Interview with Scott Newstok, author of ‘How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education’

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education is available from Princeton University Press.

This interview was conducted on November 23, 2020. The interview & transcript have been shortened and edited for clarity.

MM: Hello, and welcome to Interviews with Shakespeare For All. Today we’re speaking with Scott Newstok. Scott Newstok is professor of English and Founding Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. He is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the book that is the subject of our discussion today, How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. Published by Princeton University Press in 2020, this widely praised book was recently selected as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. Professor Newstok describes How to Think like Shakespeare as “my love letter to the craft of thought — pondering what we’ve lost in education today, and how we might begin to recover it.” Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, describes the book as “something to treasure. The book lays out a case for Shakespeare’s vital connection to the lives we live today, opening the door to new ways of thinking and experiencing the world, which are essential to a life well lived.” I’m Maria Devlin McNair, creator of Shakespeare For All,” and I'm very pleased to be speaking today with Scott Newstok about How to Think like Shakespeare.

SN: Thanks, Maria.

MM: So first off, I'd love it if you could introduce the book for us, tell us a little bit about the subject and the thesis of the book and especially the style in which it's written, because it's quite a unique style that kind of embodies some of the things that it's talking about.

SN: Sure. Thank you. That's a nice way to put it. I mean, the style is at its heart, a commonplace book. It really emerges from my teaching and the work that I've done in the classroom over the last 20 plus years. And it is an attempt to distill things I love about teaching and things I love somewhat essayistically via various clusters of topics in an attempt to remind ourselves of some of the good, enduring legacies of a Shakespearian education, not the things that we know and we kind of satirize and we're rightly avoiding when we're against corporal punishment or against exclusive forms of education, but the powerful and enduring pedagogical habits that would have shaped a mind like his in a generation of minds from his frontline, his era.

So it emerged out of my teaching and it emerged out of my classroom, things that I've loved to share with my students, and at a certain point about maybe five or seven years ago, I found kind of two paths converging in my life, my personal path and my professional path, my children were starting to enter school and they were having some great experiences in their schooling and then some not so great experiences. And I was really puzzling over what was working and what was not working in their education, so that as a parent, the task of education or the goals of education were very much on my mind. And at the same time that that was happening and I was kind of mulling over why I was concerned about their education, I was also reading a lot of great scholarship by Shakespearians about 16th century educational practices, as well as Shakespeare's own professional practices in the professional theater. So I, in a way, I was trying to make those things converge, my professional career and my personal life, as I was seeking to think hard about things that I've always loved about education, things that I think are worth sustaining about humanist pedagogy. And I think it brought into light some of the things that I found frustrating about what was going on in my family's experience of contemporary education.

MM: I’d love to ask you to elaborate a little bit further on those particular themes in Renaissance education. You can find them in this book in the headings of the chapters, which are sort of listed like the headings of a Renaissance commonplace book. Some of them: Of Thinking, Of Ends, Of Craft, Of Fit, Of Place, Of Attention, Of Technology, Of Imitation, Of Exercises.  And to show a little bit of the style of this book and its wide-ranging qualities, I pulled out this paragraph that I feel is sort of exemplary from the chapter on stock.

(Quoting from How to Think like Shakespeare) “Take stock: the contemporary analogue might be a blog, a Tumblr, an advertising agency’s ‘swipe file,’ Beyoncé’s ‘memory bank.’ Stock grants us inventio, a word that gave us not only ‘invention’ but ‘inventory.’ Cartoon images of inventors depict a lightbulb flashing above the head of a solitary genius. But, as Keith Richards admits in his autobiography, nothing came from itself. He was endorsing Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s preface to her second edition of Frankenstein: Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void. Or maybe it was Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s injunction that painters must build on the creativity of predecessors: You don’t get anything from nothing. To be fair, I should acknowledge the earlier Sir Joshua Reynolds, who pointed out that invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those things which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing. Well, technically, Reynolds is quoting King Lear: Nothing can be made out of nothing. Wait, that’s Lear, citing his own earlier rage: Nothing will come of nothing.”

MM: This gives you a little bit of the sense of the movement, from Shakespeare back into the Greek and Romans and upwards to you the contemporary with Beyoncé, that this book offers its readers.

SN: I like that passage. I'm glad you cited it. I tried to be playful in the book, I tried to capture some of the spirit of play that I recognize in early modern writing and that I really cherish in that mode of writing, and then what I would like to think is characteristic of my classroom as well, as being wide-ranging across periods and genres and capturing a spirit that's meant to kind of celebrate the joy of learning and ranging, ranging around in thought. So, thanks for I'm glad you cited that particular passage.

