In a time deluged by ideology -- when everyone is urged to take a side and join the political battle -- Shakespeare offers a different message: that the most important and dramatic choices are made in the human soul. Some steps, once taken, cannot be retraced. Some appetites, once freed, become a prison.

But the plays are not simple sermons. Fate can be indifferent to our best intentions. Even the purest love can lead to disaster. All our explanations of suffering are incomplete.

We watch the struggling souls in Shakespeare's plays with uncomfortable self-recognition. In their raw honesty we see our own nature, even those parts that are despairing and lawless. And as these characters are transformed, we see ourselves differently as well.

but then Shakespeare lived in an age far more consumed by idealogy even more than our own -- the religious conflicts, the wars, threat of foreign invasion and coup d'état (Richard II was used to incite rebellion)
Shakespeare rocks
The Tempest
Caliban says of Propero

'tis a custom with him
I' the afternoon to sleep: there thou may'st brain him,
Having first seiz'd his books; or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezend with thy knife. Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He's but a sot, as I am,

50 lines later this would be murderer, attempted rapist and rebel (traitor to his master in Elizabethean terms being a heinous crime)
has the most beautiful lines in the play and some of the best in Shakespeare -- like an uber Mike Tyson saying something so beautiful it makes you cry

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.

part of Shakespeare's genius is that he demonstrates that just when we may think we have the measure of a character, there goes the rug from beneath your feet, you can never measure a person's soul

Michael Gerson - Ourselves in Shakespeare - washingtonpost.com