Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Thou serv'st me, and I'll love thee”: Love and Service in Shakespeare's World
- 2 Performance and Imagination: The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 3 “His man, unbound”: The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest
- 4 “More than a steward”: The Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and Timon of Athens
- 5 “Office and devotion”: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, the Sonnets, and Antony and Cleopatra
- 6 “I am your own forever”: King Lear and Othello
- 7 “Something more than man”: The Winter's Tale
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Thou serv'st me, and I'll love thee”: Love and Service in Shakespeare's World
- 2 Performance and Imagination: The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 3 “His man, unbound”: The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest
- 4 “More than a steward”: The Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and Timon of Athens
- 5 “Office and devotion”: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, the Sonnets, and Antony and Cleopatra
- 6 “I am your own forever”: King Lear and Othello
- 7 “Something more than man”: The Winter's Tale
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book examines the interaction of two concepts. Both of them are messy. One is ostensibly a universal aspect of the human condition, the other a historically specific form of social organisation. Both are central to Shakespeare's work. Love, as the ordinary person exposed to the culture of the West in the twenty-first century would understand it, is the driving force in more than half his plays, his complete sonnet cycle, and, arguably, all of his nondramatic poems. Service is the informing condition of everything he wrote. If we put love and service together, every symbolic act that Shakespeare committed to paper or through performance may be said to be “about” this interaction. Shakespeare's mimetic art depends in the deepest sense of the word on the conjunctive play of love and service.
This fact involves two almost insurmountable difficulties for a scholarly monograph. First, it demands a principle of selection that cannot be determined by the concepts themselves, severally or jointly. Second, it presents a difficulty that is now the defining parameter of early modern scholarship: how do we relate a concept now so distant from Western, twentieth-century forms of social and personal life as to be barely recognisable to one that we instantly claim as our own?
CONCEPTS
Before I answer that question, let me tackle the messiness of the concepts. Scientific or scholarly argument depends upon the organisation of concepts in a rational format such that the concepts themselves do not move or slide out of place.
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- Shakespeare, Love and Service , pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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