How to Think Like Shakespeare - A Review
The list of books I have purchased because of Ken Myers and his Mars Hill Audio Journal continues to grow. Though subscriptions to the journal run about $30, regular listeners are likely to find the actual cost of the journal and the free, weekly Friday Features much greater because Myers has the gift of bibliography. He also brings such interesting people in for interviews or reads such enthralling essays that curious minds will find it difficult not to want to follow where he leads. For those without robust university libraries nearby, the cost of following those intellectual breadcrumbs can rise as online orders and regular deliveries from the postman serve to dish up fuel for the mind.
One recent book that I purchased because of Ken Myers is How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. The author, Scott Newstok is a professor of English at Rhodes College. He has previously published on both Shakespeare and renaissance education. In this volume, published with Princeton University Press, Newstok brings those ideas together.
How to Think Like Shakespeare sounds like a “how to” manual. Thankfully, it is not, though that might annoy some who pick up the volume thinking it will provide “10 easy steps to better writing” or whatever.
In an interview with Myers, Newstok related that one of the driving forces behind his writing the book was a rejection of the education-industrial complex. His daughter, enrolled in a public school, came home muttering about “assessment,” which is code for “high stakes testing to justify money spent on novel methods with unproven results which may not have a valid goal in mind.” The problem with assessment is that it pushes toward educating in measurable information without necessarily considering whether the end goal is right and proper. What could have turned into a manifesto is framed much more positively, though, as Newstok provides a framework for considerations for the Renaissance Mind.
The purpose of this book is to help reframe the goal of education around more human considerations. Newstok writes:
My conviction is that education must be about thinking––not training a set of specific skills. . . . Education isn’t merely accumulating data; machines can memorize far more, and far less fallibly, than humans.
The best way to learn about thinking is not to hire a neuroscientist to measure the electrical activity in the brain, but to watch how others have thought before. Since we do not have a time machine to travel back to meet Shakespeare or other thinkers who lived before our technology-saturated age, we must consider what they have written and follow the trails they have followed.
How to Think About Shakespeare takes an intriguing approach. In a world that prizes originality, the book is comprised largely of quotes and tight allusions. Newstok is fastidious in his annotation, so this is no plagiarist’s volume. However, what is illustrated is the great degree that we are dependent upon those that have come before us. In many cases, they have already thought better with clearer language about the things that we consider imponderable.
The book has fourteen chapters, which all deal with particular issues relevant to human thinking and our contemporary culture. For example, Newstok begins with “Of Thinking,” which is appropriate considering the title of the volume. The upshot being that the lament “why can’t people think” is not a new problem driven by smart phones (though perhaps accelerated), but one that spans the intellectual history of the world. The conclusion we might draw from that is that it may be better to see how the problem has been overcome in the past and model our solutions off of that, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Newstok then moves on to discuss ends, craft, fit, place, attention, and more. All the topics serve to outline aspects of human thought in a humane world. Each of the chapters is brief—usually about a dozen pages, which keeps the pace quick while providing some material for future consideration.
How to Think Like Shakespeare is not so much earthshattering as paradigm disrupting. It’s hard to define, really, but this is book that caused me to think and is still nagging at me to continue thinking. Mostly, it’s driving me to continue to explore what it means to be human and to think as a human in a computerized world. Newstok’s brief chapters highlight the ways that we have been habituated to a technological society. He doesn’t provide a lot of clear answers, but he raises some of the more significant questions that we should be asking and which humanity has previously asked. This is the sort of book that I read and have dipped into several times as I’ve mulled its contents since then. The book is one that that will stick with you at the edge of your mind and encourage dabbling.
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.