Ich dien

Michael Neill

  • BuyShakespeare, Love and Service by David Schalkwyk
    Cambridge, 317 pp, £50.00, June 2008, ISBN 978 0 521 88639 0

‘For some extraordinary reason, the men won’t drink this – but you might like it.’ Holding out a jug of cloudy bitter, still sludgy with hops, our employer stood framed indignantly in the doorway that separated her kitchen from the servants’ quarters. The ‘men’ were the other ranks among the annual tranche of recruits preparing to serve her husband in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy bitter, though, needed to rest for 24 hours before it was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the recalcitrant denizens of the hall, it might do for the help.

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[*] Coincidentally, the three most substantial contributions all appeared in 2005: Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England by David Evett; Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays by Judith Weil; and A Place in the Story: Servants and Service in Shakespeare’s Plays by Linda Anderson. There was also a special section devoted to ‘Shakespeare and the Bonds of Service’ in the Shakespeare International Yearbook.