The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 21.0271 Saturday, 11 July 2010
From: Hardy M. Cook <
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Date: Saturday, July 10, 2010
Subject: SBReview_9: Shakespeare, Love, and Service
SBReview_9:
David Schalkwyk. _Shakespeare, Love, and Service_. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008. ISBN-13: 9780521886390. Pp. x + 317. U.S. $93.
Reviewed by David Evett, Professor Emeritus, Cleveland State University.
David Schalkwyk's book makes a splendid climax to the recent surge of
publications on Shakespeare and service, following important work by Richard
Strier, Mark Thornton Burnett, Michael Neill, Linda Anderson, Judith Weil, and
me. Schalkwyk takes much from his precursors, then adds much of his own. The
book needs to be read by everybody who wants to understand fully the social and
emotional relationships that give structure and texture to most of Shakespeare's
plays. The work has, as well, important implications for the thoughtful
consideration of service relationships in fields far removed from Early Modern
English drama.
Indeed, in the aftermath of this study, it becomes difficult to understand how
service could have gone as largely unnoticed and unconsidered as it did for as
long as it did, until 1988, when Strier's essay on faithful and disobedient
service in _King Lear_ (following up, indeed, an earlier but largely disregarded
essay by Jonas Barish and Marshall Waingrow, 1958) can be said to have peered
over the wall, and led others to come and look. Before then, across four
centuries, the people who read and watched Shakespeare took domestic service --
the hewing of wood and drawing of water, the carrying of messages and ironing of
clothes -- more or less for granted. Servants, so called, were by definition and
in dramatic practice marginal figures: fungible, to use a term important in
Schalkwyk's analysis, lacking the individuality and self-consciousness so
crucial to neoclassical, romantic, and modern criticism. (Some comic figures --
Juliet's nurse, Feste, Lear's Fool -- did get a little more attention.) Even
when post-modern Marxist materialism shoved economic and political power
relationships to the center of critical discourse, the earlier attitudes
constrained Burnett's pioneering book on service in Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama (1997) to focus on characters in the lower ranges of the hierarchy. Neill,
it was, who first strongly showed that ideals and practices of service informed
relationships within the higher ranks, as well (2000).
Neill, however, and the three of us who published books in 2005, kept _service_
as our defining term. Schalwyck's bunker-busting achievement is to add _love_,
in all the senses of that complex term to the equation. The word, of course, was
commonplace in Shakespearean criticism from Dryden on-almost entirely, however,
with reference to erotically charged relations between men and women. Schalkwyk,
however, stretches the term to include its other traditional meanings, not just
_eros_ but _agape_, _philia_, and _nomos_, and then, prompted by the complex
play of the terms in the _Sonnets_, to explore the wonderfully rich and dynamic
interaction of love and service in the drama. Love, he proposes, is "a complex
of interwoven orientations to the self and the world, embodied in forms of
action rather than confined to the inscrutability of an interior affect . . .
[and] is not merely a value produced within an abstract system of differences
but is constituted out of its changing, lived relations with concepts such as
desire and friendship, as well as tenderness and anger, indignation and
generosity, want and repletion, satisfaction and resentment, pleasure and pain,
exultation and grief" (7-8). The treatment of love and service in Shakespeare's
plays arose out of the fact that Shakespeare and his theatrical associates were
servants themselves, in a society in which service relationships deeply affected
virtually everyone (the metatheatrical elements of the book, many of which take
off from the work of Robert Weimann, are stimulating). This treatment informs
and is informed by other relationships not established through the formal
subordination of servant to master.
Schalkwyk carries forward my own argument that the Protestant ideology of
service incorporated in dynamic ways the paradox that when undertaken by what at
least appears inwardly to be free choice, service actually becomes a form of
freedom. Schalkwyk here calls on Hegel's anatomy of the ineluctable
interdependence of master and servant. Neither can exist without the other.
Whereas the master's consciousness only depends on recognizing the servant as a
reflection of the master, hence remaining inherently dependent, the servant's
consciousness is, however, truly independent (40). He, or she, is consequently
enabled to seek elements of freedom from within the subordinate's role.
The argument begins with the recognition that the theology of service expressed
in a large corpus of early modern didactic treatments of service insisted on
reciprocity without equality as an essential feature of divinely ordained
master-servant relationships. In actuality, however, and in that life as
represented in the drama, there was (and remains) an inescapable central tension
"between the duties of reciprocal care that were supposed to inform all
relations between master and servant and the personal demand for _affective_
equality in relations of friendship and love that, unfulfilled, could turn to
resentment. . . ." These feelings are not typically provoked by disparities of
wealth and power. "Shakespeare seems to be less interested in ambition and
avarice than in the complexities of abjection that arise from deeper forms of
personal intimacy: the need for love, friendship, and devotion; willing self-
sacrifice; and the attendant anxieties and forms of resentment that arise from
feelings of rejection, betrayal, and neglect" (39).
