What a Piece of Work is Man: The Representation of Workers Condition in Shakespeare s Plays

Within Shakespeare's canon, workers and craftsmen play an essential role: besides being powerful vehicles of comedy or comic relief, they often tackle important social issues of the Elizabethan age, thus representing a living link between the abstract "world" of theatre and the Elizabethan one. However, despite the primary role they play in Shakespeare''s canon, workers seem to have received little attention from Shakespearean critics, who have always tended to treat them as marginal figures of almost irrelevant importance. The aim of this paper is therefore to revaluate and problematise the role of minor characters in Shakespeare's plays by offering a new reading of the dramatic function of workers and craftsmen in Shakespeare's canon. Constantly oscillating between the role of submitted servants (such is the case, for instance, of Caliban in The Tempest, whose physical “otherness” makes him naturally suitable for the hardest activities) to that of "rude mechanicals" [III.2.9] (such is the case of A Midsummer Night''s Dream, in which comic relief is made possible by the improbable actions of Bottom and his companions), workers and craftsmen provide Shakespeare's audience with a comic, yet deeply realistic picture of the living conditions of the lower classes in the Elizabethan age. By discussing several different examples of workers in Shakespeare''s plays, this paper aims to read Shakespeare's plays not simply as the immortal fruits produced by the mind of the Bard of English literature, but also as real historical documents showing that theatres were spaces in which the economic problems, the social concerns and the medical issues of the Elizabethan age could be discussed and represented.