The Art of Manliness - How to Think Like a Renaissance Man

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when we think

00:00:11.280 about the renaissance we think of a great flowering artistic creativity and intellectual

00:00:15.160 innovation we think about the beautiful paintings and sculptures of michelangelo

00:00:18.360 the astute discoveries of copernicus the timeless plays of shakespeare ironically though this great

00:00:23.740 creative flowering was spurred by men who were educated under a system that by our modern lights

00:00:27.760 can seem rather rigid and rote my guest today unpacks this seeming paradox his name is scott

00:00:32.100 newstock he's a professor of english and the author of how to think like shakespeare lessons from a

00:00:36.160 renaissance education in which he uses the bard as a jumping off point to explore broader insights

00:00:41.120 into matters of the mind we begin our conversation with the ways scott thinks our modern educational

00:00:45.440 system is lacking and how students approach learning has changed over the years we then

00:00:49.480 discuss how the renaissance model of education with its emphasis on language and verbal fluency

00:00:53.600 provides possibilities for strengthening our reading writing speaking and thinking skills

00:00:57.580 and making the refinement a lifelong habit we delve into how artists and thinkers of the renaissance

00:01:02.180 thought about originality differently than we do and how they believe that imitating and even

00:01:06.740 copying the work of others can actually help you find your own voice and we discuss how shakespeare

00:01:11.220 sonnets demonstrate the way in which constraints can counterintuitly enable creativity and we enter

00:01:15.680 conversation with how you can incorporate renaissance thinking into your day-to-day life after the show's

00:01:20.400 over check out our show notes at aom.is slash renaissance thinking scott joins me now via clearcast.io

00:01:26.660 all right scott newstock welcome to the show thanks for having me brett so you got a book called how to

00:01:41.880 think like shakespeare lessons from a renaissance education this is a really fun book you take a look

00:01:46.820 back at the education that william shakespeare likely got i mean how that education shaped his

00:01:52.880 thinking and his worldview and lessons and insights we can take from that for us modern folks and you

00:01:58.900 begin the book sort of i don't know bemoaning or sort of criticizing our education system we have

00:02:03.640 today you are an educator yourself you teach as a teacher from where you're standing what do you see

00:02:10.060 what are we lacking in our education like what do you think where our modern education system falls short

00:02:14.740 well you know i should begin with a caveat that every teacher thinks that things were better in

00:02:19.640 a previous generation when they were coming up through the school system so i'm cautious about

00:02:23.900 about too much bemoaning but i do think i do think i'm not alone in saying that a kind of pivot that

00:02:31.640 we've had in the last couple of decades at least in the united states educational system and from what i

00:02:37.140 hear from colleagues abroad i think this is a global phenomenon is is a pivot to i don't know a kind of

00:02:44.240 form of education that's fixated on testing and the kind of poor dynamics that emerge from a fixation

00:02:52.860 on text testing which leads often to teaching to the test or feeling like you're just doing this for

00:02:58.800 the sake of doing it so you can pass the test to get the to the next level rather than thinking about

00:03:04.620 this education as worthy unto itself and exciting and valuable and something that will in the long run

00:03:10.940 contribute to your human flourishing and your independence of thought and autonomy as a human

00:03:17.000 being so those are i know those are kind of grandiose and ambitious goals but they are

00:03:21.720 long-standing good goals and they're i think goals that we would all like to subscribe to as citizens in

00:03:28.420 a flourishing democracy so i i guess there are a number of things that i think have led to

00:03:33.340 that transition or that pivot in the last couple of decades to fixating more on short-term goals or short-term

00:03:41.420 ends which unfortunately lead to kind of cutting off the long-term or the more ambitious visions of

00:03:48.440 education that again i think many of us would would agree to if you articulated them in that way

00:03:53.160 so you're a college professor right that's right though i do also teach at multiple different levels

00:03:58.740 whether i'm tutoring in grade schools or giving visiting lectures in high schools or teaching in

00:04:03.660 prison so i teach a a wide range of audiences but yes my my formal position is teaching at the

00:04:09.160 post-secondary level well i'm curious what how have you seen students change on a this is gonna be hard

00:04:14.860 to measure because this is sort of subjective but a qualitative measure right as you've seen students

00:04:19.340 who've gone through this process they've they've gone through the public education system where there's

00:04:23.540 an emphasis on standardized testing and getting ap scores and you know studying for the sat where

00:04:31.020 that's been the focus have you seen like how students approach learning has that changed or

00:04:37.480 their approach towards thinking has have you seen that change in the classroom when you interact with

00:04:41.440 them i think it has i think one way i would isolate that transition would be in the ways in which

00:04:51.240 i think students are kind of primed to receive feedback now and expect feedback in what strike

00:04:58.300 me is kind of very fragmentary forms of evaluation i recall not having heard the word rubric before

00:05:05.440 i don't know maybe a decade or so ago and maybe that just dates me in a way but the the sense of breaking

00:05:11.120 down a well-written essay into kind of fragmentary components of you got this many points on this part and

00:05:18.000 this many points on this part rather than you know the whole worked or the whole didn't work for all

00:05:22.320 kinds of complicated nuanced qualitative reasons that that to me seems like a new thing and i think

