Scott Newstok’s new book, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, makes a seemingly radical proposition: what if we returned to the teaching methods of Shakespeare’s day? No, Newstok isn’t advocating corporal punishment, Greek and Latin translations, or the endless rote memorization that Shakespeare himself mocked. However, Shakespeare’ s genius, Newstok claims, can be nurtured, and he, professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College in Tennessee, knows how. The specious-sounding treatise examines less the brain waves in the Bard's head than the methods that shaped his education. Although organized into fourteen short chapters (a number upon which the introduction spends nearly two pages philosophizing), the book tends to hit you over the head with its erudition, but that's part of its charm. Newstok’s prodigious use of quotes, which extends from the Table of Contents to the Index, at first ca...
Life, Books, and SFF