How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education

by Scott Newstok

Overview

A lively and engaging guide to vital habits of mind that can help you think more deeply, write more effectively, and learn more joyfully

How to Think like Shakespeare is a brilliantly fun exploration of the craft of thought—one that demonstrates what we’ve lost in education today, and how we might begin to recover it. In fourteen brief chapters that draw from Shakespeare’s world and works, and from other writers past and present, Scott Newstok distills enduring practices that can make learning more creative and pleasurable.

Challenging a host of today's questionable notions about education, Newstok shows how mental play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraint, and freedom through discipline. It was these practices, and a conversation with the past—not a fruitless obsession with assessment—that nurtured a mind like Shakespeare's. And while few of us can hope to approach the genius of the Bard, we can all learn from the exercises that shaped him.

Written in a friendly, conversational tone and brimming with insights, How to Think like Shakespeare enacts the thrill of thinking on every page, reviving timeless—and timely—ways to stretch your mind and hone your words.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691201580
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/21/2020
Series:	Skills for Scholars , #18
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	885,467
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Table of Contents

What's Past Is prologue ix

1 Of Thinking 1

2 Of Ends 13

3 Of Craft 25

4 Of Fit 37

5 Of Place 47

6 Of Attention 55

7 Of Technology 63

8 Of Imitation 73

9 Of Exercises 85

10 Of Conversation 97

11 Of Stock 107

12 Of Constraint 119

13 Of Making 131

14 Of Freedom 141

Kinsmen of the Shelf 153

Thanks and Thanks 165

Index 173

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A lucid, human, terrifically engaging call to remember our better selves and a supremely unstuffy celebration of what’s essential.”—Pico Iyer, author of The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

"How to Think like Shakespeare is a witty and wise incitement to shape our minds in old ways that will be new to almost all of us. By description and by imitation, Scott Newstok performs an improbable but delightful resurrection of five-hundred-year-old methods of engagement with words and thoughts. And hey: if they worked for Shakespeare, why shouldn't they work for you?"—Alan Jacobs, author of How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

"A wonderfully light-footed and erudite investigation of education (and so much more), by means of Shakespeare (and so much more). Scott Newstok's book, a playful delight, also delivers a serious pedagogical punch."—Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

"Splendid, tremendously clever, and obviously inspired by a real love of Shakespeare. The whole basic idea is terrific, with wonderful passages to illustrate each new idea. Bravo."—Ken Ludwig, author of How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare

"Scott Newstok has written an urgent account of Renaissance education and our own impoverished equivalent. Learned, pacey, full of witty observation—I loved the idea of thinking as humanity's 'killer app'—it is a brilliant enactment of its own central ideas about the importance of liberated thinking and the constitutive pleasures of rhetoric. The chapter titles recall Bacon and Montaigne, essayists of Shakespeare's time: Newstok is their worthy successor."—Emma Smith, University of Oxford

"Scott Newstok's How to Think like Shakespeare is something to treasure. The book lays out a case for Shakespeare's vital connection to the lives we live today, opening the door to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world, which are essential to a life well lived."—Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library

"Insightful and joyful, this book is a masterpiece. It invokes and provokes rather than explains. It reminds rather than lectures. It is different from any book I have ever read. And it works. Drawing on the past in the best sense of the term, it reminds us that we are part of a long tradition. Few books make the case for liberal education as creatively as this one does."—Johann N. Neem, author of What's the Point of College? Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform

"Ranging widely from the classics right up to the present with apt quotations, all in service of ideas we lose at our peril, How to Think like Shakespeare winningly blends respect for tradition with thoughtful steps toward a more equitable society. It is the work of a Renaissance man in both senses."—Robert N. Watson, author of Cultural Evolution and Its Discontents: Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure

"Hugely illuminating and insightful. It should be obligatory reading for all involved in education.”—David Crystal, coauthor of Shakespeare's Words

“There are few recent books I can think of that make for more encouraging and salutary reading as a reminder of all that remains to be gained from literary studies, and conversely of all that might be lost from allowing it simply to fall by the wayside.”—Jeffrey Alan Miller, MacArthur Fellow

“A little gem of a book. It offers the pleasures of a modern commonplace book, brimming with so many choice thoughts that you feel the urge to scribble them down. The book is written with elegance and wit; the last chapter in particular is a tour de force.”—Indira Ghose, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Editorial Reviews

"Part humanist manifesto, part commonplace book, [How to Think like Shakespeare] combines erudition and accessibility in an inviting package that is a joy to read."

Sententiae Antiquae Reviews

One of the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2020

Finalist for the PROSE Award in Literature, Association of American Publishers

"Shortlisted for the Parnassus Prize, Memoria College"

From the Publisher

"A playful, quote filled romp into the mind of Shakespeare."

Fourteen Lines blog