Shakespeare: the new Jesus?
I have spent a fair amount of time in my teaching career on preaching the gospel of Shakespeare. This is not too onerous from my point of view since I happen to appreciate Shakespeare’s playwrighting and poetic abilities. However, recently a strange parallel between much of the material we teach about Shakespeare’s life and the story of Jesus as related in the New Testament has emerged. Neither has any real outside evidence to support it.
For centuries scholars have woven tales around Shakespeare’s personal life to the point that after reference to each other, they have created a mass of misinformation or information that at the very least is speculative. Now, four hundred years after his life, some scholars are questioning this mass of information.
Like those of us who ask for outside verification for the stories surrounding Jesus’ life, they are asking for and seeking out primary resources to support the stories surrounding Shakespeare’s life.
The point is that we know Shakespeare’s year, and some claim day of his birth, and the year, some say day of his death. We certainly have plenty of his writing, courtesy of Ben Johnson. We know something of his married life and a few things about his life in London. And that, folks, is about it. The rest has not been verified.
This parallel would seem to support the idea that people have a propensity for building tales and hearsay into belief structures over the generations. I can’t help but wonder what people will be saying about Shakespeare in another sixteen hundred years or so. In the meantime, a detailed analysis of the parallel in the development of the two legends, might be interesting.
