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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
DISCOURSES OF SERVICE IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND
© David Evett, 2005.
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
the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of
Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark
in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries.
Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN 1–4039–6815–2
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 1–4039–6815–2
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⬘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
Printed in the United States of America.
 Con t e n t s

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 Fidelis Servus . . . : Good Service

and the Obligations of Obedience 109

Chapter 7 . . . Perpetuus Asinus: 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
 Ch ap t e r 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-
tudes and 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
 2 / discourses of service in shakespeare’s england

attention is informed by sensitivity to issues of power, and my argument

tries to take account of the real force of this work. Still, the book tries to
show that the idea and the praxis of service invoked and enacted the
motives of love and sacrifice that make social life not only possible but
also desirable. It thus contends that a full response to these plays—and
by implication to many other early modern cultural artifacts—requires
a fuller awareness of service than has generally been achieved. And it
contends that the ideals of service have important twenty-first-century
applications.
The exploration begins with a brief history of the great paradox of
freedom in service. The paradox stands at the center of the Collect for
Peace of the Anglican Prayer Book’s service of Morning Prayer:

O God, which art author of peace, and lover of concorde, in knowledge

of whome standeth oure eternall life, whose service is perfect fredome:
defende us, thy humble servauntes, in al assaultes of our enemies, that
wee surely trustyng in thy defence, maye not feare the power of any
adversaries: through the myght of Jesu Christ our lorde. Amen. (1549;
emphasis added)

In assembling the 1549 version of the Prayer Book, Thomas Cranmer

took this collect from the postcommunio of the Missa pro pace in the
Sacramentary of Gregory the Great, as found in the Sarum rites followed
in English churches and which Cranmer himself had heard and used
through almost all of his 60 years as layman, priest, and bishop.1 The
Latin version, which had been a constant feature of the missal from the
twelfth century onward, reads as follows:

Deus autor pacis et amator caritatis quem nosse uiuere cui servire regnare
est. protege ab omnibus impugnacionibus supplices tuos. ut cui in defen-
sione tua confidimus. nullius hostilitatis arma timeamus. (Legge 396)2

The rubric in the Sarum Missal states that the Missa pro pace was routinely
used on the eighteenth Sunday in Trinity, and exceptionally whenever war
threatened. Many versions of the missal, however, include five other
prayers under the heading pro pace, and twenty-seven more under the
heading tempore belli; none of them exhibits anything similar to servire
regnare, making Cranmer’s choice even more striking.
In the Sarum Primer, on which the daily offices of the Prayer Book
are largely based, a different Collect for Peace had appeared at the end
of the second morning office, Lauds, the service on which Morning
 the paradox of service and freedom / 3

Prayer was modeled:

O God, from whome all holy desyres, all good counsels, and all iust
works do procede, geue vnto thy seruantes that same peace which the
world cannot geue: that oure heartes beyng obedient to thy commaun-
dementes, and the feare of our enemyes taken awaye, oure time may be
peaceable by thy protection. Through Christ our lorde. Amen.3

By substituting the collect from the Missa pro pace for this one,
Cranmer saw to it that a prayer formerly heard once or twice a year was
now placed where it would be said or heard every day by every consci-
entious Anglican priest, heard almost every Sunday by every churchgoer,
and said or heard almost every day by the masters and servants of pious
conforming households (Brightman 148; Legge 395).4 The original
collect called attention to servants, and to obedience; in promoting the
new one from occasional to incessant use, however, Cranmer laid the
emphasis of repetition and of Establishment on the paradox of “perfect
freedom” in service. And in adapting the prayer, he made changes that
strengthen the features of the prayer most germane to a consideration
of service as a social practice. For Cranmer promotes the idea from
an infinitive phrase, servire regnare, to a clause, “whose service is perfect
freedom,” and replaces the essentially political term “to reign” with a
word, “freedom,” that not only explicitly invokes liberty within
constraints of all kinds, but also has a much more generally social,
psychological, and situational emphasis. Cranmer then goes on to domes-
ticate the quasi-military “assailants” and “attackers” of the Latin prayer
(omnibus impugnationibus, hostilitatis arma) into more general “enemies”
and “adversaries,” so that they could be cruel masters or pitiless creditors
as well as besieging armies. Cranmer’s translation of caritas as “concord”
foregrounds social or domestic harmony rather than the top-down solici-
tude for the less fortunate that operates in the Bible in things like the story
of the rich man and the beggar and that had generally characterized
medieval Christian thought.5 And Cranmer turns Sarum’s supplices, “sup-
plicants,” into “servants,” reiterating, more sharply than the Latin rite, the
theological concept invoked by the service–freedom paradox, but also on
phenomenological grounds rendering the prayer particularly relevant to
any auditors who already think of themselves as servants in nontheological
contexts.
We can certainly situate this development in a familiar materialist
history in which rulers and their spin doctors exploit the elements of
religious belief and practice to sustain their power and privilege. Such an
 4 / discourses of service in shakespeare’s england

