Each of the fourteen deliberately short chapters follows the logic of a Montaignean essay (e.g. ‘Of Technology’; ‘Of Conversation’; ‘Of Freedom’), using a concept that was central to the education of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in order to reconsider modern pedagogical approaches. To think like Shakespeare, we need to ‘reconsider the habits that shaped his mind’. Newstok ponders the goal of education and decries ‘our fixation on test as target, as the end of education itself’, suggesting that conceiving of thinking as a ‘craft’ rather than as something utilitarian and oriented towards an external goal is a helpful way to revalue education. (The very concept of a ‘playwright’ entails the act of fashioning and crafting: a play is wrought, like iron; not written.) For example, tracing the practice of ‘bi-vocal argumentation’ from Erasmus through Shakespeare (and Hamlet in particular), Newstok treats characters conversing in a Shakespeare play as analogous to a ‘mind in motion’, and demonstrates the value of such techniques for rhetorical prowess but also for engendering sympathy and empathy.

But instead of thinking through Shakespeare – taking the dramatic situations and responses he creates and repurposing them as heuristics for navigating dilemmas of our own – Newstok’s focus is more sensibly on the education system that contributed to the development of Shakespeare’s mind: ‘A Shakespearean education gives us the chance to build these habits of mind that individuals (and cultures) need if they’re to flourish.’ Of course, our own time is markedly different from Shakespeare’s: most notably in the fact that the great thinkers of the English Renaissance thought they were rebirthing the classics. For them, ‘originality’ meant a return to origins, not a break with the past. Imitatio, the art and practice of imitation, was an essential element of Shakespeare’s education and his work. Grammar school students were famously required to translate classical literature into English and back again into Latin in order to master not simply vocabulary but rhetoric and expression. Such ‘creative imitation’ (as Newstok dubs it) is actually ‘the hallmark of art and industry’, though it has not been celebrated thus since Romanticism’s emphasis on the bard-like imagination of the individual genius.

Newstok treats characters conversing in a Shakespeare play as analogous to a ‘mind in motion’

When he does turn to originality in the modern sense, Newstok draws out the concept of inventio, and the seemingly opposite senses of ‘invention’ and ‘inventory’ (of stock ideas) that the term generates, to make a simple but effective point: ‘You cannot transform tradition (a creative ideal) without first knowing it (a conserving ideal). Making an inventory must precede making an invention.’ You need to know the rules before you can break them. Constraints can be enabling: they foster versatility and creativity. We would do well to remember this.

Particularly pertinent at present, as we turn to Zoom and other platforms to teach remotely, is Newstok’s chapter ‘Of Technology’ and the note of caution that he sounds: ‘Too often we mistake the instrument for a method’ where really we ought to regard thought itself as not just a craft but as ‘techne – the art of fitting things together, as a carpenter, or joiner’. Technology that distracts from (rather than enabling) apprehension and comprehension is a failure.

In this book, which is about Shakespeare’s education rather than his thinking, Newstok is able to provide us with innumerable examples of how other great thinkers (Erasmus, Lyly, Montaigne) grappled with the challenges of reading, learning, and creating. By focusing on their pedagogical and cogitative insights, Newstok can extend his pool of examples to thinkers that followed Shakespeare (Hemingway, Lincoln, Woolf, Arendt). Somewhat puzzlingly for a book that is so clearly designed to have wide appeal rather than an academic audience, the style can at times become an impediment to its own success. An assemblage of quotations from drastically different sources, periods, and contexts has the unhappy side effect of being distracting (‘That’s from Victorian poet William Brighty Rands’s “Topsyturvey-World”, set to music by Natalie Merchant on Leave Your Sleep (2010)’). This tissue of quotations is weaved into the syntax of Newstok’s sentences seemingly to naturalise it, yet it is marked typographically through ostentatious italics: the borrowed text is thus both subsumed by the prose of the book and overtly marked as other.

Of course, thousands of Englishmen were the recipients of the same education as Shakespeare without going on to become Shakespeare; likewise, plenty of remarkable intellects have flourished in later ages under different educational regimes. But Newstok isn’t offering to turn us all into Shakespeares or even to replicate his views or values. The eminently sensible premise here is ‘how we might reclaim some of the best aspects of his education’, and the pay-off is an emphatic appreciation of just how valuable the pedagogical insights of four centuries ago remain today.