Servile Ministers: Othello, King Lear and the Sacralization of Service
“Servile Ministers”
Othello, King Lear and the Sacralization of Service
by Michael Neill
$8.95
- Spring 2004
- ISBN 978-1-55380-015-6 (1-55380-015-X)
- 5-3/4″ x 9″ Pamphlet, 40 pages
- Literary Criticism
- Out of print
In his 2003 Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture, Michael Neill takes us deep into the cultural complexities of Shakespeare’s world. With special attention to the two plays Othello and King Lear, Neill explores the various Elizabethan meanings surrounding the concept of “service.”
In the ordered, hierarchical world of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries, the idea of service as a sacred duty to God and God’s representatives penetrated all of society so that each and every person was linked to others within a pattern of sacred service. But as Neill demonstrates, Shakespeare recognizes in his plays that service was becoming increasingly linked to “slavery,” that the sacralized world of service was slowly disintegrating. T
he fascination of Shakespeare’s plays, Neill suggests, lies in their multi-layered probing of the ways in which the ideal of service continues to exist even as the world which gave substance to the ideal was vanishing.
Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lectures:
- From There: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Place by Stephen Burt (2015)
- More Heat than Light: Sex-difference Science & the Study of Language by Deborah Cameron (2012)
- Marvellous Repossessions: The Tempest, Globalization and the Waking Dream of Paradise by Jonathan Gil Harris (2011)
- John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist by P.G. Stanwood (2008)
- Living Language and Dead Reckoning: Navigating Oral and Written Traditions by J. Edward Chamberlin (2005)
- Spontaneous Overflows and Revivifying Rays: Romanticism and the Discourse of Improvisation by Angela Esterhammer (2004)
- Grandchild of Empire: About Irony, Mainly in the Commonwealth by W.H. New (2002)
- The Generation of Caliban by Jonathan Goldberg (2001)
- Double Crossings: Madness, Sexuality and Imperialism by Anne McClintock (2000)
- Professing English at UBC: The Legacy of Roy Daniells and Garnett Sedgewick by Sandra Djwa (1999)