analysis rests on the demonstrable instabilities wrought on the model of

service operating in England around the accession of Henry VII. This
model was quasi-military. In it, mainly male servants, bound by vows of
lifetime service and compensated for it by their lodging, clothing, and
food plus occasional gifts, did most of the household chores, but also
stood ready to accompany their master to war; similar patterns of
exchange governed households in which the military dimension was less
significant. In Tudor times, an increasingly centralized royal authority
reduced the power of the magnates by reducing the size of their retainer
bands. The feudal household gave place to a more obviously capitalistic
model in which women as well as men were hired by the quarter or year
for maintenance plus cash wages. Driven by enclosure and drawn by the
growth of commerce and industry, thousands of men and women,
former tenants, beholden to their landlords, but also in significant ways
independent, became the hirelings of better-to-do farmers, or left the
land altogether and moved to cities and towns to become dependents in
the households of merchants and crafters as apprentices, journeymen, or
domestics. The closing of the monasteries, by redistributing ecclesiasti-
cal wealth and turning many former monastics to seek a living for them-
selves, together with the first groups of Protestant refugees from the
Continent, generated economic uncertainty and enlarged the number of
people for whom domestic service represented a possible livelihood.6
Later in the period, soldiers discharged back into civilian life after
English military activities in France, the Low Countries, and Ireland
returned in significant numbers to look for work in the cities or in the
large households of agrarian magnates.
For these and other reasons, the dominant model of service became
increasingly domestic rather than military. Over the same period, the
economic developments of an emerging capitalism shifted the standard
service relationship from long-term affiliations grounded in neighbor-
hood and custom to short-term arrangements for cash wages. The shift
gave servants much greater mobility—even as it made the social system
less stable. The increase in the population of dependents no longer fixed
in customary places for life aroused anxiety. Civil strife, especially the
Peasants’ Revolt (which fed the conservative reaction against the initial
success of radical Protestant thought across Europe) and the Catholic
uprisings of 1536–37 in England itself, a largely popular movement,
shook the seats of the mighty. Thus, the anxiety of rulers about subjects
blended into the anxiety of masters about servants; this anxiety pro-
voked legal and conceptual strategies of control and containment.
The notion of “ideological misrepresentation” developed by Jonathan
 the paradox of service and freedom / 5

