If we have read Shakespeare we must be joyous, playing our parts on the stage, not taking affairs of life too seriously; taking beauty and love seriously, knowing little sorrow or understanding any trouble currently facing as goad to redemption. While travelling in a bus or watching people on streets and even in mosques and shrines we see mostly serious somber faces, anxious (meaning living in future) or depressed (living in past).

Most of us daydream for hours on daily basis. This shows we aren’t in the present. Very few are like Cordelia who know the grammar of gratitude. Few know here we must laugh in the world of fools, in the long run we all die as Keynes said. Understanding, forgiveness, compassion and creativity are what are final lessons from the drama of life depicted in Shakespeare. Eternity of beauty he implicates in his great sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” reminds us of the old Platonic and mystical theme of Beauty as the signature of God, as splendour of Truth. Embracing voluntary retirement at the peak of one’s career, as Prospero does in The Tempest remains a standing invitation to all of us who identify too much with their careers and fear retirement or keep lobbying for extension. King Lear is an invitation to ripeness, to detachment and preparation for death.

As a student of literature one often wonders how come Shakespeare continues to be taught as part of the canon but is generally approached with a hermeneutic of suspicion. He is little researched now, at least in his own terms and not in terms of reigning ideologies, especially historicist, cultural materialist, psychoanalyst and feminist, as if Shakespeare has little to teach us and our job is to show his ideological proclivities or failings. Most critics don’t read........

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