How to Think Like Shakespeare

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The tagline for this site is Thinking, Writing, Reading, Teaching, and you may have spotted that Shakespeare features regularly. So it’s exciting to come across a book which combines all five elements. 

Scott Newstok is Professor of English and Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His new book, How to Think Like Shakespeare: lessons from a Renaissance education is

My love letter to the craft of thought — pondering what we’ve lost in education today, and how we might begin to recover it. 

He writes that he had 

become dismayed by the way we think of thinking 

and so sets out to show how (and why) we might think more effectively, given that we are

Faced with existential crises in the environment, human migration, creeping authoritarianism, and the specter of artificial intelligence, a world without a broadly disseminated capacity for thinking is severely exposed.

I imagine we can all agree on that. Many people are overwhelmed by a sense of those encroaching crises, but can ‘thinking like Shakespeare’ really help us cope with such forces? The book is ‘only’ 183 pages long. However, Scott Newstok is skilful in marshalling evidence from hundreds of sources and presenting his argument with admirably clear thinking of his own. He wears his learning lightly. The result is a pleasure: 14 short, accessible and witty chapters on topics such as ‘Craft’, ‘Place’, ‘Conversation’ and ‘Freedom’.

There is a lot of pointed commentary here on contemporary education, informed partly by Newstok’s experience as a parent of children in the American school system, but surely applicable everywhere. He is concerned by our own student-centered, present-focused, STEM-driven schools. I like that ‘present-focused’ (I think of it as ‘the arrogance of the present’). His core belief about education, and the driving force behind this book, is I think in the following two statements:

Thinking like Shakespeare untangles a host of today’s confused - let’s be blunt: just plain wrong - educational binaries. We now act as if work precludes play; imitation impedes creativity; tradition stifles autonomy; constraint limits innovation; discipline somehow contradicts freedom; engagement with what is past and foreign occludes what is present and native.

but

Shakespeare’s era delighted in exposing these purported dilemmas as false: play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraints, freedom through discipline. I stand with the contrarian view that to be a political progressive, one needs to be an educational conservative.

A series of early interlocking chapters examines ideas about attention, craft, place and the effects of technology. Newstok is worried (like so many others) about the intellectual deracination that technology may cause in children’s education. He must have been writing the book well before the Covid-19 pandemic, but the emergency move to remote learning this year across the world (still going on in some places) will surely have confirmed his scepticism about ed-tech boosterism:

Advocates of distance have always pined for a day when mediated systems could escape the tired confines of face-to-face instruction. In their ideal world, bold technologies will make it possible for dispersed pupils to enroll, with administrators (or, better yet, algorithms) assessing them from afar. New pedagogical tools are claimed to be not only more affordable than traditional classes, but also more effective.

That pining which repeatedly results in overpromises about technology as an educational medium is forensically examined in Daisy Christodoulou’s 2020 book Teachers vs Tech? The case for an ed tech revolution which I wrote about here. She too is deeply sceptical about the idea that technology can ‘personalise’ learning, and the pandemic experience has confirmed the importance of age-old practice: a teacher in a room of pupils, face to face, giving each other full attention.

While “personalized learning” is the latest ed-tech buzz, in practice it means depersonalized learning, via algorithmic surveillance at remote screens. 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. 

The pandemic has proven Newtok’s wise words, especially about the widening of the advantage gap:

Yet I persist in doubting that students watch an online lecture with the attention it demands. They’re just not in the same place with the teacher - physically, temporally, cognitively. Their attention is not held. And, as studies have alarmingly confirmed, distance learning is least helpful for those already disadvantaged: first-generation students; language learners; those from families without access to technology.

For me, ‘attention’ is the key word. It is the topic of a (sorry, terribly slow) series of essays on this site (coming soon, Julia Bell). Newstok opens his chapter ‘Of Attention’, with an image from the series ‘Removed’ by the photographer Eric Pickersgill which you can see here. Pickersgill’s photographs show people staring at their hands, now empty after phones have been digitally removed. In my second piece on attention I look at Maryanne Wolf’s superb book Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world. Wolf looks at the ways deep reading is under threat by the digital environment, and how ‘cognitive patience’ may be lost

as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focussing of our attention.