Dollimore and Alan Sinfield suggests the possibility that Cranmer’s

work on the Prayer Book (which also includes prayers for the monarch
and other magistrates) made part of the general strategy of hegemonic
legitimation undertaken by the supporters of Henry VIII, Edward VI,
and Elizabeth, of which the Book of Homilies—including the homilies
against disobedience and rebellion—is a familiar instance (Dollimore and
Sinfield 206–27). A reading of the collect might plausibly see in it an
appeal to subordinated persons to remain contentedly in the stations to
which God had called them—a call that, indeed, only echoes significant
strains in the Bible, and especially the Pauline epistles. Such a view has
dominated the materialist treatments of service that we examine more
closely in chapter 2.
An examination of the history of the paradox, however, suggests that
by the time Cranmer boosted its liturgical visibility, it had not only sus-
tained its ability to inspire anew each generation of Christian idealists,
but had also come over time to have a more general and intrinsic claim,
independent of the interests of the privileged few. Indeed, foregrounding
the paradox only amplifies a leveling strain present in Christian theol-
ogy and polity from the earliest days, when members of the brand new
church repeatedly invoked Christ and his followers by the title of servant
(Acts 2:18, 27; 3:13, 26; 4:25, 27, 29, 30, and passim). There is a solid
Old Testament basis for this in the periods spent in servile roles by Jacob
and Joseph, Samuel’s service of Eli and David and David’s service of
Saul, and the national service of the Israelites during both the Egyptian
and the Babylonian exiles. Christ takes this further, turning models into
prescriptions: “If anie man desire to be first, the same shalbe last of all,
and seruant vnto all” (Mark 9:35; see also Mark 10:43–44; Matt.
20:26–27; 23:11–12; Luke 9:48; 22:26).7
In Scripture, the notion as incorporated in the collect emerges most
fully in Galatians 4–5. Here, Paul constructs an elaborate allegory of
bondage and freedom (citing the relationships among Abraham, Sarah,
Hagar, and their children), in which the law of the old covenant is
required by the bondage of the body, but the freedom of the new
covenant is enabled by the new freedom of the spirit, which comes to a
focus in an injunction obviously relevant to our present purposes: “For
brethren, ye haue been called vnto libertie: only vse not your libertie as
an occasion vnto the flesh, but by loue serue one another. For all the
Law is fulfilled in one worde, which is this, Thou shalt loue thy neigh-
bour as thy selfe” (5:13–14). (It is on this text that Luther and other
Protestant theologians primarily found their understanding of service.)
There is no question that even in the early Christian period, the words
 6 / discourses of service in shakespeare’s england

are used in a primarily spiritual sense; relief from literal slavery, always a
perquisite of Greek and Roman masters, might come somewhat more
often for the bond servants of Christians than for those of pagans, but
most born or sold into the servant class could expect to spend their lives
there, only looking forward to freedom, even the reversal of roles (as in
the story of the rich man and Lazarus) in the afterlife. Yet the argument
has the effect of blurring the distinction between Law and law, service
to an ideal and service to a man, for only rarely do the biblical texts
make social distinctions, and when they are made in the context of a
particular situation or story, they tend to get lost when the statement is
cited by itself. Either way, then, the life of service is extrinsically bound
and hence extrinsically undesirable, intrinsically free and hence intrinsi-
cally valuable. The ultimate argument is the life of Christ, who “chose a
laborious and painful life. . . . So that if thou be his disciple and servant,
thou must not disdaine that which thy Master chose” (Fosset 1612, 13;
emphasis added). And Paul himself, as he tells his Christian brothers
and sisters in Corinth, is striving to live this argument: “For thogh I be
fre from all men, yet haue I made myself seruant vnto all men, that I
might winne the mo” (1 Cor. 9:19).8 Or, as he puts it more generally, in
a verse repeatedly cited by Tudor commentators, “For he that is called in
the Lord being a seruant, is the Lords freman: likewise also he that is
called being fre, is Christs seruant” (1 Cor. 7:22).9
Christian emphasis on service, and its paradoxical association with
freedom, passes over from the Bible into the writings of the Church
Fathers and thence into the practice of the church. From early on, the
popes call themselves servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God
(that the proposition looks remarkably hypocritical in connection with
somebody like Alexander VI does not invalidate it theologically). The
paradox of freedom in service is particularly marked by St. John
Chrysostom. Indeed, Chrysostom develops the theme of service more
fully than any other of the early fathers, with a specifically domestic,
practical emphasis, particularly in his commentary on Ephesians (of
which an English translation was published in 1581, popular enough to
deserve a second printing). The condition and institution of servitude in
the world is without question a direct consequence of the Fall (303). But
taken aright, this is the Fortunate Fall; adducing the example of Christ
washing the disciples’ feet, Chrysostom argues that “It were better, that
both Maisters and servants, would serve one another. Much better were
it thus to be servant, than to be otherwise a free man” (255). The theme
is that other paradox of the last being first: in the world to come, faithful
servants will occupy “the last [i.e., highest] place in worthinesse” (298).
 the paradox of service and freedom / 7

