Why shouldn’t Christians study Shakespeare? The Bible is just as full of stories about adultery, murder, treachery, etc. It’s the overriding narrative that’s instructive in the Bible or the classics.

I have a BA in Drama, and I studied Shakespeare at the Central School of Speech & Drama in London, and I have to say I have never read such an enlightening review of Othello.

Well done Michael, and welcome back.

Your next mission, if you are willing to accept it, is to show them “The Big Lebowski” (at your home, of course), and ask them the same questions which will, of course, be just as applicable.

BTW – have you seen the movie “Saved” yet? It’s a good laugh, even if it is a parody of a stereotype.

WS’s mother’s family, the Arden’s, were imprisoned and suffered some executions as Catholic plotters. (Though they were probably innocent.) Shakespeare’s trail of Catholic patrons and friends is convincing, as is his purchase, in the last years of his life, of the largest Catholic “safehouse” in London in the district of the Blackfriar’s theater.

I’m convinced that WS was reluctantly caught up in this, and it is one of the reasons he is such a low profile figure throughout his life. As to his own sympathies and beliefs? Who knows? Hamlet did study in Wittenberg it is hard for me to see WS as a devout Christian. He appears to be greatly affected by the religious conflicts of his time, and what he had seen them do to his country, his family and his art.

With Shakespeare, all is a mystery and we all get to play the game. It’s fun.

“A woman planted a tree and watered it every day, but somehow it never grew.

It turned out that what she thought was fertilizer was cement. No matter how much water she put in, the plant died.

We’re like that. We put all kinds of bad stuff in our soil and we don’t read enough Bible. So you need to put away that worldly stuff and read the Bible.”

Well, after a sermon like that, how can anyone have an excuse to read anything BUT the Bible?

It’s a message I’ve been getting all my life in church sermons — that’s not what they say, but that is what I, in my head, hear. That I have to put away my Terry Pratchett and my Tolkien and just read the word.

So I appreciate articles like this. It’s a much-needed counterbalance.

Besides which — I find that reading other works helps me appreciate the Bible more, not less.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I love “Lebowski,” but I’ve had a difficult time marrying it and “The Master Story” successfully (short of an exhortation to “abide”). I’d be curious to hear where you’d go with The Dude and Jesus.

Michael,

Great post, as usual. I like discussions like this, but what films would you apply to this?

A lot of them would be here.
http://www.nationalreview.com/conservative_movies/conservative_movies.shtml

But certainly not all.

I use Contact in my classes to teach this.

Those myths have stood me in good stead for many years, and allowed me to understand Plato, Ovid, and Shakespeare much better than I would have otherwise.

Hooray for the classics!