Joseph Pearce, a Roman Catholic, has written an account of his experience of seeing Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice on the campus of Bob Jones University.

"The Business Book Every Serious Student Should Read" is a great article on Shakespeare.

“But if you say to a child, have you fallen in love with somebody or know what the feeling of love is? Or have you ever envied somebody something, a toy? Have you ever got really angry about something?

“That’s what Shakespeare’s about, all of those things. He says it better than anybody else.”

Dame Judi Dench

In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C. S. Lewis destroys the notion that Milton was an egalitarian, explaining that Milton held what Lewis calls the "Hierarchical conception" of not only society but also the very cosmos itself:

According to this conception degrees of value are objectively present in the universe. Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors. When it fails in either part of this twofold task we have disease or monstrosity in the scheme of things until the [guilty] being is either destroyed or corrected. One or the other it will certainly be; for by stepping out of its place in the system (whether it step up like a rebellious angel or down like an uxorious husband) it has made the very nature of things its enemy. It cannot succeed.

Lewis explains that in Milton's Hierarchical conception, one's happiness consists in joyfully submitting to one's place. In this view, once we submit to the God-designed natural order of authority, we are free to become what we were fully created to become. To illustrate this concept, Lewis uses the metaphors of taking part in a dance or playing an instrument in an orchestra. Yes, you must submit to the rules of the dance or the notes on the music--but once you do submit to the created order, you become what you were created to be:

[Milton] pictures the life of beatitude as one of order--an intricate dance, so intricate that it seems irregular precisely when its regularity is most elaborate. He pictures his whole universe as a universe of degrees, from root to stalk, from stalk to flower, from flower to breath, from fruit to human reason (V, 480). He delights in the ceremonious interchange of unequal courtesies, with condescension (a beautiful word which we have spoiled) on the one side and reverence on the other. He shows us the Father 'with rayes direct' shining full on the Son, and the Son 'o'er his scepter bowing' as He rose (VI, 719, 746). ...

Discipline . . . exists for the sake of what seems its very opposite--for freedom, almost for extravagance. The pattern deep hidden in the dance, hidden so deep that shallow spectators cannot see it, alone gives beauty to the wild, free gestures that fill it. . . The happy soul is, like a planet, a wandering star; yet in that very wandering (as astronomy teaches) invariable; she is eccentric beyond all predicting, yet equable in her eccentricity. The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom possible between those who obey them. Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.  

Lewis also discusses how the Hierarchical conception sees civil society, private life, and other areas:

When Donne says 'thy love shall be my love's sphere,' he has for his background the cosmic hierarchy of the Platonic theologians. . . . Every being is a conductor of superior love . . . to the being below it, and of inferior love . . . to the being above. Such is the loving inequality between the intelligence who guides a sphere and the sphere which is guided. This is not metaphor. For the Renaissance thinker, not less but more than for the schoolman, the universe was packed and tingling with anthropomorphic life; its true picture is to be found in the elaborate title pages of old folios where winds blow at the corners and at the bottom dolphins spout, and the eye passes upward through cities and kings and angels to four Hebrew letters with rays darting from them at the top, which represent the ineffable Name. Hence we are only on the borderline of metaphor Spenser's Artegall reproves the leveling giant by telling him that all things were created 'in goodly measure' and 'doe know their certaine bound,' so that hills do not 'disdaine' vallies nor valies 'envy hills; in virtue of the same grand Authority who causes kings to command and subjects to obey.

According to Lewis, the Hierarchical conception was held from Aristotle to the eighteenth century. He argues that it is difficult for modern readers to understand older literature because the concept is so foreign to us. For example, Shakespeare fully accepted this Hierarchical view as well. Lewis argues,

Hierarchy is a favourite theme with Shakespeare. A failure to accept his notion of natural authority makes nonsense, for example, of The Taming of the Shrew. . . . If the poet had not meant us to rejoice in the correction of Katharina he would have made her a more amiable character.

Lewis cites other examples from Shakespeare as well, including A Comedy of Errors, The Tempest, King Lear, and Macbeth. Along the way, he shows how this natural order of things can be violated:

Now if once the conception of Hierarchy is fully grasped, we see that order can be destroyed in two ways: (1) By ruling or obeying natural equals, that is by Tyranny or Servility. (2) By failing to obey a natural superior or to rule a natural inferior--that is, by Rebellion or Remisness. And these . . . are equally monstrosities.

