Newstok, Scott. How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Ours is not an age in which we desire to think like our predecessors. Instead, we observe that they did not think like we do, and we reprimand them for their ignorance or worse, for their malice. Scott Newstok’s remarkable volume, How to Think Like Shakespeare, is thus radical in its reverence for tradition. Newstok provides, moreover, a delightfully eclectic treasury of wisdom gleaned both from Shakespeare and from his own experience as an educator. A professor of English at Rhodes College, Newstok has long been a friend of the liberal arts, and he brings his knowledge of the liberal arts tradition to bear on many of the central questions that classical educators seek to answer, questions that regard the purpose of education, the nature of human freedom, and the many challenges that modern educators face. Classical educators will find this book intelligent and engaging. It has much to teach us about Shakespeare’s education and our own.
Each of the book’s fourteen chapters addresses a feature of Shakespeare’s education: thinking, ends, craft, fit, place, attention, technology, imitation, exercises, conversation, stock, constraint, making, and freedom. The chapters are brief, each of them their own mini-lesson on the difference between Shakespeare’s education and our own. Newstok’s style is quirky, swift-moving, and full of quotations drawn from his omnivorous reading. The chapters are accompanied by delightful and fitting images, from an ostomachion puzzle in the shape of Shakespeare’s face to a group of Tibetan Buddhist nuns practicing their debating skills. One could profitably “read around” in this book, for each chapter could be read as a standalone piece. Newstok does, however, weave several important arguments throughout the book as a whole—arguments about the nature of education, freedom, and democracy.
This is a book about thinking and, hence, about education. It is about the way that Shakespeare “stages thought in action” and about the style of education that actualized the potential for Shakespeare’s thinking. In contrast to the Renaissance lessons that he draws upon, Newstok observes that present-day educational programs “kill the capacity to think independently, or even the desire to do so” (3). Newstok is clear-sighted in his comparison of our contemporary educational landscape to Shakespeare’s, and he rightly identifies the kinds of problems that today’s classroom teachers face: ideological binaries, high-stakes testing, an obsession with learning targets, the dissolution of our attention through technology, et al. Newstok points out the perverse irony of the skills-based, exam-driven No Child Left Behind Act: that it actually widened the achievement gap while reducing teachers to “little more than paraprofessionals” (6). Writing of learning targets, Newstok wonders whether we have become like William Tell, “cruelly aiming arrows at our own children” (15). And he thinks through the irony of the archery metaphor: archers don’t actually aim at targets. That’s actually the worst way to practice archery. Instead, archers continually practice their form. Yet teachers increasingly face state or district mandates, some of them turbocharged with funding incentives, that focus their attention not on the form of their teaching, but on ill-conceived, hyper-quantified learning targets that distract them from the real work of teaching. “All intellectual pursuits,” argues Newstok, “are more qualitative than any bubble sheet can ever gauge” (7).
Newstok makes a further argument about freedom. He critiques the quackery of quasi-scientific “quality management” approaches to teacher evaluation and professional development, arguing that quality and improvement come from within a domain, through the people devoted to excellence within that domain. That’s what it means to be in a profession. But when schools, districts, and states impose top-down assessments of teacher quality through the application of generic performance metrics, third-party observation rubrics, and the like, they unwittingly de-personalize learning and de-legitimize the dignity of the craft of teaching. Teachers “fit” their work to the students in their care, and “true tailoring” comes from teachers who “know the needs and potential and aspirations of their students—and who have the time to adjust, to fit the task to the student, the student to the task” (43).
Newstok also views a Shakespearean education as a contribution to civic life in a democracy. Since he understands classrooms as rehearsal spaces for democratic participation, he observes that education without a common object is a threat to the very core of civic life (61). “Because we’ve given up on any collective end,” he writes, “we resort to inoffensive nostrums like the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education” (13). Without the cultivation of civic virtues as at least a proximate end of education, school culture—and thus culture generally—begins to devolve into a placeless, Cartesian void in which habits of attention, expression, and self-knowledge are hollowed out and disintegrated. For a positive example of his vision for a civic-minded education, Newstok refers to Kenneth Burke’s “unending conversation” analogy as a way of cultivating respect for the tradition of the past together with humility about our own role in the conversation of the present moment.
How to Think Like Shakespeare also has an important message for classical educators, who often look to Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem—but not to Renaissance England—for our pedagogical and curricular guidance. Of course, Shakespeare did, too. He looked to the Bible, Plutarch, Livy, Ovid, Cicero, Vergil and other classical authors for inspiration. But today’s classical educators may overlook the educational practices that made Shakespeare Shakespeare: commonplace books, imitation exercises, double translation, progymnasmata, declamation, disputatio in utramque partem, prosopopoeia, and more. If these exercises sound like gobbledygook as you read them, then perhaps you should pick up Newstok’s book to learn more about “the habits that shaped [Shakespeare’s] mind” (11). You’ll be treated not only to a treasure trove of Shakespearean thinking, but also to a poignant and insightful argument from a present-day liberal artist and educator.
Paul Weinhold has been a teacher and leader in classical education movement for the last twenty years. He is Director of Continuing Education for Great Hearts America and Founder of ClassicalEd Review.