Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England (review)

Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England is one of three monographs published in 2005 on service in Shakespeare¹. After decades of neglect, service was finally recognized as the preeminent social relation in early modern England. Of these books, Discourses of Service is the most theoretically provocative, historically informed, and critically astute.

That literary critics and scholars have all but ignored the social conditions and lived experience of service in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries should now strike us as a bizarre exemplum of the blindness that is the condition of all critical insight, especially in light of the major turn to the explanation of literary texts in terms of their historical and political conditions. It took more than a decade after that revolution in the mid-1970s for the first monograph on master-servant relations to appear, in the form of Mark Thornton Burnett’s pathbreaking 1997 Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture. Between 1997 and 2005 only Michael Neill’s work sustained any focus on service as the informing condition of what Peter Laslett memorably called “the world we have lost.”

I draw attention to this critical lacuna not only to underline the significance of David Evett’s book, but also to indicate something that he makes plain in his distinctive approach to service—that critics have ignored what was before them in the very historical conditions they were so intent on excavating and illuminating, perhaps because their concern with a particular way of framing their questions led them to predictable answers. Discourses of Service may announce itself in the familiar terms of Foucauldian historicism of its title, but in practice it works resolutely against those terms. Evett takes issue with the exclusive materialist interest in power, exploitation, and group politics of the past three decades by focusing on Shakespeare’s representation of the individual subject’s phenomenological experience of service as an act of will. He argues that a received theoretical and ideological inclination to discount personal aspects of what appear to be merely economic or legal forms of exploitation has rendered the human textures of Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic relationships critically uninteresting or even politically questionable. This new recognition of the multilayered human quality of service has exposed a degree of theoretically induced myopia in prevailing assumptions and practice.

Evett’s framing argument does not abandon history or material conditions. He begins with service as a peculiarly Christian form of obligation by emphasizing both the ideal and the practice of willing service. “Whatever Shakespeare’s own doctrinal views,” he states, “I believe that the concept of freedom in service directs our attention to a moral if not a theological ideal that he enacts so repeatedly and effectively that it seems to me to become fully the cornerstone of his ethical vision” (15). The “perfect freedom” of service (3 et passim) is conceivable only by moving from imposed structure to phenomenological agency: to a kind of idealism that “places value on service per se” (60).

The author’s most distinctive contribution to current critical thought is his concept of “volitional primacy” (1), a notion that not only encompasses “willing service” (15), in imitation of Christ’s sacrifice, but also recognizes agency on the part of the servant. Turning the Protestant injunction to serve with “good will” (14) from precept into experience enables him to focus on satisfaction and to recognize the servants in Shakespeare as ethical agents rather than ideological victims. Central here is the corrective that service is not a class concept. We need to approach early modern master-servant relationships with the unaccustomed view that all members of the society were servants: many were both masters and servants, and even the monarch was a servant of God and his or her people.

Evett organizes his argument around a useful typology of service: (1) an inherited biblical discourse, which informs the sermons, conduct books, moral treatises, and polemics; (2) a...