Of servants serving, he writes that “it is not a basenesse so to doe, but it

is the greatest nobilitie that can be, for men to knowe howe to submitte
themselues, and to keepe a meane, and to yielde to their neighbour”
(299–300). Of particular importance is the way Chrysostom amplifies
the importance of the will, invoking the turning of the other cheek: “for,
he that is readie to suffer more iniurie than is already offered him, hath
made that to be his owne, which was not his owne” (300–1), that is, by
willingly allowing rather than merely enduring the injury, the Christian
has, in effect, made the transition from child to adult and servant to
master outlined in Galatians 4.10
I will call this process, whereby one treats as self-imposed various
conditions and actions that are in fact imposed from outside, volitional
primacy (see chapter 7 for a detailed treatment). Aquinas would subse-
quently connect such a process with the concept of Christian charity,
and put it on an Aristotelian footing, in a way that gives servants respon-
sibility for all that they do, even when following a master’s orders: “. . .
men who are slaves [servi] or subjects in any sense, are moved by the
commands of others in such a way that they move themselves by their
free-will; wherefore some kind of rectitude of government is required in
them . . .” (2–2 q.50 A2, 2.48).
Augustine, who wrote a commentary on Galatians, repeatedly
invokes the ideal; writing when the institution of slavery is still norma-
tive for Mediterranean societies, he edges toward, if he cannot quite
endorse, a notion of the spiritual equality of masters and servants:

Moreover, if [a] slave is receiving from you, his master, a better moral
training or a guidance more correct and better adapted to the worship of
God than can be given him by the man who wants to take him away,
I doubt whether anyone would venture to say that this slave—like a
garment—ought to receive no consideration. For, as subsequent pro-
nouncements reveal, a man ought to love a man [note the absence of
social discriminators] as he loves himself, because the Lord commands
him to love even his enemies. (Mount 86–87)

Augustine did not necessarily initiate the service–freedom paradox itself;

he certainly used it, however, if in a less concentrated form than the
collect: “This is the true, perfect, and only religion, through which it
becomes a property of the greatness of the soul, which we are studying
now, to be reconciled to God, and by which it makes itself worthy of
freedom. For He whom it is most useful for all to serve, and to delight
in whose service is the only perfect freedom, frees all things” (De quan-
titatae animis 78).11 Augustine speaks here of service to God. But from
 8 / discourses of service in shakespeare’s england

the first Pentecost onward, the church has always understood that people
serve God by serving their neighbors, that is, subordinating their own
interests to others’. Service to God means service to man. And Augustine’s
immense subsequent authority authorized the recurrence of the idea.
Augustine’s movement is usually away from the actual toward the
spiritual, however, and unlike Chrysostom, he does not develop his
thinking about service in terms of quotidian human life. His monastic
rule, the basis for all the subsequent orders, does not emphasize service,
though it does insist that the leader of a monastic house, even when
honored by all the other residents, should nevertheless think of himself
as their servant (Rule, ch. 10).12 The ideal of service takes a more fully
practical and experiential form in later manifestations of the monastic
impulse. In the Benedictine Rule, mutual service is clearly a condition
of the monastic vocation from the Abbot to the lowest novice:

Let the brethren serve each other so that no one be excused from the
work in the kitchen, except on account of sickness or more necessary
work, because greater merit and more charity is thereby acquired. . . . or
if, as we have said, any are engaged in more urgent work; let the rest serve
each other in charity. (ch. 35)
Before and above all things, care must be taken of the sick, that they be
served in very truth as Christ is served; because He hath said, “I was sick
and you visited Me” (Matt. 25:36). (ch. 36)
But when the Abbot hath been elected let him bear in mind how great a
burden he hath taken upon himself, and to whom he must give an
account of his stewardship [cf. Luke 16:2]; and let him be convinced that
it becometh him better to serve than to rule. (ch. 64)

