Shakespeare, Love and Service (review)

This is an ambitious, welcome, and impressive volume, which for the first time explores the ways in which Shakespearean representations of love are inflected by the social institutions of service. As Schalkwyk states, associations of "affect" (187) are crucially involved in the need for "acknowledgement of the humanity of others" (255); in this connection, service plays a key role, functioning not so much in a "linear way but rather across different relationships" (259). It might appear a bold claim to assert, as the author does, that "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" (1), yet Schalkwyk defends this position over the course of a thoroughly absorbing and enlightening discussion of the plays and poems. Mapping the continuities of this preoccupation in Shakespeare, and attending to service rather than the servant, Shakespeare, Love and Service astutely recognizes that almost every subject in early modern England could be classed a type of "servant" and that service itself was a style of performance.

The book is divided into seven chapters which detail a range of Shakespearean examples and which consistently interrelate the drama and the Sonnets. The Sonnets are understood as a form of drama that sheds light on the plays and vice versa; this is a powerful interpretive strategy and has the merit of underscoring the breadth of a peculiarly Shakespearean theme. The opening chapter neatly sets the parameters of the study. The second, concentrating on The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream, is concerned with "the imaginative bestowal that lies at the heart of service" (79) and, as such, is highly attuned both to transactions that unfold "through love and in service" (75) and to points of contact between institutions and their representational equivalents. We benefit from learning that the theater "was an uneasy component of . . . relations of service" (67) and that, between shrew and servant, there obtained a telling affiliation. Mapping these connections, Schalkwyk is productively self-conscious in his recognition of ideological consanguinities. Chapter 3, which investigates The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest, has as its central concern the vexed partnership shared by "the bondage of service and the bonds of love" (81). Juxtaposing the two plays leads to some arresting observations about the entangled significance of names and identity, the "estranged doubleness" (94) of the plays and the poems, and, in the case of The Tempest, the historical dimensions of service.

It is with the poems, indeed, that Schalkwyk is preoccupied in the fourth chapter: here, the Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and Timon of Athens speak with each other and with notions of stewardship and "dutiful reciprocity" (150). The author teases out how service in Shakespeare can be "transformed into the classically informed relation of friendship" (115); in this process, moreover, tensions are generated as the necessities of love come into conflict with "conditions of social inequality" (115). Part of that tension is made manifest in the similarities between Viola and Malvolio, in the doubling of various other troubled domestics in the plays, and in the extent to which Timon, for example, is constructed as someone who "ignores the degree to which he is sustained by those who serve him" (148). Each play is discovered as elucidating a particular component of the topic while more wide-ranging considerations are addressed.

Chapter 5 explores "companionship and service . . . in the context of warfare, rebellion and the politics of state" (164). Interestingly, the service questions raised by Henry IV, the sonnets, and Antony and Cleopatra are not simply assessed at the level of "relations of power" (207); rather, Schalkwyk reads these works in terms of the inherent unpredictability of master-servant positions and the theatrical implications of "company" and service to time. We are encouraged to reflect upon seemingly familiar notions with fresh eyes. Two tragedies are productively tied in chapter 6: the paradoxical "unconditionality of love and service" (215) is the point of...