Education

How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education

A lively and engaging guide to vital habits of mind that can help you think more deeply, write more effectively, and learn more joyfully

Hardcover

Price:
$19.95/£16.99
ISBN:
Published:
Apr 21, 2020
2020
Pages:
200
Size:
5.5 x 8.5 in.
Illus:
20 b/w illus.
Buy This

How to Think like Shakespeare is a brilliantly fun exploration of the craft of thought—one that demonstrates what we’ve lost in education today, and how we might begin to recover it. In fourteen brief chapters that draw from Shakespeare’s world and works, and from other writers past and present, Scott Newstok distills enduring practices that can make learning more creative and pleasurable.

Challenging a host of today’s questionable notions about education, Newstok shows how mental play emerges through work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through constraint, and freedom through discipline. It was these practices, and a conversation with the past—not a fruitless obsession with assessment—that nurtured a mind like Shakespeare’s. And while few of us can hope to approach the genius of the Bard, we can all learn from the exercises that shaped him.

Written in a friendly, conversational tone and brimming with insights, How to Think like Shakespeare enacts the thrill of thinking on every page, reviving timeless—and timely—ways to stretch your mind and hone your words.

Skills for Scholars: The new tools of the trade


Awards and Recognition

  • One of the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2020
  • Finalist for the PROSE Award in Literature, Association of American Publishers
  • Shortlisted for the Parnassus Prize, Memoria College