Our Home In Heaven & Hope Beyond Death, Series

The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare is hailed as the most excellent writer of the

English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet. His

influence over the last six centuries is immense and continues to influence new authors. He is

said to be the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world.

I came to appreciate Shakespeare from a young age through my father. He was an English language

teacher and a visiting lecturer in English Literature at the most prestigious university in Sri Lanka, the

University of Peradeniya in Kandy.

Shakespeare was his most favourite writer, and he knew his thirty-nine plays almost by heart. In 1991, the

British Council in Sri Lanka offered him a scholarship to visit England and attend the Shakespeare tour. It

was one of the most cherished times of his life. In 1991, as a birthday present, I bought my father leather-bound Collected Works of Shakespeare for his 55th Birthday.

In 1986, when I was preparing myself to enter Seminary, perhaps with a wish to instil in me an

appreciation of Shakespeare, my father explained to me in detail a less-known fact about Shakespeare’s plays.

He told me that Shakespeare was a serious reader of the Bible and made biblical allusions in all his plays.

My father told me these allusions, along with the themes and biblical storylines, were one of his best

methods of engaging his audiences in his day. My father said that these biblical themes and storylines were related to everyday experiences of our lives: family and friends, love and marriage, history and politics, law and finance, jealousy, betrayal, murder, suffering, and sacrifice, gardening, medicine, science, and birth and death.

This enticed me greatly to know more about Shakespeare. After reading a bit about Shakespeare, I gained a youthful enthusiasm to prove to my father that Shakespeare had used biblical allusions only with a personal motive to gain from engaging his audiences in his plays, not to convey something he had

believed. All of us who have been through teens and twenties would, I hope, understand my

rebellious wish.

At my father’s invitation, I attended a few private tuition classes he was conducting on Shakespeare’s

Hamlet that year for university students. I participated in the classes only to find the smallest clue to

argue and prove my point to my father.

The fifth class I had attended offered me the opportunity I was waiting for. My father was explaining the

text of Act Three, Scene 1 of Hamlet, where Hamlet asks the following question:

Who would choose to grunt and sweat through an exhausting life unless they were afraid of something dreadful after death, the undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about without getting any answers and which makes us stick to the evils we know rather than rush off to seek the ones we don’t?

The original text of Shakespeare my father was explaining, read in 16th century English thus:

Who would fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?

I had my youthful -- but, of course, naive -- the moment of eureka! I asked myself: how come the great

Shakespeare, who used the Bible to provide themes to his plays, says death is an undiscovered country from which no visitor returns. That day after the class, until midnight, I argued with my father

to prove that Shakespeare did not know that death is NOT the undiscovered country from

which no visitor returns. Had Shakespeare thought of death differently, I fervently argued, the moral of

Hamlet would have been hugely different. This is especially the case because, in the play, Hamlet’s grief and misery are so great that he frequently longs for death to end his suffering. At times, he contemplates

suicide, but his fear of eternal suffering in hell prevents him from doing so.

The father-son-loving argument continued until my father finally admitted that although Shakespeare was a serious reader of the Bible, he was also a sceptic. He explained that Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible in his plays do not necessarily make him a man of faith, nor is there evidence for his personal beliefs.

My father was proud of me for being able to stage such an argument at that age. He smiled at me and said that I would learn later in life.

I wanted to share this story with you because there is a parallel between Shakespeare using biblical

allusions in his plays, our Christian lives are also full of biblical allusions.