How to Think like Shakespeare

Lessons from a Renaissance Education

Scott Newstok

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201580
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

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.

The Thinker of Cernavodă. National History Museum of Romania, Bucharest: 15906. Photo: Marius Amarie.

1

OF THINKING

“I will not cease from mental fight,” Blake wrote. Mental
fight means thinking against the current, not with it.

—Virginia Woolf, “Thoughts on Peace
in an Air Raid” (1940)

Thinking’s tough. We all want shortcuts; you probably picked up this book because you thought it would give you shortcuts. Thinking taxes us, because our brains are designed not for thought but for the avoidance of thought.¹ No wonder we dodge it! But don’t take my word for it:

• Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)

• Most people would die sooner than think—in fact they do so.

—Bertrand Russell (1925)

• Remember how many pass their whole lives and hardly once think and never learned themselves to think.

—Walt Whitman (1855)

• What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

• the very painful Effort of really thinking

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1811)

• A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite enquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour,—the real labour of thinking.

—Sir Joshua Reynolds (1784)²

Thinking about thinking might be easier to caricature than to capture, whether in iconic images of Rodin’s Thinker or Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull. The novelist William Golding relates how he was chastised as a delinquent student:

“Don’t you ever think at all?”

No, I didn’t think, wasn’t thinking, couldn’t think—I was simply waiting in anguish for the interview to stop.

“Then you’d better learn—hadn’t you?”

On one occasion the headmaster leaped to his feet, reached up and plonked Rodin’s masterpiece on the desk before me.

“That’s what a man looks like when he’s really thinking.”

I surveyed the gentleman without interest or comprehension.³

Lewis Carroll mocks the faith that a mere pose will induce insight: when the Dodo can’t answer a question

without a great deal of thought . . . it stood for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence.⁴

Even Plato failed to settle upon one apt image for thinking, calling forth, in turn, the sting of a gadfly; the midwifing of a notion; the paralysis induced by an electric ray; an inward conversation; a sudden, invisible wind.

Yet like the famous judge faced with obscenity, we claim to know thinking when we see it, despite the difficulty of definition. And if we believe cultivating it is a good thing, then we are often perverse. We’ve imposed educational programs that kill the capacity to think independently, or even the desire to do so. While we point to thinkers—Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Curie— who model the disciplined, independent, questing intellect we claim to revere, we enforce systems ensuring that our own young people could never emulate them.

Shakespeare earned his place in our pantheon of minds by staging thought in action. Across his works, terms like “think,” “thinking,” or “thought” outnumber “feel,” “feeling,” or “felt,” by a nearly 10:1 ratio. He raises ideas into a quasi-physical reality,⁵ vivifying their dynamic power as a palpable force. When staging thinking, Shakespeare adopts images from a craft workshop, whether as thoughts whirlèd like a potter’s wheel, or the quick forge and working-house of thought—as if one were hammering mental metal on an anvil.

He even coins an adjective for thinking, “forgetive.” “Forgetive” looks as though it ought to mean something like, well, “forgetful.” But the emphasis is instead on the kinetic activity in that root “forge”: to make or grasp. We must be ready to fly like thought to catch it in the act, for nimble thought can jump both sea and land.⁶ (When Helen Keller placed her hands on Merce Cunningham to feel him leap, she marveled: How like thought. How like the mind it is.)⁷

As Shakespeare’s contemporary Michel de Montaigne put it, thinking about thinking is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind.⁸

Here’s a recent example of not thinking about Shakespearean thinking.

Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” is a popular TED talk, with more than sixty million views. The title primes your answer: yes—yes, of course schools kill creativity. And Robinson’s pitch follows his self-confirming template:

schools are _______ [hierarchical/industrialist/outdated];
this is a _______ [crisis/crime/catastrophe];
and the answer is _______ [creativity/innovation/technology].

Yet his diagnoses and his prescriptions don’t line up, right from his disarming opening joke:

. . . you don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you?
Shakespeare being seven?

I never thought of it.

I mean, he was seven at some point.

He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he?

How annoying would that be?

“Must try harder.”

Sir Ken gets the laughs. But Shakespeare never studied in an “English class”; no such class would exist until centuries after his time. Instead, his Stratford grammar school was conducted in Latin. And his regimented Latin curriculum proved to be the crucible for his creative achievement—in English.

Robinson is right about one thing: Shakespeare would have been enrolled at around the age of seven—long considered a pivotal developmental stage for children, as lasting patterns of thinking take hold. Aristotle held that children should leave home and enter school when they turned seven. At seven, medieval pages would enter the household of a knight. It’s the age that Michael Apted’s Seven Up documentary commences its remarkable chronicle of the life-determining effects of social class, summoning the motto attributed to Loyola: Give me the child for the first seven years, and I will give you the man.

In 2016, I was invited to address my college’s incoming students. My summer was consumed with fretting that the last thing they’d want to hear would be a lecture from some forty-three-year-old white man.

Indeed, my microdemographic had just become a reverse meme! An irritated millennial journalist had replaced the word “millennials” in magazine headlines with the phrase “43-Year-Old White Men,”⁹ exposing fatuous generational generalizations:

“How 43-Year-Old White Men Are Ruining the Workforce”

“Why Are So Many 43-Year-Old White Men Having Zero Sex?”

“The Hot New 43-Year-Old White Men Trend Is Hating 43-Year-Old

White Men”

and my favorite:

“Martha Stewart Still Confused about What 43-Year-Old White

Men Are Exactly”

So I was cautious about being the cranky old prof hectoring the youth.

But it dawned on me: these students would have been seven years old just around the moment that our obsession with shallow forms of evaluation was kicking into high gear. Their cohort was the first to have been marched through their entire primary and secondary schooling under a testing-obsessed...