Staging alien women's work in civic pageants, Natasha Korda; Osmologies of luxury and labor: entertaining perfumers in early English drama, Holly Dugan; Englishmen for My Money: work and social conflict?, Tom Rutter; Will Kempe's work: performing the player's masculinity in Kempe's Nine Daies Wonder, Ronda Arab; The rogues' paradox: redefining work in The Alchemist, Elizabeth Rivlin; Desiring subjects: staging the female servant in early modern tragedy, Michelle M. Dowd; Domestic work in progress entertainments, Sara Mueller; 'You take no labour': women workers of magic in early modern England, Molly Hand; Raising Mephistopheles: performative representation and alienated labor in The Tempest, David Hawkes; Custom, debt, and the valuation of service within and without early modern England, Amanda Bailey; The comic-tragedy of labor: a global story, Valerie Forman; Labor and travel on the early modern stage: representing the travail of travel in Dekker's Old Fortunatus and Shakespeare's Pericles, Daniel Vitkus; Afterword: early modern work and the work of representation, Jean E. Howard; Selected bibliography; Index.