MM: To carry on with some more examples, I had a question here, if you could sort of talk us through an example from something in Shakespeare where you see some of these methods at work that you discuss in your book. Equally, I'd love to hear you talk about any sort of classroom practices you've introduced as a result of looking at Renaissance education.

SN: In some ways, this is a way to revivify or to make, keep fresh old-fashioned source study, but to frame it, not as the old-fashioned way of looking at a kind of linear relationship to a past precedent, but rather trying to get into the head of Shakespeare as a maker or as a creator, as a creative writer. And so I like finding moments and staging moments from the plays and from the poems where students are placed in that position and trying to think their way into what's going on when a writer decides to trope on a previous writer in this way, or aggressively revises a contemporary peer or makes a kind of nod to their own work.

So increasingly that's become the way I've approached the classroom, is posing Shakespeare as a maker and part of a long tradition of intellectual making in all kinds of media and in all kinds of nations and times -- but to try to help them occupy that subject position, or imagine themselves in that position and walk through why they might have made this particular decision or made this particular kind of move. So it's a very localized kind of thinking that I'm asking them to do, whether that's thinking about an allusion or that's thinking about a particular word choice. It's not looking at it from the outside, as something that you're judging or you're evaluating, but rather, almost like you're trying to work your way up into it from the inside, as if you were to recreate it yourself right now, which I think makes reading a less alienating process. And my hope is that it makes students feel more like they’re a peer or they're an equal to the thing that they are engaging with, rather than having it feel like a distant memorial, monumental thing that is untouchable and unchangeable.

I have a lot of friends who do versions of this kind of exercise, where they even just look at variations between Quarto and Folio versions of a particular play and use that as an occasion to animate a thought experiment about what might be the resonances between variant moments in two otherwise similar texts. So again, nothing that I'm saying is really new, but I think the framework that I'm trying to present of thinking through Shakespeare as a maker is a way to revivify things that have been valuable for teaching of his works for a long time.

MM: And I love that sort of freedom or playfulness that that could bring into the students' experience with the text, because one of the things we've wanted to help work against with this course is the sense that people can sometimes have, that Shakespeare is sort of behind this gate, and there are gatekeepers who can tell you, Oh, do you know enough? Do you understand enough to come and look at Shakespeare? And with source study, it might make you feel like you have to go through even more gates in order to get to Shakespeare, if you have to know all the things he was alluding to. But then, thinking of Shakespeare almost as a contemporary, that he's doing something and you're trying to step in there and do something along with him, trying to make yourself, I think that takes away those sense of barriers that someone could have about Shakespeare.

SN: I hope that that's the case. And I think in some ways there are some really basic strategies you can use to work towards that. And my students, this very week, are working on a single line from a single sonnet that they've been examining intensively, but the premise is, I really want them to kind of walk through and rewrite that line as if they were writing it from scratch, going through the process of, Why would I use this word at this moment? Or, Why would I shift my emphasis at this particular moment in this line? And it's almost as if you're trying to reoccupy that cognitive space of what it was like to create that line or that word at the moment of its creation. So again, the goal is to think less of this as a static thing from the past and more as an example of a form of making, or a form of creation, with which we have a great continuity in the present.

MM: And are there other moments from other poems or plays of Shakespeare that you feel like work particularly well for these exercises?

SN: It's one of those cases where once you start looking, you see it everywhere, and it actually taps into a lot of great work that's done in the history of the book over the last couple of decades, as well as in practices of rehearsals for theater in Shakespeare's era. So, something we were just looking at last week, we were watching the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater production of Much Ado About Nothing, which is available on the, on the PBS website right now. And there are great instances of a re-attribution of a speech to a different speaker through editorial history. If you look at the footnote at the bottom of the page for “Peace, I will stop your mouth,” that is in most additions attributed to Benedick. And then you look at the note, and it says, Oh, actually in the Quarto, in the Folio, this was said by Leonato. And that seems trivial, but it actually has some pretty big consequences if you think through what it means to have the male character going over to the woman and saying, Stop speaking, I'm going to kiss you, or an authority figure draw them together as equals, like these two are never going to shut up and I need to find some way to bring them together so their mouths will stop. So that's an old fashioned thing to pay attention to, but it's very easy to do just by glancing at the bottom of the page and then using that as an occasion for thought. If you're a director, which one of those two speakers do you choose for that particular line? It changes the stakes of the delivery of that line and really, in some ways, of the whole play. So I tend to be someone that likes to fixate on the local and find ways to look at granular levels of decisions that then have kind of ripple-like, cascading consequences for larger scales of reading.

