Thinking Like Shakespeare – Today

Abstract

Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020) The "Renaissance Education" of Scott Newstok's sub-title suggests both Shakespeare's sixteenthcentury grammar school training in rhetoric, translation, composition and other disciplines, and the author's own extensive reading in and study of the literature of the world The book sets out to counter an education system obsessed with assessment and quantifiable outcomes, and threatened by impersonal online learning, with an approach that is learner-centred, leisurely, exploratory, conversational and imaginative "Stock grants us invention, a word that gives us not only 'invention' but also 'inventory'" (113), so that in an education engaged with tradition we move "between knowledge acquisition and knowledge application, between stock and exercise" (110);one of the productive determinants of exercise is the subject of Chapter 12, "Of Constraint"