Having established these principles through a closely reasoned and widely
supported argument far too rich to be summarize here, Schalkwyk substantiates
their critical utility through detailed analysis of eleven plays, ranging across
all four of the traditional generic clusters, plus the sonnets. The organization
is thematic rather than chronological, although it does begin with an early
comedy, _Taming of the Shrew_, and ends with _Winter's Tale_. (The relatively
tight coverage means that readers interested in service aspects of many plays in
which they are important will want to consult the more comprehensive studies by
Anderson and me; the tight focus on Shakespeare means that Burnett and Neill
remain primary sources for non-Shakespearean texts.) The analysis is uniformly
intriguing, informative, illuminating, with fresh insights on virtually every
page: even the treatments of _Lear_ and _Othello_, the plays subjected to the
most extensive study by other scholars, use the focus on love to open new
perspectives.
Only in Chapter 5, on the two parts of _1_ and _2 Henry IV_ and _Antony and
Cleopatra_, does the level seem to me to drop a little; I think this is because
Schalkwyk fails to perceive how his own emphasis on the tension between
reciprocity and inequality can lead a reader to see that the desirable state of
affective reciprocity is rigidly closed off to monarchs, the only members of
classical and early modern societies who could, by definition, have no equals.
That fact means that we do not have to fall back on the materialistic emphasis
on power that has dominated recent criticism of the Henriad, at least, to
explain why Hal must change his relationship to Falstaff when he is crowned, or
why Antony can only restore the close affective relationship of the war-leader
with his band after it is clear that the loner Octavius, who scorns reciprocity
from his first appearance in _Julius Caesar_ and shows affection for no one but
his sister, is going to be the emperor.
The final two chapters, however, are brilliant, and the last one, on _Winter's
Tale_, opens the lens even wider by its highly persuasive expansion of the
argument to incorporate matters of gender. The topic is lightly touched in the
treatments of _Shrew_, _Othello_, and _Twelfth Night_ that precede it. In this
late play, however, the development of Paulina most perspicuously amplifies the
profound connections between the dynamics of patriarchy and the dynamics of
service. She provides "resistance, healing, and restoration . . . the epitome of
service in the Shakespearean canon", repeating and amplifying the effects of
Perdita's words and acts on Polixines. (The process provokes a fine irony: the
brother kings learn the virtues of servants from the women they thought were
made to serve them.) Resistance is crucial. Obedient service to tyrannical
masters cannot be true service; in crisis, "Disobedience, critical opposition,
and judicious counsel are . . . the essence of service" (263). For their own
reasons, the male servants, Antigonus and Camillus, are unable to supply these.
Paulina, however, remains remarkably faithful to both mistress and master. Her
counsel leads him a remarkable place, a willingness to let her choose for him a
second wife; her disobedience and resistance allow her to produce something that
feels like a miracle. Leontes' decision, Schalkwyk says, uniquely enacts the
paradox of freedom in service -- nowhere else embodied in a king (285). In the
domestic setting of the final scene, metatheater reappears: the kings are
obliged to be spectators as well as actors, "as if the player were to be held
accountable for his actions in the part" (292-92). At the very end, Paulina
retreats, as servants are wont to do, to the sidelines. Leontes gets the final
words. But as Schalkwyk does not go on to notice, most of that speech is given
to rewarding her with a version of the gift she has just given him, a loving
spouse, and the final sentence can be read as bestowing on her the first place
in this society: "Good Paulina, / Lead us from hence . . . lead away" 5.2.152-
56), a final expression, in an act of service, of the abjection that has led him
back to love and the world.
Together with the pervasive importance in the argument of the interaction of
love and service within the quotidian work of the theater, this extension of the
argument into couples and families beckons us to think about service in our own
lives and work -- as theater people, teachers, children, parents, citizens. When
I was still teaching, I used to say, sometimes with conviction, that I loved my
work. David Schalkwyk's book has got me thinking about where and how I found
love in my work-how in serving my students and colleagues and readers I
increased the quantity of love in my life, in myself, and in others. I am
persuaded that the world would be a better place, a more loving place, if
everybody in it thought about such things.
At the risk of bathos, I want to end with an all too familiar complaint about
the copyediting of this expensive book. It is littered with errors, mostly
small, but cumulatively irritating -- misspellings, misnumberings, solecisms, of
which "Hall" instead of "Hal" is only one of the more obvious. One of our most
prestigious academic presses should be ashamed. As the absence of any reference
to the book's copyeditor in Schalkwyk's acknowledgments (especially in the
Cavellian sense of that word that the book frequently employs) testifies, it is
hard to love and serve well somebody half a world away with whom your only
contact is the mechanical exchange of files on the Internet. It would serve us
all better if publishers took that service more seriously.
_______________________________________________________________
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Hardy M. Cook,
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