In this study I have sought to examine the portraiture of domestic servants in the comedies from the Restoration period to the earlier part of the eighteenth century. The examination is intended to evaluate the reliability of those comedies as a source of information on domestic service, and to consider to what extent the classical and Renaissance ancestry and the cultural shifts affected the representation of domestics on the stage, and how far away historical realities are from that representation.
This task made it necessary for me to investigate, in the first chapter, the representation of domestics in the classical literary inheritance of Greece and Rome to use it as a point of reference for further discussion. I also made a compact survey of the role and the portrayal of domestics in the Renaissance comedies of Italy, England and France, and in the Spanish comedy of the Golden Age.
In the second chapter I carried out an investigation of the historical realities of
domestic service in the period in question. This allows for a corroborated judgement on the portraiture of servants in the comedies of the period and the representation of domestics on the stage. This judgement should establish the extent to which the comedies of the period 1660-1737 could be
relied upon as sources of historical information.
In Chapter Three a number of comedies by the most notable playwrights of the Restoration period - like Sedley, Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Shadwell,
Otway, Behn, and Crowne were investigated to establish the facts about the stereotyped representation of servants regardless of the historical realities regarding the problems and dilemmas of the domestic servants. Some social facts and the literature of the reforming pamphleteers which affected the portraiture of domestics on stage have been taken into consideration.
In Chapter Four the same argument was further supported by comparing and contrasting the stage representation of domestics in a number of comedies
produced in the earlier part of the eighteenth century and written by Congreve, Burnaby, Centlivre, Addison, Cibber, Farquhar, and Steele - with the
historical realities and with the portraiture of servants in the classical and Renaissance comedies. To support the historical evidence further, I endeavoured to examine the complaints of masters against their servants in The Tatler and The Spectator, and , concluded the chapter with a statement of my findings.