Note that in the last sentence the idea though not originally the actual
language of the paradox appears.13 A similar ideal appears in the consti-
tutions of the mendicant orders; thus the Rule of St. Francis repeatedly
calls the leaders of these monks “ministers and servants” of the others
(Writings 36, 38, and passim).
Monastic devotion to service reappears in the writings of Martin
Luther, an Augustinian monk, who scatters dozens of appeals to service,
including several extensive treatments of the idea, across dozens of
works over the whole course of his career.14 He follows Chrysostom in
emphasizing in The Freedom of a Christian Man (1520) the element of
absolutely free choice: “a Christian is a servant of all and made subject
to all. Insofar as he is free he does no works, but insofar as he is a servant
he does all kinds of works. . . . it is his one occupation to serve God
[which means serving other people] joyfully and without thought of
 the paradox of service and freedom / 9

gain, in love that is not constrained” (Works 31.358–59). Luther enu-

merates the various meanings of the term servant using the traditional
exegetical paradigm. In the moral and typological senses, he says, some-
what opaquely, it refers to “every person by himself and for himself ”—
presumably under the compelling universality of the Golden Rule. In
the allegorical sense, it is “a person for others and over others and for the
sake of others.” The latter sense signifies “dignity and honor,” and the
former “complete submission and humility” (Comm. Romans, Works
25.140–41). The latter is “worth more”: in this passage, Luther was
writing with an eye to clerical ministry, the “servants” of the faithful who
nevertheless enjoy the people’s honor and esteem, like the popes and
abbots of the Augustinian–Franciscan monastic tradition invoked
above. The former meaning, applicable to “every person,” however base,
is “more salutary.” It is this first, wider sense that most influences and
informs subsequent commentators. And it takes special force within the
Lutheran context because of Luther’s pervasive insistence on the impor-
tance of individual Christians’ need to identify themselves with Christ.
Christ lived a life of service, and in every moment of that life, he saw
and responded to the needs of others, at whatever cost to himself,
including the ultimate cost of death on the Cross. A Christian trying to
live a Christian life could try to do no less.
Incorporated in these definitions is the duality of body and soul:
physical bondage, spiritual freedom. Phenomenologically, all of us are
enslaved by our bodies and the laws of nature. We have to eat, drink,
and sleep; we are inescapably subject to gravity, time, and death—
St. Paul calls these constraints “the elements of the world” (Gal. 4:3;
Geneva and Bishops’ “rudiments of the world,” but Vulgate “elementis
mundi,” Authorized Version “elements of the world”). Psychologically
and theologically, all people are enslaved by their passions. True freedom
can be found only in the motions of the spirit. Thus, Luther’s English
follower William Whately treats servitude as an equation of
dichotomies: bond is to flesh as freedom is to spirit (1640, 1.156). The
Scottish commentator Robert Rollock argues that if it is a vice in a
servant to be disobedient (i.e., free) in body, it is equally a vice to be sub-
missive (i.e., bound) in spirit to anyone but God (361). It is on this
ground that servants are encouraged to resist and even to disobey the
wicked orders of their masters, a crucial component of fully faithful
service, as we shall see.
In any event, Luther pays a lot of attention to service, in strikingly
practical and quotidian terms. A commonplace of his writing is that
sixteenth-century servants are conspicuously less conscientious and
 10 / discourses of service in shakespeare’s england

