ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 focuses on the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women. It argues that the play stages ineffective household government in two distinct households as having negative impacts on the master-servant relationship. For the first time, the household headed by Mistress Drury is recognised as one of those female-headed households that caused moralistic writers of conduct literature much anxiety. Juxtaposing the kind of service that this household employs with the service experienced in the more traditional, male-headed household of the Saunders, the chapter argues that A Warning links poor household government and the particular form it takes, the corruption of domestic service, with anxieties about widows who headed their own homes and managed their own domestic servants. Corrupt household government in this play re-defines the master-servant relationship and turns it into its inverse.
