Thinking Like Shakespeare

I think quite a lot of people have seen Scott Newstok’s address to the new students at Rhodes College, where he teaches, but if you haven’t, it’s worth a click. You can find out about Scott here and you can read a version of the talk here. It’s partly a searing attack on an educational culture that emphasises testing and thus inhibits the minds it is supposed to be training, and it’s partly a rousing call to think like Shakespeare – to respond as he seems to have to an education based on rhetoric.
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At college, Newstok, argues, students can and should work with ‘precision, inventiveness, and empathy worthy to be called Shakespearean’:

His mind was shaped by rhetoric, a term that you probably associate with empty promises — things politicians say but don’t really mean. But in the Renaissance, rhetoric was nothing less than the fabric of thought itself. Because thinking and speaking well form the basis of existence in a community, rhetoric prepares you for every occasion that requires words.

This is music to my ears: I suppose you could sum up some of the things I was trying to say in my book Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition along these lines. In Shakespeare, rhetoric (the metaphors and other tropes, the tone and structure) is the fabric of his characters’ thinking. They think their way through the problems they encounter in style.
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There’s more music to my ears:

Yet we might do better to revive instead the phrase ‘negative capability’: what the poet John Keats called Shakespeare’s disposition to be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts’. In the Renaissance, the rhetorical tradition encouraged such ‘play of the mind’ through the practice of disputation. Students had to argue from multiple perspectives rather than dogmatically insist upon one biased position.

Now it is certainly the case that a lot of people in Shakespeare’s time, beneficiaries of its rhetorical education, were seriously dogmatic about many things. But I think Newstok is right to urge us towards flexibility and open-ness to other ways of thinking, and to recognise it as a product of a rich engagement with rhetorical writing and thought.

E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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