faithful than their biblical counterparts. (It is, indeed, a marked feature
of the Bible that servants are by and large represented as faithful and
hard working.15) Thus, in his lectures on Genesis, he comments on the
readiness of the servants of Abraham to leave the country of their birth
to follow their master to Canaan: “The servants and maids surprise me;
for if they had been like ours, they would never have lifted up a foot”
(2.280). But they are only reflecting the spirit of their master; though
Abraham was Lot’s uncle, his elder, his superior in wealth and dignity,
he nevertheless yielded his own rights to the younger man (Gen. 13:7):
“Is this not what Christ commands in John 13:15 ff., that he who is the
greater should be as the lesser and as the servant of others,” reiterat-
ing the injunctions to popes and abbots in Augustine and the monas-
tic rules (2.336–37).16 The service of Jacob to Laban and Joseph to
Pharaoh is likewise exemplary: “Today, how sad and all too common the
complaints of all fathers of households are regarding the treachery and
dishonesty of servants!” (Works 6.67).
Indeed, the reiterated burden of Luther’s treatment of service is the
need for servants to be faithful and obedient. What though a man be
formally dependent on another man? “ ‘God loves me, and I believe that
my master, too, shares in all the blessings of God that I enjoy.’ Therefore
you should consider in what a favorable position you are. To be sure,
you are in a slavery of the body, but you are equals in spirit. When a
servant thinks this way, he serves gladly” (Comm. 1 Timothy, Works
28.363).17 There is a certain sense of strain in this and other similar
passages: Luther himself by this time had left the monastery, married, set
up housekeeping, and so was now himself presumably an employer of ser-
vants, as worried as any other early modern master about his employees’
reliability.18 So he repeatedly urges the spiritual superiority of social and
economic inferiority—and in the process comes close to, though he
never explicitly reaches, the oxymoron of service and freedom. “How
much better is the kind of life when a man is servant to another man,
promising fidelity and the duties of a servant! Here there is a voluntary
fidelity [ fides voluntaria]”—note again the Augustinian and Thomistic
emphasis on the will (Comm. Titus, Works 29.60).19 More to the purpose,
then, is the general spirit of Lutheran teaching, with its powerful
endorsement of personal identification with the life and death of Christ,
and its reiteration of the notion that true freedom arises from eager obe-
dience to God.20 And the crucially important consequence of these writ-
ings is to blur the distinction between servants, in the familiar economic
and social sense, and other people. Christianity calls all people to a life
of service; it is only that some are more fully (or merely) servants than
 the paradox of service and freedom / 11

others. As we shall see in chapters 2 and 3, however, that line was also
blurred in the social practices of early modern England, inasmuch as
most people spent at least part of their lives in formally servile roles,
including members of the economic and social elite.
Almost as soon as he had formulated these ideas, Luther was driven
to repudiate them. When some of his early followers began to act out a
program to obliterate social hierarchy, the beneficiaries of the hierarchy
responded ferociously. Hence, Luther retreated almost desperately from
his own early socialism (in which we may see the egalitarian ideals of the
monastic tradition extended into secular life) into the ancient distinc-
tion between earthly and heavenly justice. Stephen Greenblatt has
forcibly reminded us that Luther’s response to the Peasants’ Revolt of
1523–24 was first (May 5, 1525) a letter in which he tells his “dear
friends” that the Bible marks a distinction between spiritual and social
or economic freedom; then a pamphlet, “Against the Robbing and
Murdering Hordes of Peasants,” which sees the rebels as agents of the
Devil and encourages good Christian people to put the rebellion down
with all necessary violence (Learning 105–06). If he was moved by the
furious charges of betrayal from the peasants he had inspired, he did not
show it, and in time, the institutionalized Lutheran church became “an
established church, predominantly an aristocratic and middle class party
of vested interest and privilege” (P. Smith 86).
As ideas do, however, these, once articulated, took on a life of their
own, and it seems certain that all these influences bore on Thomas
Cranmer at the point where he was assembling the materials for the
Prayer Book. The Bible he knew intimately. St. John Chrysostom was an
important source for his thought and writing throughout his career; a
prayer identified as Chrysostom’s closes the service of Morning Prayer.21
Chrysostom, along with Augustine, was the patristic wellhead for justi-
fication by faith, the core concept of Cranmer’s reforming theology; the
two provided sources on which Cranmer could safely call for support
while avoiding explicit debts to that more dangerous Augustinian,
Luther. As layman, don, and archbishop, Cranmer had extensive knowl-
edge of English monastics; his sister Alice was a Cistercian nun and
prioress of her convent, and although he came to share the general refor-
mation view of the monasteries as pustules of popish corruption, he did
seek at the time of the Dissolution to protect individual monastics whom
he knew and admired. Lutheran writings and practice inspired English
reformists of the 1520s and 1530s, including many in Cambridge where
Cranmer lived and worked at that time as a Fellow of Jesus College.
During this period, Cranmer followed an essentially Lutheran line on
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