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 everyperson 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. The 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.

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Michael Neill was born in Tenby, South Wales in 1942. He spent the early part of his life in Ireland until 1955, when his family returned to New Zealand. He was educated at the University of Otago before proceeding to postgraduate work at the University of Cambridge.

Now Professor of English at the University of Auckland (where he has taught since 1967), he is the author of Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia University Press, 2000), a selection from his numerous essays on early modern literature. He has edited Anthony and Cleopatra for the Oxford Shakespeare, and is currently completing an edition of Othello for the same series.