Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

The speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 58, in the voice of “slave” or “vassal,” clearly in that of a servingman, says, “I am to wait, though waiting so be hell; not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.” This metaphor relies on the fact of the morally ambivalent circumstance of the servant, frequently an issue in the plays. The servant is required to be loyal and obedient to, and is deeply dependent on, a master who might put him to uses that are contrary to his own moral feelings and to the good of his own soul, and in doing so might expose him to revenge or to the rigor of the law.

Wycliffe and his followers had an answer for this, asserted in their vernacular moral teaching. The subordinate was indeed guilty who carried out an order to do a sinful thing or who consented to sin, that is, who did not object to or strongly oppose sinful behavior in a superior. “Among all the sins by which the fiend beguiles men, none is more subtle than this consent … But cowardice and lack of love for God makes us start back from doing so [that is, refusing consent] as traitors do.” This kind of teaching is the consequence of the dignity and value of the human person in Wycliffite thought, without reference to status or condition. Wycliffe wrote that though, according to the philosophers, friendship occurs only between equals or near equals, “the simple response is that humanity is in its nature equal,” this in a context which asserts the apostles were the friends of Christ, no less. In a gloss on the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain,” a Wycliffite writer said, “We should know, first, that both prayer and speech have more to do with action than with words spoken by the mouth. Every man on earth bears the name of God printed in his soul, for otherwise he might not have being. So when any man abandons what he should do, or does what he should not do, on pain of the hate of God, he takes his holy name in vain. For no man is ordained for any purpose but to serve God, and he must take his name if he has being, and so he takes his name in vain when he fails in achieving his proper purpose.” Society has its hierarchies, but, in reality, everyone has the same master. Wycliffe wrote, “One can be saved without obedience to someone superior, since obedience does nothing unless it leads one in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. But without obedience to Christ, no one can be saved.” The authority of earthly masters seems to have been reinforced by oaths. Lollards forbade oaths. Loyalty to Christ might bring down affliction. This was a thing Lollards were always ready to accept.

Let us say no more than that Lollard thinking had had an influence over time on the thinking of England at large, and more particularly on those who felt the condition of subordinate or servant without the compensations that would have come with being served in turn — groundlings, in a word. Or let us say that these teachings reinforced a sense of things congenial to the English people more generally. Then the issue of individual moral dignity in circumstances that would penalize its expression would have been live, even pressing, since this very dignity meant their souls were at stake when obedience to an earthly master would have put them at odds with the will of God. John Webster’s dark play The Duchess of Malfi turns on the pathological obedience of Bosola to Duke Ferdinand, who, in his own defense, can plausibly claim to be mad. Othello is another version of the destructive power of a trusted subordinate. In light of the dependency of anyone having servants on their loyalty and discretion, that is, in light of the master’s vulnerability to the effects of a servant’s disloyalty and indiscretion, or his uncritical obedience, these relationships must have been at least as complex as marriages. Servanthood is strongly foregrounded in King Lear, Cymbeline , and The Winter’s Tale. In each of these plays, disobedience motivated by a higher loyalty is central to the drama. The Duke of Kent takes the form of a servant, disguising himself as what he is in fact, dutiful and loving as would become an ideal liege man, in order to continue to attend on and protect Lear even after he has been banished by him. In the horrific scene of the blinding of Gloucester, only a servant has the courage or the moral sense to attempt to intervene. Other servants, at peril to themselves, care for the old man’s injuries and arrange his escape. The dying thought of the superserviceable Oswald, servant to Goneril, is to attempt to ensure that the letter she has entrusted to him will be delivered, his obedience a consent to evil in Wycliffite terms, in contrast to the refusals of the other servants, whose disobedience is true to their consciences and would mitigate the evil being done. Cymbeline depends altogether on the refusal of a servant to obey an order to kill his master’s wife. In The Winter’s Tale , Camillo refuses to murder a king who is a guest in the court of his master, King Leontes. Another servant carries out the king’s order to leave an infant to die of exposure. He loathes the act, which is to say that he is violating his own conscience in doing it, and he is, famously and remarkably, killed by a bear, and eaten by it, too. As bad befalls the ship he came in. The servant Leonidas in Pericles is ordered to kill the young woman Marina, refuses at first, then resolves to do it. Though she has been carried away before he can act, he is poisoned and dies. Even Nym and Pistol, half the ragtag entourage of Falstaff, recoil from his scheme to seduce two wives of Windsor for access to their husbands’ wealth. They plot to defeat him in it, his little page assisting. Pistol will not become Sir Pandarus of Troy, Nym will keep the ’havior of reputation. Literal servanthood being a widely shared condition, and the expectation of loyal subservience being a powerful social norm, to obey is nevertheless a complex moral choice, equally so when peers or people are forced to decide to whom their obedience is owed. This is an issue that brought England to disaster in the fifteenth century, the period of Shakespeare’s history plays, and more recently threatened or haunted the country in the persons of Lady Jane Grey, Mary Queen of Scots, the Earl of Essex, and other less significant claimants and pretenders.

On the other hand, the servants who are faithful and comforting to Webster’s Duchess, and to Cleopatra, to the boy Arthur, to the imprisoned Richard II, and to Lear as well, bring the audience into the drama, enacting the kindness the audience feels toward these desperate and bewildered souls, the selflessness of ideal servanthood. At the same time they make the sufferers more sympathetic by revealing them as they are in their private and intimate lives. These servants are deeply normative figures, figures of grace. The character Hamlet would be impossible if there were not Horatio, his “poor servant ever,” self-possessed and unpresuming, to whom the prince can speak without feigning or irony or contempt, who in turn can speak the simple and perfect blessing and farewell, and would die with Hamlet, if the prince had not asked him to live on and serve him further. In their servanthood these figures are not so much Christian as they are Christlike. The dignity of their courage and generosity, so costly to themselves, epitomizes the deep core of value the civilization had claimed for a millennium and more, a fierce, barbarous civilization, but with an ember of beauty at the center of it for which our egalitarianism and our pride have perhaps denied us a name. Then again, our egalitarianism was once inspired by this early recognition of the high dignity of servants and the lowly, the saving paradox at the heart of wild old Christendom. To quote again from Piers the Ploughman , “Our joy and our healing, Christ Jesus of Heaven, always pursues us in a poor man’s apparel, and looks upon us in a poor man’s likeness, searching us as we pass with looks of love, and forever seeking to know us by our kindness of heart; and he sees which way we cast our eyes, and whether we love the lords of this earth before the Lord of Heaven.”