Peter Holland comments, ‘The ease with which Mrs Pepys went to the theatre on her own, with no moral comment from Pepys, finally belies the old myth that all unattached women in the Restoration theatre were whores or aristocrats or both’, and he also works out that Deb Willets, Mrs Pepys’s maid, ‘went to the theatre over 23 times in the eight months’ from January to the end of August 1668.
• The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 11.
Servants could become significant consumers of drama – servants became usefully used in restoration comedy in turn.