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.