The context of modern and postmodern Shakespeare criticism is modernistic worldview which, as Russell puts it, is built on the foundations of “unyielding despair.” Reading religion with sages rather than exoteric authorities, it can be shown that we can affirm meanings in a trans-theistic and even so-called secular context and thus our reading of Shakespeare can be quite contemporary.

We can read Shakespeare illuminating the problem of meaning of life even in secularized landscape. We find almost everywhere references to the next world, to our eternal vocation, to higher world of spirit that ultimately vivifies all great art. One may recount here major works of influential Shakespeare scholars on the particular theme of metaphysical meaning of Shakespeare that have focused on the question of immortality in Shakespeare. These include Harry Morris’s titled The Last Things in Shakespeare, Marshall’s Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespeare’s Eschatology, Martin Ling’s Shakespeare in the Light of Sacred Art and Shakespeare’s Window into the Soul: Mystical Wisdom in Shakespeare’s Characters and Shakespeare and the Afterlife by John Garrison.

Bloom’s magisterial works that have much influenced Shakespeare reception in America at least have a sustained engagement with the question of meaning and how art as such has salvific function in the work of Shakespeare.

There are large number of works that develop the spiritual aspect of Shakespeare’s work that bears on the point of salvific function of Shakespearean art underscored here. One can find almost every major critical voice from classical through Romantic to modern and postmodern period making reference to spiritual or transcendental life affirming vision in Shakespeare. One can bring evidence from Ben Jonson to Keats to Coleridge to Carlyle to Eliot to Wilson Knight to Harold Bloom........

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