ABSTRACT
Viola, as an unbound maid, must at all costs avoid becoming too "free." In a culture where legal protection was based on attachment to a household, a woman who subsisted outside the household was too free for her own good. Women's work songs add significantly to the clamor of the sounds, shouts, and cries that would have been audible in early modern England, so ably described by Bruce Smith. The starched ruffs of countless Elizabethan aristocrats were manufactured by the free maids of England using the same laborious process. In any case, free maids signed indentures of transportation hoping that it would prove a better option than maidservant, lacemaker, or convict, all of which kept them in poverty. The place of poor women in our late modern global economy can be traced back to the period of early industrialization in William Shakespeare's England.
