ABSTRACT
In Twelfth Night (c. 1600), the lovesick Duke Orsino requests a song to accompany his longings for the Countess Olivia:
This obscure moment in a familiar play offers a compelling account of much larger cultural conditions for women than the cloistered countess Olivia occupies. At first glance, this romantic comedy, with its focus on the aristocratic negotiation of love between a Duke and his social superior, a Countess, does not seem to make room for working women beyond Maria, Olivia’s gentlewoman maidservant. Hidden not so far from the surface of this drama about the close confinement of the well-dowried maid Olivia, however, lies the barely suppressed memory of poor maids who lacked dowries at the other end of the social scale. These maids have undoubtedly failed to attract interest because, like the “old women and mayds” of John Aubrey’s early seventeenth century childhood (Dick xxix, xxxiii), and his mother’s maids that Reginald Scot recalls from his own sixteenth-century childhood, these women make their appearance only in someone’s recollection. The stories and songs the maids actually recited go unrecorded by Shakespeare, Aubrey, and Scot. Not only this, but Shakespeare’s free maids appear in reference to a form of song that remains unnoticed, forgotten, or dismissed by historians and literary scholars alike-an occupational song.
