Having traced the self-consciously performative representations of love and service as a manifold of complex relations between self-expressive player and represented authority in the context of the projective imagination of “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.7), I complete my outline of the framing conditions of love's conjunction with service by turning to a new set of concepts. I move from questions of self-reflexive performance and imaginative bestowal to the bounds of service – the word conveying both its limits or boundaries and its ties. The plays in this chapter show that whereas servant and master are emotionally and psychologically bound and bounden to each other, the bonds of love may be experienced as the chains of slavery and the chains of slavery may be imaginatively annulled by the bonds of love.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

It would not have escaped the attention of Shakespeare or his audience that Ephesus, the setting of The Comedy of Errors, is the destination of the apostle Paul's letter which sets out with the greatest force and concision the reciprocal but hierarchical duties of husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant. Chapter 6 of the Epistle to the Ephesians is the biblical locus classicus of master-servant relations, and the organising text of Gouge's exegesis in Of Domesticall Dvties: