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
3 - “His man, unbound”: The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest
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
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:
5 Servants, be obedient unto them that are your masters, according to the flesh, with fear and trembling in singleness of your hearts as unto Christ,
6 Not with service to the eye, as men pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart,
7 With good will serving the Lord, and not men. […]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare, Love and Service , pp. 80 - 114Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008