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James Yates, Elizabethan Servant Poet

James Yates, Elizabethan Servant Poet by A Lady I obey and serue With heart and minde and onelie will: Who hath done more then I deserue, For which I am her seruant still, To wish her well since wealth is small, And wishing is the most of all.1 URPRISINGLY little is known about servant writing in Renaissance England. This statement obviously raises a problem of definition: on the one hand, almost all writing of the period is involved in discourses of ``service'' of one sort or another and thus has some claim to be ``servant writing.'' On the other hand, one may usefully adopt for the moment Mark Thornton Burnett's operational definition of ``servant'' as an employee of an aristocratic family who ``lives in'' at the family home.2 The literary representation of servants has received some attention, and individual texts by servants have been studied for their representations of class and in particular gender, but ``servant writing'' as a category remains largely unexplored.3 1 James Yates, ``In the Prayse of a vertuous Gentlewoman,'' The Castell of Courtesy (London, 1582), 46r. The poems are cited from the UMI microfilm of The Castell of Courtesy; the publication numbers folios, rather than pages, and this use http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Studies in Philology University of North Carolina Press

James Yates, Elizabethan Servant Poet

Steggle, Matthew
Studies in Philology , Volume 101 (1) – Mar 2, 2004
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by The University of North Carolina Press.
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1543-0383
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Abstract

by A Lady I obey and serue With heart and minde and onelie will: Who hath done more then I deserue, For which I am her seruant still, To wish her well since wealth is small, And wishing is the most of all.1 URPRISINGLY little is known about servant writing in Renaissance England. This statement obviously raises a problem of definition: on the one hand, almost all writing of the period is involved in discourses of ``service'' of one sort or another and thus has some claim to be ``servant writing.'' On the other hand, one may usefully adopt for the moment Mark Thornton Burnett's operational definition of ``servant'' as an employee of an aristocratic family who ``lives in'' at the family home.2 The literary representation of servants has received some attention, and individual texts by servants have been studied for their representations of class and in particular gender, but ``servant writing'' as a category remains largely unexplored.3 1 James Yates, ``In the Prayse of a vertuous Gentlewoman,'' The Castell of Courtesy (London, 1582), 46r. The poems are cited from the UMI microfilm of The Castell of Courtesy; the publication numbers folios, rather than pages, and this use

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Studies in Philology – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Mar 2, 2004

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