Why Shakespeare?

“All the world’s a stage.”

 

Such beautiful words!

Shakespeare has many such phrases that are encapsulated in our hearts. Sometimes, they are tricky to understand. One of the biggest drawbacks to studying the plays of the Bard is the language. Written in Elizabethan English, it can sometimes be intimidating and difficult to decipher. I remember attending a performance of As You Like It a year or so after graduating from high school. I hadn’t read or seen one of Shakespeare’s plays since then, so when the opening lines of the show rolled off the actor’s tongue, I felt as though I was listening to a foreign language! After a few minutes, the meanings came back to my mind and I felt like the muscle memory was returning. Had I not trained those muscles as a teenager, I doubt I would’ve enjoyed the play as much. Though we don’t speak with many of the words and phrases of his time, Shakespeare’s themes and ideas are very modern and are worth studying, understanding and becoming accustomed to.

Here are 4 reasons we should study Shakespeare:

  1. His works have withstood the test of time. Why? There must be something in his storytelling that captivated and entertained us for over 400 years, despite all of the socio-economic changes which have occurred since then.
  2. His plays and sonnets have influenced and inspired authors, artists, playwrights and composers. We use words daily that were created by the Bard himself. So many of the tropes used in literature come straight from his comedies, tragedies and histories. Think of any of the romance novels, stories, songs and movies you’ve consumed and you can trace a line right back to one of Shakespeare’s anthology.
  3. Shakespeare had insight into the hearts of men. Much like Charles Dickens, Shakespeare’s characters, though sometimes exaggerated, reveal the desires we all have and the lengths we will go to appease them. There are myriads of lessons to be learned within the texts and characters of his plays.
  4. As believers, we need to have an answer for something that has so shaped our culture. In Acts 17, Paul reaches the Athenians by using their own culture and customs to start a conversation about the gospel. If Shakespeare has so influenced our own culture, should we not know in what way and how to address it in order to convey the gospel to the lost?

With such a timeless canon of works that have had such an impact on western society, how can we help but study further in order to understand humankind and in turn reach them for Christ.