We allow Shakespeare his respected place in literature because of his eternal wisdom.  His works show out his conception of the Ego's falseness.  His plays are full of lessons, the equality of the human condition, beggar and king miserable and human alike.  His take on thinking, 'nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so,' cannot be argued with.  Wild almost Buddhist ideas though they are.  His tales are full of the excesses and misguidedness of Egotistical thinking, the suffering caused through mental machinations based on greed and power-seeking.  They are full of victims, of Egoless people put down, abused, harmed, overlooked, all by way of a lesson, a moral tale that goes down easily as far as the preaching of a moral.  Lear is led by egotistical illusions, fed by the conniving and insincere, and he will face his lesson, tragically too late for Cordelia.  Hamlet, who sees through Ego, in praise of egoless sensitivity, is consciously or not one of the bard's high heroes.

He wrote in a time when it was very dangerous to preach a morality based directly on Church teachings, as then one might have to take a side in a bloody conflict, Catholic versus Protestant.  (His plays seem to have lived in a strange open secrecy, or cleverly disguised right out in the open in front of the paranoid sanctimonious spies of Elizabeth.)  And his understandings of the Ego's folly, of the need to humble one's self to the truths of life, were as dangerous, wild and radical then as they are now, as they were two thousand years ago.  Hard for us to imagine, perhaps, the dangers, ever present, of his day.

The Universe seems to have embraced him, allowed him not just as a comic and a teller of histories, but as a deeper philosopher whose commentary on love, on life, on human ways is appreciated now as then.  One hopes he prompted discussions and thoughtful considerations then as now, as his points, though subtly cloaked at times, cannot be missed.  Times haven't changed much.




The battle of literature is always that one "against the State," against the mode of selfish desire and dehumanizing security.  In Kundera's Central Europe it takes one form, defined as that battle is by the Ego of 'Communist' Reality, the Police State, the exile of contrarians, the logic of power for the sake of power.  Here perhaps it is the tyranny of another kind of majority bent on Ego of a different sort, blinded by material achievement against the great humility of spirituality, against the great potential of the least amongst us.   In his own day Shakespeare may have come very close to being in some very hot water.

The Christian (or Judeao-Christian) message, or the Buddhist message, simply seems to have the accuracy of a modern physics about it.  It survives as a truth we can all see and understand, maybe piecemeal, maybe bit by bit, maybe a little at a time, growing gradually, comprehended, at least at times, with fullness.