Examples of such violation include Macbeth (who let his wife tell him what to do) and Lear (who failed to take responsibility for his kingdom).

Finally, Lewis critiques modern Milton critics who see Satan as some sort of ironic hero:

It would not be surprising if we, who were mostly brought up on egalitarian or even antinomian ideas, should come to the poem with minds prepossessed in favour of Satan against God and of Eve against Adam, and then read into the poet a sympathy with those prepossessions which is not really there.

I've read, seen, and taught The Tempest, but these lines never stood out to me till I came across them yesterday in another book I'm reading:

     Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
     Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
     Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
     Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
     That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
     Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
     The clouds methought would open, and show riches
     Ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked,
     I cried to dream again.

We don't go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.

Jeannette Winterson, "The Secret Life of Us"

When you take time to read a book or listen to music or look at a picture, the first thing you are doing is turning your attention inwards. The outside world, with all of its demands, has to wait. As you withdraw your energy from the world, the artwork begins to reach you with energies of its own. The creativity and concentration put into the making of the artwork begin to cross-current into you. This is not simply about being recharged, as in a good night's sleep or a holiday, it is about being charged at a completely different voltage.

When I read Seamus Heaney or Ted Hughes, I'm not just reading a poet's take on the world, I am entering into a different world - a world built from the beginning on other principles. William Carlos Williams said: "It's hard to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

Jeannette Winterson, "The Secret Life of Us"

It was the fall of 1936, just at the beginning of the new school year. . . . My veins were still bursting with the materialistic and political enthusiasms with which I had first come to Columbia and, indeed, in line with their general direction, I had signed up for courses that were more or less sociological and economic and historical. In the obscurity of the strange, half-conscious semi-conversion that had attended my retreat from Cambridge, I had tended to be suspicious of literature, poetry . . . on the grounds that they might lead to a sort of futile estheticism, a philosophy of "escape." ... 

So now I was climbing one of the crowded stairways in Hamilton Hall to the room where I thought this history course was to be given. I looked in to the room. The second row was filled with the unbrushed heads of those who every day at noon sat in the Jester editorial offices and threw paper airplanes around the room or drew pictures on the walls. ... 

It was when I had taken off my coat and put down my load of books that I found out that this was not the class I was supposed to be taking, but Van Doren's course on Shakespeare.

So I got up to go out. But when I got to the door I turned around again and went back and sat down where I had been, and stayed there. Later I went and changed everything with the registrar, so I remained in that class for the rest of the year.

It was the best course I ever had at college. And it did me the most good, in many different ways. It was the only place where I ever heard anything really sensible said about any of the things that were really fundamental--life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering, eternity. ... The material of literature and especially drama is chiefly human acts--that is, free acts, moral acts, And, as a matter of fact, literature, drama, poetry, make certain statements bout these acts that can be made in no other way. That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order. . . . 

All that year we were, in fact, talking about the deepest springs of human desire and hope and fear; we were considering all the most important realities. . . . [Van Doren's] balanced and sensitive and clear way of seeing things, at once simlpe and yet capable of subtlety, being fundamentally scholastic, though not necessarily and explicitly Christian, presented these things in ways that made them live within us, and with a life that was healthy and permanent and productive. This class was one of the few things that could persuade me to get on the train and go to Columbia at all. It was, that year, my only health ...

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, 179-80

"With Tozer, seeking truth and seeking God were one and the same thing. For example, when he felt he needed an understanding of the great English works of Shakespeare, he read them through on his knees, asking God to help him understand their meaning."

--From "Tozer's Legacy," introduction to The Pursuit of God

Last night, as I was reading Shakespeare's sonnets (I've been slowly reading through them for several weeks), I found a gem that I don't remember coming across before: Sonnet 76. I love how it deals with  the tension between novelty and convention, and how it ends up being almost an apologetic for the sonnet form itself. As I read last night, I felt like Keats discovering George Chapman's translation of Homer. Here it is.

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument,
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
   For as the sun is daily new and old,
   So is my love still telling what is told.