Attention is central to education, and indeed to what we are as human beings. In this on Meghan Cox Gurdon’s The Enchanted Hour: The miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction I make the same point as Scott Newstok about the etymology of the word (a ‘stretching towards’) and its opposite, distraction:

Distraction is, of course, the opposite of Attention. Its origin is in the Latin verb ‘trahere’, to draw (in the sense of pulling): our minds can be drawn away or dragged or pulled away from a focus, and it is a condition that more and more people are being conscious of, even disturbed by.  ‘Attention’ also has Latin origins, in the verb ‘tendere’, to stretch (towards), which also provides us with ‘tend’ (to look after) and thus, eventually, ‘tender’ (something we look after, that which is young and delicate). [JG].

Attention to craft, to knowledge, to practice, is at the core of Newstok’s vision. He cites the example of his friend John Latimer, who spent his career documenting seasonal changes to flora and fauna along his rural postal delivery route in northern Minnesota. Such extraordinary depth of domain knowledge - knowledge in the field. It is always uplifting to work with someone with that kind of knowledge and craft. I think of my experiences with a plumber, a carpenter, a printer, a web designer, a photographer: how pleasurable it is to witness their fluency, founded on deep domain knowledge, their confidence in the crafts they have practised for a long time. Newstok gives an appropriate example of this from Shakespeare’s own artisanal household in a brilliant chapter called ‘Of Fit’. Shakespeare’s father was a glover (that household is evoked memorably in Maggie O’Farrell’s recent novel Hamnet) and:

Many virtues could have been habituated in the workshop: efficiency, foresight, coordination of multiple steps in an evolving process; a kind of ‘feel’ for the product. Such a household would have introduced a child to an entire vocabulary and community, later to be recalled with evident pride.

This rooting in a place, the particularities of expertise and the development of a mutual language is a fine model for what we want in a classroom. ‘Proving’ comes from the Latin ‘probus’, that which is good, and tested, and

In this sense, craft becomes both empirical and cumulative. Such habits, in turn, can be shared with others, tried and evaluated by them, in a public component: a recursive sense of proving the craft, and thereby im-proving it. This is ‘quality control’ from within, by peers who understand the domain.

We aim to ‘im-prove’ over time as teachers, and (we hope) our pupils also improve over time, and this requires deliberate practice, craft, hard work and attention (for practical classroom advice on the power of practice in the classroom, read this great piece by Tom Sherrington).

The necessarily deliberate nature of this enterprise in Shakespeare’s time is pithily expressed by Walter Ong:

Tudor exuberance of language and expression was not accidental, but programmed.

Newstok shows this is in an analysis of the sonnet form in the chapter ‘On Constraint’, citing Wordsworth’s sonnet about sonnet-making, ‘Nuns fret not’. Why has such a constrained 14-line form been so popular over the centuries? Because its very constraints liberate creativity. Recently I have been teaching some of the sonnets of one of the masters of the form, Gerald Manley Hopkins. The sheer intensity (the un-Victorian exuberance) of Hopkins’s feelings would be unmanageable in the wild; instead, the form both contains and intensifies them. ‘The Windhover’ is like a tap across which you press your thumb, a high heel pressing down on your foot: the power is heightened by the constraint. Hopkins’s darkest emotions in the Sonnets of Terror scream all the louder because they are locked in a 14-line box.

There is so much more to give pleasure in this book, and re-reading is definitely needed. For the moment, here are more things I appreciated-

  • The insight into those subtle moments when Shakespearean characters seem to be tinkering with their own thoughts; Newstok cites Richard II and Prospero. I think of the sinister minds of Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear as they think their ways through their own psychopathies, discovering or uncovering how dark they can be.

  • The idea of translating sonnets into another language and back again: the effort makes you attend to the texture of the text; appreciate nuance; and close the distance across cultures and time.

  • Willa Cather: It takes a great deal of experience to become a natural.

  • References to one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, Elizabeth Bishop (also a ‘tinkerer’ with thoughts as she self-corrects and recalibrates: see ‘The Fish’ for a start), including ‘One Art’ and its 17 drafts (revisions, re-seeings).

  • The idea of a pedagogy suffused with beautiful questions, generative questions.

  • A rich and helpful final section, ‘Kinsmen of the Shelf’, which points the way to further reading on each chapter. 

Finally, Scott Newstok quotes Martin Luther King:

Originality does not mean thinking up something totally new in the universe, but it does mean giving new validity to old form.

That is just right, and an apposite description of this excellent book.