Othello and King Lear, Michael Neill has shown, are united by their mutual investment in the qualities, and uncertainties, of service. Both open with the question of love and the stance of service towards love: to what extent does Othello's service to the state earn him the right to the love of its citizens in general, and one of its daughters in particular; and to what extent does the monarch's demand for a show of love in King Lear undermine the bonds of service upon which its very existence depends? Both plays are concerned in very different ways with the show of love and service – with an impossible demand in the one instance that love be demonstrated or acted out in the sphere of public life, and in the other with the refusal by the quintessential servant to display anything other than the purely performative dimensions of service.

In a pioneering essay, Jonas Barish and Marshall Waingrow use service as a touchstone for a general reading of King Lear. They argue that service, especially feudal expectations of reciprocity of rights and obligations, stands at the centre of the play's vision of social and moral order. This enables them to show that social and personal failure, violence, and loss stem from a abrogation of traditional forms of reciprocity. Central to their argument is the division of service into “true” and “false” forms – the former dynamically reciprocal, the latter mechanically self-serving or at least indifferently unresponsive.