And I think that's another way to make this feel less intimidating or less alienating, is to be very comfortable with leaning into particular, local discrepancies and feeling confident that you should notice those things, and you have the right and the ability to make a judgment about those things. Everyone can have an opinion on which one of those characters they like to attribute that speech to.

MM: That’s a wonderful technique for thinking about how to do something that's both important, but within the size that you can feel like, we're going to be experts on, in the scope of one lesson. And about re-attribution of lines and restructuring the play -- I was watching recently a recording of Benedict Cumberbatch, his performance of Hamlet, where they take that famous first line, “Who's there?”, that’s sort of almost to a throwaway character, a guard, and they give that line to Hamlet. It starts with Hamlet playing with a toy soldier, and there's a noise, and Hamlet says “Who's there?” And then it's Horatio and Horatio comes in. That's when they have their meeting scene, which of course isn't the first scene. They moved it from later in the play. But that could be another conversation you have in a classroom. How would you restructure this to bring out what you think are some of the important themes?

SN: I think that's in some way, what you're doing is you're occupying, let's say, like the headspace of somebody who would have been working in the theater on a very practical level for a couple of decades with an interesting, fascinating group of people with the goal of reaching a wide range of audiences.

Even as you're describing that speech from Hamlet, I'm recalling a funny passage that Bob Dylan invokes in his Nobel prize acceptance speech where he's talking about just the practicalities of, Where can I get a skull. He’s kind of imagining that maybe Shakespeare would have been doing exactly those kinds of practical considerations in the way that Dylan says that's, that's what making is. It's a dynamic of trying to figure out how this works for this particular audience and how best to make it fit and make it suit the occasion, to make the action suit the word and the word suit the action, right? Make that kind of mutual congruence between the occasion and the thing you're trying to convey work as best as possible.

So again, as long as you step back to encouraging a reader or encouraging the students to imagine themselves in that active space, it becomes a much more dynamic experience, rather than, this thing is settled in and it has always been this way and always will be this way, and it's alien from me.

MM: I was thinking particularly about some of your other chapters, “Of Place” and “Of Attention,” right now during lockdown when so much teaching has to be virtual, or physical teaching looks very, very different than it has, and how some of the good habits that you recommend and emphasize in these chapters about attention and gathering proximity, have become even harder in an era of remote teaching. So I'm wondering if you have any suggestions for how to keep implementing good habits of gathering and attention even while we're distanced.

SN: Oh, it's tough. I mean, everyone I know is struggling. One thing that's clear to me from online interactions is, in some ways it's such a deceptive interaction because you have kind of the simulacrum of being in the same place at the same time, but it's, it's not really. One strategy that I've had is again, to move towards the local rather than the kind of large scale, to try to think about micro-ways of engaging with each other. That has included not reading entire plays. My strategy has been to move towards the sonnets, which, as we know, have long been figured as rooms, or little rooms, or pretty rooms, or locked rooms, or certain kinds of prisons, and allowing us to linger in those spaces and recognize that there are downsides to being constrained in that way, inside of a box, and there are also some virtues that emerge from the constraints of being within a frame and trying to work as well as you can within a frame.

So that's been one strategy is, that I've decided that it's worth our while to attend to short things that we can work through together. But honestly, I think everyone I know has struggled with where we are and I don't have a number of great suggestions. I think in some ways the pandemic and the emergency measures that we've all had to take have confirmed a lot of the concerns that I was conveying in those chapters about attention and technology.

I don't, you know, I don't feel vindicated by that. I'm dismayed that a lot of those hunches were, I think, accurate and I am yearning to get back into a room with other human beings and be in conversation with them, as I know all actors and directors are, and teachers across the globe are. So if there's one good upside from the forced emergency measures that we've all had to adapt and adopt, I do think it has been to remind us of the very complicated and in some ways not -- I'm trying to think of the best way to put this -- I think we took for granted a lot of the amazing things that happen when we're together in a room before the pandemic. And I think we're all yearning for that now. And I think we -- I hope we will be a little bit more skeptical about the next time we are presented with something that tries to erase the virtues of being in a room together.

