Recently at a dinner party, a friend asked, “Can I ask you a dumb question? Why should I read Shakespeare?” For about ten minutes I gave a spontaneous rant about the value of reading Shakespeare. Perhaps some of my passion can be explained because I myself am a Shakespeare scholar and professor, and in our all-too-human narcissism it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what we love and do must be the most important features of the universe. The interesting thing is that this friend who doubts the value of Shakespeare is herself a teacher at a faith-based school where her daughter recently performed in an excellent high school production of the Shakespearean comedy Much Ado about Nothing. If her daughter could not convert her to Shakespeare, I doubt I was much more successful.
Here’s another vignette that convinces me that some people seriously underestimate the value of reading Shakespeare. Just before embarking on my doctoral studies, I told a high-ranking faculty member at a local Bible college where I had been teaching literature in an adjunct capacity that I was excited to be doing a PhD on … you guessed it! … Shakespeare! My enthusiasm was met with the pious quip, “Shakespeare was a very crude man.” If the response hadn’t struck my funny bone, I might have been hurt.
But no, I don’t have a “Shakespeare wound” based on these friends’ lack of interest in the Bard. These two incidents described above, however, do concern me that Christians in particular, even educated Christians, may be blind to the treasure that is Shakespearean drama and poetry.
FINDING THE GOOD IN WESTERN LITERARY CULTURE
So how can I justify my love of Shakespeare? In other words, why should you read Shakespeare? Simply put, Shakespeare is a repository of much of the best in Western culture, written at a time period when Western culture was steeped in the Christian scriptures. That’s arguably why Shakespeare is the best of the best in terms of both literary acumen and his insight into the human condition. Indian scholar and social justice initiator Vishal Mangalwadi, in The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, makes the claim that much of what the world loves about the West today derives from centuries of biblical influence. Of course, Mangalwadi objects to the West’s history of colonization, even in his own country of India. Nonetheless, Mangalwadi attributes much of the good in Western culture to the scriptures that significantly shaped it.
Shakespeare is just such a writer who was steeped in the Bible, and whose art thus conveys the wisdom of its source. Hannibal Hamlin, author of The Bible in Shakespeare, notes that Shakespeare quotes from every single book in the Bible, including the Apocrypha, and that his allusions typically derive from the Geneva Bible rather than from the Great Bible used in mandatory Elizabethan public church services. In other words, most of Shakespeare’s impressive biblical knowledge came from his own private reading.
While I personally think that reading the Bible—the master text of civilization and of life itself—is even more important than reading Shakespeare, I don’t want well-intentioned religious people, such as those I described above, to miss out on the glories of Shakespeare by dismissing him as crude or his language as outdated.
REDEEMING SHAKESPEARE?
Louise Cowan was a Shakespeare professor who had been taught that Shakespeare was inherently secular. She later discovered that the scholarly consensus on Shakespeare in the twentieth century had been seriously misguided in representing him as an atheist or agnostic:
I pored over Hamlet several times during the ensuing months, each time finding further evidence of Shakespeare’s spiritual outlook. And gradually it became apparent that his perspective was not simply spiritual, but overtly Christian. Sacrificial love was evident everywhere in his dramas. Grace was one of his key words; evil was its darker counterpart. … By today, of course, several scholars have come to acknowledge and even explore Shakespeare’s Christian faith; but at that time my discovery seemed monumental. It meant recognizing the secularism of our day and discerning the bias of most scholars. (Cowan cited in Mangalwadi 185)
GIDEON RAPPAPORT’S NEW EDITION OF HAMLET: A LITERARY GOLD MINE
One such scholar who has helped to restore the moral and spiritual dimensions of Shakespearean drama to a 21st-century audience and readership is Gideon Rappaport. His brand-new edition of Shakespeare’s supreme tragedy Hamlet provides an accurate edition of the play (with the second quarto as the control text) along with an extensive editorial apparatus. No less a Shakespeare scholar than Scott Newstok has endorsed Rappaport’s contribution to Shakespeare studies. I believe Rappaport’s edition of Hamlet is a gift to scholars and lay readers alike in its impressive efforts to recover the real Shakespeare and the real play by accentuating many of the concerns that were important to Shakespeare’s age.
But Rappaport’s Hamlet is not just for religious people, just as Shakespeare himself is not just for religious people (nor just for secular folks, for that matter). There’s something in Shakespeare to keep everyone happy (or unhappy), and certainly any special interest group can find pegs in Shakespeare to hang its ideology on. Yet Rappaport is doing so much more than supplying a “religious” Shakespeare. Rather, Rappaport’s introductory essay and impressive textual apparatus equip the reader to draw their own conclusions about the text.
Rappaport argues that Hamlet should have avenged his father’s murder earlier than he did. Had he done so, Rappaport suggests, much of the ensuing bloodshed might have been prevented. This is a great example of Rappaport taking the text on its own terms by seeing the play through the eyes of its original audiences. Rappaport also believes that Hamlet found salvation at the end of the play, giving a kind of redemptive outlook to an otherwise tragic story. I concur with Rappaport that the scene in Act III, Scene III, where Claudius is at prayer, serves as the pivotal moment of the play. If Claudius had actually repented, instead of going through a failed attempt at contrition, the play would have ended very differently. In one of Rappaport’s many interesting footnotes, we learn that President Abraham Lincoln believed that Claudius’ prayer “surpasses” the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy (229). Indeed, Rappaport is probably at his finest in analyzing the play’s soliloquies, for his PhD dissertation from Brandeis University is entitled “Some Special Uses of the Soliloquy in Shakespeare.” Rappaport is eminently qualified to give us a reliable edition of Hamlet, and his enthusiasm for Shakespearean drama is infectiously uplifting. Be prepared to enjoy Hamlet like you might never have before!
WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT SHAKESPEARE?
Shakespeare truly has something for everyone. Having read hundreds of authors from various time periods and geographical regions around the world, I cherish Shakespeare as my favorite author (next to the Bible). Shakespeare’s insight into human nature is uncanny, whether he’s dealing with today’s hot topics like racism, feminism, and sexuality, or whether he’s on the more traditional terrain of monarchy, aristocracy, and religion. Having read scores of plays by other English Renaissance playwrights, I can confidently assert that Shakespeare’s appeal is so much more universal than that of his contemporaries, though he was influenced by them and influenced them in turn.
Shakespeare’s vocabulary is many times greater than that of the average person, and it shows in his incisive ideas and characters. Though not university educated, Shakespeare was well read. And despite fellow playwright Ben Jonson’s quip that Shakespeare knew “small Latin and less Greek,” Shakespeare’s borrowing from classical authors is ingenious. Shakespeare drew heavily not only on the biblical tradition, but also on the classical tradition. The confluence of these two streams accounts for much of the artistic brilliance of the Renaissance period. Many of Shakespeare’s plays allude to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or to Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s story lines are borrowed from pre-existing works. Some of his English plays rely heavily on Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. But rather than condemning Shakespeare for plagiarism, it would be more appropriate to see him as spinning flax into gold. He truly had the Midas touch; everything he handled turned to gold.
But perhaps we feel so rich that we don’t need such “gold.” We live in a technological era, where science, medicine, transportation, and communication abound. Maybe that’s all we need. Or maybe not. Rather than courting a superiority complex over our technological advances, we might do well to consider what we have lost by being so “plugged in.” Are our cell phones serving us or are we serving them? One way to break free from the domination of technology is to get lost in a classic work of literature. Try reading a Shakespeare play in one sitting. Better yet, attend a local production of a Shakespeare play by a live theatre company. After all, drama is meant to be performed and not just read.
That’s another reason why drama is so special, and Shakespearean drama in particular. As an embodied art form, drama uses the human body (actually a community of human bodies) as instruments to convey characterization, action, ideas, and aesthetics. Shakespeare’s plays combine the best of story and language. They contribute to our personhood by mirroring back to us the best and worst of human nature, all through the discerning but stunningly impartial mind of Shakespeare. While many of his contemporaries resorted to propaganda or prurience, Shakespeare consistently enriches his audience.
THE HEALING POWER OF SHAKESPEARE’S ART
Maya Angelou, a famous African American civil rights activist, poet, essayist, and memoirist, found Shakespeare to be a significant source of healing. After sustaining a horrific trauma as a teenager, Angelou was able to recover her voice by encountering Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes.” For Angelou, Shakespeare was not some irrelevant dead white European male, but rather an ally in her struggles as a young African American woman.
Another example of the power of Shakespeare comes from my own life. When I moved to Kenya, East Africa in 1989, for my grade twelve year, my school attended a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Nairobi put on by a theatre company from England called London Bubbles. The performance was electric. The cast of the English theatre company was interracial, as was the audience, composed of Kenyans and Westerners alike. Here I witnessed the power of Shakespearean drama to bring about interracial and cross-cultural healing. Interracial drama was a powerful statement in Africa at this time, for South Africa was then in the birth pangs of achieving racial equality that was not to be realized until Nelson Mandela became president in 1994.
Moving from the sublime to the comic, I also remember that after that performance of Macbeth a female Kenyan student made a loud passing comment that Banquo was good looking. (Banquo was played by a black Englishman.) My female Japanese friend turned to me in response to the Kenyan woman’s comment, and said, “She’s right.” I suppose this memory might even suggest the power of drama to bring about romance in the Kenya of my youth, which was then emerging from the shadows of past colonialism with all of its hateful racism. Perhaps this brilliant English playwright was posthumously helping to heal the wounds that his own country inflicted on Kenya in the early and mid-twentieth century.
HAPPY READING!
I hope my arguments have convinced you that Shakespeare is not just for people from the U.K. I also hope I have also persuaded some of my fellow Christians that Shakespeare is not irrelevant, or worse yet, a menace. All that to say that if Shakespeare is good enough for the secular person, he certainly should be good enough for the religious person (and vice versa). If you feel inclined to pick up a Shakespearean play to read, how about starting with Gideon Rappaport’s new edition of Hamlet? It’s available hot off the press from One Mind Good Press in San Diego, California.
Works Cited
Hamlin, Hannibal. The Bible in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.
Mangalwadi, Vishal. The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Gideon Rappaport, San Diego: One Good Mind Press, 2023.
David Anonby is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, where he has taught Shakespeare and other literature for over two decades. He holds a PhD in early modern literature from the University of Victoria. His monograph Shakespeare on Salvation: Crossing the Reformation Divide was published in 2024 by Pickwick Publishing, an academic imprint of Wipf and Stock.