Shakespeare and the Bible.

I've been thinking about one of the things that you always hear about teaching the Bible in public schools is that it's a cultural touchstone for the authors of the great works of English literature, and so kids can't understand Shakespeare or whoever if they don't know the Bible. While that's true, an educational system that taught the Greek and Roman classics was also a given for many authors of English lit and they reference those texts and conceptual framework just as much as the Bible -- Milton's "Paradise Lost" is just as much Homer and Virgil as it is Adam and Eve -- but you never hear people lamenting the decline of people knowing the classics as a culutural touchstone and trying to get together textbooks on that for public schools, so to some extent, having to know the Bible to read Shakespeare isn't so much about the Shakespeare as it is about the Bible, and to that extent the issue-framing in the debate strikes me as at best naive or at worst disingenuous.