Shadowlands Study Guide

The play is set in Oxford, England in the 1950s. On stage, there are two rooms, one within another, blocked by a translucent screen. C.S. Lewis, referred to as Jack, enters with a newspaper. Lewis is in his mid 50s, well dressed and extremely well spoken. He begins to address the audience as though he were giving a lecture, introducing the topics as love, pain and suffering. Clarifying the type of love he is discussing, he addresses the question 'If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer so much?' Lewis asserts that perhaps God does not want us to be happy, but rather loveable, and as a mechanism to break through the selfishness of our nature, has created suffering. Suffering, he claims, is intended to wake us from the illusion that everything is all right. This life is, Lewis describes, a mere shadow of the next. (read more)