MM: The final question I wanted to discuss with you, it's about reading. You speak very persuasively about the importance of literary tradition and how having this great, great stock of reading enabled all of this creativity, doing something new with their old stock. And so I wanted to ask your thoughts on how to be a reader who can make the best use of tradition. And you talk in your chapters about how, on the one hand, in order to be a good judge of literature, to judge what are sort of the best works, you have to have read more widely than that. You have to read all kinds of books. On the other hand, we have Thoreau who says very pithily and wisely, Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all. And so I was just wondering how, how do we do our reading?

SN: None of us can read everything and if there ever was a fantasy time that someone could, that time has long, long since gone, as we all know. One strategy that I like, and I like to encourage in my students, is simply to kind of follow a thread of a particular artist or a particular writer or a particular creator whom you already like and you admire, and kind of start digging your way into their own intellectual genealogy as well as their intellectual legacy. So that is allowing your curiosity to drive your reading, but it's anchoring it in some form of judgment that you've already made. You've already evaluated that I like her for these reasons, or I like this particular creator for these other reasons, and then allowing that to then generate a kind of recursive process where you're creating concentric or unfolding networks of association with a particular maker or that creator.

So in some ways, you're kind of generating a genealogy or a lineage that then allows you to enrich your familiarity with the original thing that you loved by finding ways to, again, both network your way back into what led that person to their own creation, and then the legacy of readers that have followed them.

So Shakespeare is easy in that way, because there have been so many readers and respondents to Shakespeare, and there are so many wonderful precedents. But it is really true of any creator, whether it's a contemporary artist or one from thousands of years ago, that part of the intellectual pleasure of engaging with them is through that dynamic of connecting them. And I like that model as being something that, you know, I'm not prescribing that you should read this author, you should read this author, but clearly you already love this figure, so why would you not want to know more about her genealogy or her legacy? That, to me, works, and it feels like that's a very organic way to pursue a program of reading that's animated by whatever inclination that you already have, you've already indicated, or you've already felt it on some kind of profound level. It doesn't solve the challenge of the infinite library by any stretch of the imagination. But it starts unraveling a pathway through it that's generated by the original thing that drew you, that drew your interest or drew your imagination in the first place.

MM: I love that idea. And of course, one problem that people have, and rightly so, with canons, it's the idea that they're imposed from above, as all decisions that other people have made-- I decided that you should read this—and here, it's coming from this original spark of interest, that then creates this logical, coherent stretching-back into ancestors and descendants. And I've always thought that that's a good way for canons to be formed anyway, if we have the term “canon,” is writers talking to each other -- what did that conversation look like? And how are these threads of inspiration moving forward? We've tried to pick up on that in our “Shakespeare For All” course, looking at American Moor, a play by Keith Hamilton Cobb that was inspired by his experience and interaction with Othello.

SN: I don't use the word “canon” in the book because in some ways, I think I'm just describing something more preliminary and basic. In fact, I'm even hesitant to use the word “tradition.” You know, T.S. Eliot had pointed out a hundred years ago, it's already a fraught word in 1920, 1921, but the Eliot point from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” still holds, which is any later creator or reader reorganizes the entire past in a powerful and wonderful and, at least initially, counterintuitive way. So rewriting Othello in 2020, it changes your reading of the play, even though that's counter the unidirectional sense of source study, where the past influences the present. In fact, it's a mutual interrelationship, and that, again, is something that's powerful for us as readers, and it's placing us in an active creatorly position rather than a passive recipient position. So, the word I do like, and I feel comfortable with it in that chapter, is “stock”, which I think is less loaded, in many helpful ways. And it's also a term that has long been used to describe “common stock,” that this belongs to everyone, and it's not exclusionary, and everyone has a right to it kind of, in the same way that it's like an intellectual comments that belongs to all of us by birthright. It's not exclusionary by any stretch of the imagination, but you do need to make it your own by making your claim on it. And I like that, too. It again, it places the reader or the audience in an active relationship to the past, rather than just a consumer-like relationship to the past.

MM: Well, thank you so much for speaking with us today about this book and about the ways to think about how we can take our stock from the past and especially Shakespeare and make it new in the way that we read and the way that we teach. And I hope that readers of this book will find this useful for their ongoing engagement with Shakespeare and their thoughts about learning anything in the 21st century.

SN: Yeah, I hope so. I hope so too. I think it's very much in the spirit of what you're doing that it's designed for “Shakespeare for all,” and that that's something that we all have a right to engage with and inherit.

MM: Thank you so much for being with us here today, Professor Newstok.

SN: Thank you, Maria.