In Twelfth Night, the spaces of domestic service seen in The Taming of the Shrew, and in a displaced and etiolated way in The Tempest, are expanded by the intensely personal affects of philia and eros. I ask in this chapter what it is about intimate forms of service within the household that allowed it to be transformed into the classically informed relation of friendship, and what kind of conceptual and affective space might Shakespeare forge for the conjunction of erotic devotion and loving friendship – not merely between men but also between men and women. In the latter case, the staged embodiment of Viola as both desiring woman and gentleman servant transforms the formal, imaginative constraints of Montaigne's essays.

THE SONNETS

The sonnets present a paradox in their quest for the reciprocities of love within the conditions of social inequality that are intrinsic to relations of service. The servant-poet who begins the sonnets as a project of pure service – as a commission to persuade a recalcitrant aristocratic youth to bend to the necessities of his social and familial position – finds himself caught in the toils of service of a different kind and expectation. There is a decisive moment in sonnet 10 when the argument is informed by a new, personal urgency in the plea: “Make thee an other selfe for loue of me” (emphasis added).