“You’ve been cheated of your birthright: a complete education.”
So Scott Newstok warned the Class of 2020 in a convocation speech four years ago. Newstok, who teaches literature at Rhodes College, where he also directs the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment, urged students to strive for “a level of precision, inventiveness, and empathy worthy to be called Shakespearean.”
That speech led to an essay and now to a book, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons From a Renaissance Education, which Princeton University Press will publish in April. In it, Newstok considers what the Bard’s copious intellect and imagination might tell us about the potential and failures of our educational system. In doing so, he cites a wide array of thinkers — not just Shakespeare but ancient Greek philosophers, Mary Shelley, Hannah Arendt, Maya Angelou, Bob Dylan, and scores of others. That serves as a written meta-performance that illustrates Newstok’s point: Discovering how others think is the best way to learn how to think for ourselves.
Newstok explained to The Chronicle why he approached the book in that way, how writing it influenced his teaching, and how educational reforms leave every child behind.
Your book frequently refers to Shakespeare, but it seems more of a general defense of the liberal arts and knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Is that a fair characterization?
That’s more than fair. My book takes Shakespeare as an occasion for thinking, not the end of it.
What drew you to that topic?
It grew out of a convergence between my teaching and my parenting. Over the past decade, I’ve been reading a lot of great work on Shakespeare’s career, from pedagogical practices to the inherently collaborative nature of theater. This scholarship reoriented my teaching, as I sought to help students approach him as a maker: a play-wright.
During this same decade, my own kids have been progressing through elementary and secondary school. Some of the frustrating educational reforms they’ve confronted strike me as jarringly at odds with the still-beneficial aspects of a Shakespearean education. These strands of thought came together when I was invited to speak to the incoming students at Rhodes College, which led to my 2016 Chronicle essay, and now this book.
The book is, from start to finish, dense with quotations. Why did you decide to take that approach?
I’d like to think of the book as an archive, or maybe ark, of favorite phrases, much as Renaissance writers would gather adages or epigrams or proverbs for students and friends. Quoted passages tend to make my own reading pause, as the verbal texture becomes uneven. What happens to this little fabric of thought now that it’s woven into new cloth?
This volume began to take shape once I recognized that I’d been assembling something akin to a commonplace book, itself the genesis of so much writing from this era. So I’ve patched together a compendium of voices, playfully emulating the synthetic strategies deployed by Shakespeare’s peers.
You make a persuasive case that even the most original thinkers build on and are inspired by the thoughts of those who came before. Yet both the canon and imitation have come under frequent fire. Do you discuss those issues with your students?
Yes, we invariably address the long, fraught history of what gets assigned, as well as more recent developments that have constrained their own educations. As the scholar John Guillory points out, the anomalous status of Shakespeare as the only author named in the Common Core State Standards unhelpfully isolates him in a kind of moat. But here in my book I’m trying to lay out something more basic, something much more preliminary, about how humans hone any kind of practice, whether playing an instrument or playing a sport. This kind of developmental claim precedes but doesn’t preclude larger curricular conversations.
A lot of students these days who enjoy the humanities are reluctant to major in them or seek a career in them. Do you talk to students about the notions of ostensible “utility” that you question in your book?
After he saw the first balloon ascent, in Paris, Ben Franklin overheard the question “What good is it?” He is said to have retorted, “What good is a newborn baby?”
We know education has to be useful, to have utility. The problem is that “utility” has come to have a truncated sense: only that which provides quick and direct returns. And even though the argument for deferred utility happens to be valid, it’s just as crucial to model and transmit the excitement of thinking in the moment, and not concede reflexively to the lexicon of “use.” Why did anyone take any pleasure in writing a work in the first place? Figuring that out is itself a pleasure, and can animate further inquiry.
Has writing the book influenced how you teach?
It has helped me clarify things I’d long felt but never fully confronted. “Craft” has now become the guiding conceit for my teaching: How are writers like craft practitioners? What tools and traditions do they draw upon? How do they improvise with limited resources? And what habits do they model for us today? Such a conceit reveals to students a writer-in-progress, unseating overreverence for monolithic creators. And I hope this conceit helps them recognize their own capacities for craft: cultivating the varieties of creativity needed by advanced societies.
You have school-age children and write about the cost of assessment-heavy No Child Left Behind elementary and secondary education. What are your biggest worries for their generation, intellectually and academically?
I’m most dismayed by the instrumentalization of reading comprehension. An endless battery of high-stakes testing rewards mere extraction, strip-mining context for content. While every reader gauges when and how to shift between skimming and depth, skimming increasingly prevails.
Only last week my 7-year-old boasted how she doesn’t even read her whole homework passage. She just looks at the question, then hunts for the sentence that answers it. That’s not the fault of her teachers, who are terrific; it’s the grimly predictable “outcome” of state-mandated assessment regimes. And I think we’re only beginning to realize the lasting damage habituated by such fractured reading.
How did you decide that academe was the best way to approach Shakespeare, as opposed to going into acting or directing or some other aspect of theater?
In a high-school production of Romeo and Juliet, my feeble Sampson (or maybe it was Gregory?) mumbled quips I didn’t understand about choler and colliers. And it’s not even that I ever really planned to become a professor. I enjoyed thinking about rhetoric and reading, and wanted to do more of it. Graduate study gave me the time and space to do that, and I’m lucky that my job still allows me to do the same alongside sharp students and colleagues.
You describe teaching sonnets in a prison as a wonderfully satisfying pedagogical experience, in part because frills and technology don’t get in the way and you have students eager to learn. What lessons might that hold for colleges?
Our era’s recurrent fable? Presuming that the only kind of technology is digital technology — and that digital technology inevitably improves upon anything that preceded it. A naïve enthusiasm for teaching machines often derives from an unspoken hostility toward teachers — a hostility that seeks to eliminate the human element from education by automating it.
I use lots of tech, whether online dictionaries, digital facsimiles, scholarly databases, interactive maps, performance archives, or other research resources. But in the end, it’s all to serve close learning. And the good old-fashioned printed page remains the most reliable technology. So one lesson is that real discussion requires little more than a few cheap books and a group of people caught up in reverie. The reverie alone will do, if books are few.
What’s the best production of a Shakespeare play you ever saw?
How about the best Marlowe production I’ve ever seen? That’s easy: an ecstatic 2011 Doctor Faustus at Shakespeare’s Globe. It captured that ruthlessly Marlovian edge, what T.S. Eliot called his “terribly serious, even savage comic humour.”
If Shakespeare could see how his works are taught today, what do you think would surprise him the most?
Hmm … what could surprise a nimble mind, alert to the world and its words? Having survived a daunting Latin curriculum, he might be surprised that anything was being taught in English.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
