elfs | Conservatives ought not to read Shakespeare?

All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in [John] Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: "Tho' with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get them." The heart vibrates like a bell to such utterances as this; to turn from it to "Out, out, brief candle," and "The rest is silence," and "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," and "our little life is rounded by a sleep" is turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunken nightmare.

- George Bernard Shaw, "Better Than Shakespeare"