The precept central to the Protestant ideology of service – that service is not a form of bondage but perfect freedom if perceived and experienced in the right way – ties the psychology of service to both love and theatrical performance. The imaginative bestowal of value that is the essence of love involves a similar perspectival transformation of the phenomenological world as that which finds virtue in willing obedience. Love may be regarded as the embodiment of freely given, mutual service when it is reciprocated, and as a form of asymmetrical devotion to the other who occupies the place of master or sovereign when it is not. The metaphor of being enslaved by love is thus tied to sociological conditions of mastery and service in more than merely imaginary or literary ways. Both service and love are peculiarly performative insofar as they are capable of creating their own worlds or projective valuation through imaginative or aspect-perception. One person sees beauty in the brow of Egypt; another accepts bondage as perfect freedom.

In Shakespeare, these forms of aspectual perception are profoundly related to the performance of theatrical illusion and the exercise of ideological interpellation. The acceptance of service as a fulfilling kind of identity, the forging of friendship as “a willing bondage that brings freedom forever”, and the willing suspension of disbelief central to aesthetic experience form different strands of a common concept. “Think when we talk of horses”, the Chorus urges his audience in Henry V,