Content area
Full Text
How to Think Like Shakespeare By Scott Newstok Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020
I am apparently not the only Shakespeare scholar who, subjected to the dogma and rebarbative neologisms of educational developers and deans of "teaching and learning," has felt growing admiration for the equally bossy pedagogical experts of the sixteenth century and their "nasty, brutish and long" regime of training in letters, as Scott Newstok styles it in this fine, playful new book (xi). Thirty-five years ago, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine pronounced that this same training offered "a model of true culture as something given, absolute, to be mastered, not questioned, and thus "fostered in all its initiates a properly docile relation to authority" although not before conceding that "the prose of Rabelais, the lyrics of Ronsard, and the plays of Shakespeare are only the most succulent of the fruits that grew from deep roots in the training humanists offered."1 Five years later Richard Halpern asserted that this training was "transformative" albeit only insofar as it "hammered in ideological content and also laid down economies of recreation and labour, punishment and reward."2 In contrast, and perhaps because the humanities have grown fragile over the intervening decades, Newstok starts from common-sense logic that evaded his predecessors, observing that the literary achievements of Shakespeare, Montaigne, and their contemporaries testify to the fact that the practices inculcated by their schooling-common-placing, double translation, imitation, exercises in ethopoeia-gave them and many of their contemporaries imaginative freedom and verbal chops (to put it mildly). Therefore, if we value those things, we should respect and even appropriate methods and assumptions about cultural heritage and training that enabled them.
Newstok launches his argument, however, in opposition not to earlier scholars but to "teaching and learning" nostrums of our day, in this case represented by a widely viewed TED talk by the late professor of education (what else?) Sir Ken Robinson. "Robinson's pitch" Newstok points out, "follows his self-confirming template":
Schools are_[hierarchical/industrialist/outdated]; this is a_[crisis/crime/catastrophe]; and the answer is_[creativity/innovation/technology].(4)
Newstok's maneuver here, parodying forms and tropes to advance an argument about the importance of being able to recognize and manipulate forms and tropes, exemplifies his method throughout the book and why it is delightful to read.3 The book is performative rather than...