Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England PDF
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Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England This page intentionally left blank Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England David Evett DISCOURSESOFSERVICEINSHAKESPEARE’SENGLAND © David Evett, 2005. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-6815-9 All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010 and Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire,England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of thePalgrave Macmillan division of St.Martin’s Press,LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.Macmillan® is a registered trademark intheUnited States,United Kingdom and other countries. Palgraveis a registered trademark in the European Unionandothercountries. ISBN 978-1-349-53045-8 ISBN 978-1-4039-7888-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403978882 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evett,David. Discourses of service in Shakespeare’s England / David Evett. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-349-53045-8 1.Shakespeare,William,1564–1616—Characters—Servants. 2.Master and servant—England—History—16th century. 3.Master and servant—England—History—17th century. 4.Domestics—England—History—16th century.5.Domestics— England—History—17th century.6.Master and servant in literature.7.Domestics in literature .8.Servants in literature. I.Title. PR2992.S47E97 2005 822.3(cid:1)3—dc22 2004059777 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India. First edition:April 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1 The Paradox of Service and Freedom 1 Chapter 2 The Hop and the Pole: The Limits of Materialism 17 Chapter 3 “Surprising Confrontations”: Discourses of Service in The Taming of the Shrew 35 Chapter 4 “Monsieur, We Are Not Lettered”: Classical Influences and the Early Modern Marketplace 55 Chapter 5 “Clubs, Bills, and Partisans”: Retainer Violence and Male Bonding 81 Chapter 6 FidelisServus...: Good Service and the Obligations of Obedience 109 Chapter 7 ...PerpetuusAsinus: Bad Service and the Primacy of the Will 133 Chapter 8 “A Place in the Story”: Gender, Commodity, Alienation, and Service 159 Chapter 9 “As Willing as Bondage E’er of Freedom”: The Vindication of Willing Service in The Tempest 183 Notes 213 Works Cited 263 Index 279 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book has been long in the making, and the list of my debts is correspondingly long. Most of the research and writing was done while I was still an active member of the Department of English at Cleveland State University, and I received steady support from my department and college. A sabbatical term at the Folger Shakespeare Library allowed me to explore early modern writings on service; another freed me from teaching and administration in order to write. I found the books I needed and the staff support I hoped for at the CSU library, at the Folger, and at the libraries of Case Western Reserve University, Harvard University, and Tufts University. Early versions of various chapters were presented to the Southeast Renaissance Conference, the Ohio Shakespeare Conference, the Citadel Conference, the Guild of Episcopal Scholars, and several meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America; the reactions encouraged me to continue the work and helped shape it. My worldwide associates in SHAKSPER, the ongoing international internet conference, have provoked and responded to statements and restatements of many of the book’s ideas and points, and all of us owe thanks to SHAKSPER’s indefatigable manager, Hardy Cook. Everyone now working on Shakespeare and service must honor the trailblazers, who moved a previously marginalized topic toward the cen- ter of our field. I feel special obligations to Richard Strier, who not only helped lead the way but has encouraged many others to follow, and to Mark Thornton Burnett, with whom I often disagree but never without having to improve my own understanding first. The book was read in various manuscript stages by T. G. Bishop (who has also contributed by way of dozens of conversations and emails), John Cox (whose advocacy over several decades of a Christian reading of essentially Christian texts has been exemplary), Lars Engle (whose own brilliant book on early mod- ern intellectual exchange gave me my title and whose challenges I can only hope to have met), Stuart Evett, Whit Hieatt, Carol Chillington Rutter, and Debora Shuger; all of them made many useful suggestions, and none of them led me astray. More recently, David Schalkwyk has viii/ acknowledgments materialized as companion and guide. I got detailed comments on parts of the book on the way to publication as articles from Daniel Doerksen, Christopher Hodgkins, and Michael Neill. To Michael, whose own writing on early modern service is rich, subtle, humane, and wise, I owe special thanks for encouraging me at a dark hour. My editors at Palgrave Macmillan have been consistently supportive and helpful. My largest tribute must go to my wife, Marianne. For more than four decades her acumen as a reader and editor of early modern dramatic texts, and of writing about them, has fostered my better understanding and curbed my vagaries. Her deeply informed sympathy with actors and audiences as one of America’s most distinguished drama critics has enriched my sensitivity to the plays in performance. I argue here that action more than language truly informs the servant–master relation- ship. I owe that insight mainly to my experience of Shakespeare on the stage, and my duties as her chauffeur and baggage-handler have enabled me to see significant professional productions of every single one of the Shakespeare plays mentioned in this book, in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, most of them over and over again. For what Marianne has taught me and many others about service in the widest, warmest sense of that word, to family, community, world—and the wonderful freedoms that follow from it—I can find no words. David Evett Arlington, Massachusetts November 2004 Chapter 1 The Paradox of Service and Freedom This book takes its inspiration from a magically paradoxical phrase in the Tudor Book of Common Prayer, “service is perfect freedom.” The book explores this concept in early modern English culture, with special attention to the various kinds of people we can label as servants, and to such people as they are represented in the plays of William Shakespeare. It carries out this exploration in the larger context of the complex and dynamic understandings of service in England as they evolved through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Such relationships patently involved people who were deeply dependent on other, wealth- ier, more powerful people for their livelihoods, and whose orders they took. It is essential to realize at the outset, however, that the ideals and practices of service came at one point or another to inform the atti- tudesand lives of women and men at every level of society, so that even people at the highest economic and political levels sometimes felt, thought, and acted as servants. And all these people were explicitly called to an ideal of service by the central doctrines of the Christianity to which they subscribed. The book thus has an ethical, even spiritual agenda. Initially, the focus is historical, working through the several ideologies of service that were active in early modern English society, both from the idealist and from the materialist points of view. Later, the book takes a political and psychological turn, as specifically postmodern ideas increasingly come into play. The agenda operates both within and against the over- whelmingly pragmatic and materialist ethos of late-twentieth- and early- twenty-first-century critical practice, especially in connection with a psychological concept I call volitional primacy. The servants in the Shakespeare plays, like their counterparts in early modern society out- side the drama, have lately attracted critical and historical attention after centuries in which they were almost entirely ignored. Much of that D. Evett, Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England © David Evett 2005
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