Shakespeare's Window into the Soul: The Mystical Wisdom in Shakespeare's Characters

Book received very quickly and is in excellent condition.

It is extraordinary that almost four hundred years after his death, the works of William Shakespeare continue to teach, inspire and enrich both the heart and the mind. In this intriguing book, Martin Lings provides us with a great deal of evidence that some of the later plays of Shakespeare, including Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Cymbeline and the Tempest, are also food for the soul. He makes a strong argument that these were sacred, visionary, even mystical works that used esoteric symbols and forms to reflect and reveal an inner drama: the journey of the human soul.The author of this intriguing book was an interesting and accomplished individual who passed away in 2005. Born in Manchester, England in 1909, in his lifetime he traveled widely, was a lifelong student of Frithjof Schuon, converted to Islam and became a Sufi. He taught at several European universities as well as the University of Cairo. He was the keeper of Oriental manuscripts in the British Museum and the British library and wrote a great many original books about religion and spirituality.This is one of his best, and it is quite an endorsement that H.R.H. The Prince of Wales consented to provide a foreword. Lings reveals some of the mystical meanings of the plays, as only a practicing mystic could. I thought that I knew the plays quite well, but he certainly led me to see them with fresh eyes. Many years ago I had a teacher who told me that the works of Shakespeare were some of the greatest spiritual teachings. It took me thirty years to discover that he was probably correct!We are sometimes all guilty of projection: of seeing things that we wish were there, but in reality are not. So was Martin Lings projecting onto the plays? I do not think so. There is increasing evidence that Shakespeare had access to an extraordinarily rich vein of knowledge and insights. Hence the continuing debates about the authorship of the plays.This book is an interesting complement to Arthur Versluis' work Shakespeare the Magus, in which Versluis shows how ideas about the nature of good and evil, astrology, herbalism and ideas about magic are all woven into the fabric of some of Shakespeare's later plays.This book will probably be a little too esoteric for some scholars of Shakespeare, but for people on the spiritual path, the book contains a great deal of valuable material, and for them I warmly recommend it.

Excellent