00:05:28.520 i sense some student frustration in wanting something as complicated and wonderful as as writing and

00:05:35.380 articulating yourself well wanting that to be broken down into into little component bits that if you just

00:05:40.960 kind of go through the checklist and you do all these things then you have an a rather than

00:05:44.700 well there's there's lots of things you need to do to be a good writer that includes reading widely

00:05:49.860 and that includes imitating other writers and includes being in conversation with other people

00:05:54.340 and working on good models and revising and all kinds of things that are lifelong processes that

00:06:01.020 that really don't boil down to a checklist of a rubric or a series of discrete tasks so i think that's

00:06:08.380 probably the biggest transition that i've noticed in terms of the teaching of writing and

00:06:12.140 and reading is that that fragmentary sense of these are the things that you should do in order to get

00:06:17.680 the good grade rather than writing is an art and it's a wonderful craft and it's a it's a thing that

00:06:23.040 humans have struggled with for millennia i think that's one big transition that i've seen you know

00:06:27.980 another thing is just generational and technological i remember going to college 30 years ago now and

00:06:35.280 really enjoying the sense of it being a space away from the world in which i had grown up in part because

00:06:43.720 we didn't have cell phones and now that it's possible to be talking to your parents or your

00:06:49.720 friends from back home up until the minute that class starts and at the minute that class ends there's

00:06:56.300 that space away or that that kind of interval of time or that interval of space doesn't exist in the

00:07:02.140 same way in some ways college is just kind of continuous with all the rest of your life and

00:07:06.600 i think that's a loss for for everyone that's involved that there was there was something rich

00:07:11.460 about having a space for thinking that's that's away from your origins and gives you perspective on

00:07:17.700 that and distance on that origin so it sounds like for you education in its ideal form it's about

00:07:24.340 basically training individuals how to think but like think openly not in like very binary black and

00:07:30.880 white ways but i don't know how you think fluidly basically yeah yes i think fluidly is is a good

00:07:38.540 word i think you know dynamically is another good work word reflexively open-endedly those are all

00:07:45.780 all terms that i i think are are accurate to what we've what we value about good thinkers and and

00:07:52.000 models that we aspire towards that's not the same thing as telling you what to think in some ways it's

00:07:57.280 it's trying to model for you different forms of thinking so that you can stretch your mind and

00:08:01.580 stretch your own capacities to to become your best self and become the best thinker that you

00:08:06.340 possibly could be and it's like i mean this might sound sort of vague but it's sort of it's soul

00:08:11.500 enriching too like there's something about thinking well that feels good like you feel like you become

00:08:16.640 a better person uh you know so there's you talking about that sort of compartmentalized thinking

00:08:20.440 that's kind of prevalent and young students today i think there's an article here it was an npr

00:08:25.760 interview i was listening to but as this poet her work is used on standardized tests yes in texas right

00:08:33.500 yeah yeah you heard this so like yeah she was getting emails from teachers saying

00:08:36.920 what is what does your poetry mean here's the answers that the the test take the test

00:08:42.260 maker say is and she's this poet was like i would fail this test like right that's not what i meant

00:08:47.660 do you know about this tell us i mean if you know about this oh absolutely no it you're you've

00:08:51.320 pinpointed it she she wrote an op-ed about it expressing her frustration feeling like

00:08:55.800 the way that poem was being taught has very little with the experience of composing and and making and

00:09:04.560 creating and responding to that poem from her perspective so again it's some it's it's a little

00:09:10.000 bit like that checklist sense of how could you break this down into the fragmentary i don't know you

00:09:15.720 know structure diction and tone or what's the meaning behind these words rather than what she was trying

00:09:20.540 to do was to create a complex verbal experience a complex verbal artifact that is not you know

00:09:28.000 determined in a simple kind of standardized test true false or abc response format so i think again

00:09:37.260 you know you're talking about soul formation or the or the pleasure of of thinking itself that's part of

00:09:42.580 what what i love about teaching and what i love about learning and what i love about reading and

00:09:47.840 writing and engaging with other minds and that doesn't fit very well in that kind of assessment

00:09:53.580 driven format for for some good reasons and for some very bad reasons all right so if education in its

00:10:00.420 ideal form is all about learning how to think well learning the habits of thinking well why do you think

00:10:06.440 shakespeare in his world the renaissance world that he grew up in is a good model for learning how to

00:10:13.980 think maybe not the best but it's a good model right no it's not the only model but it is a it is a good

00:10:18.980 one in part i mean you can just look to the many wonderful writers that emerged out of that era the many

00:10:24.960 wonderful thinkers that emerged in other disciplines and really even founded fields of knowledge that we we

00:10:31.140 still study today calculus and physiology and global economic theory or international law or even the

00:10:37.680 philosophy of consciousness itself those all emerge from what looks to us in retrospect like a incredibly

00:10:45.000 rigid education but in some i think fascinating and paradoxical ways some of the rigidity of that

00:10:52.880 educational training system led to enormous flowering of creativity and human achievement it was it was an

00:11:00.940 educational system that was incredibly invested in the verbal arts there was an emphasis on becoming

00:11:08.980 the most fluent writer you could possibly be through all kinds of strategies across a long period of time and

00:11:16.040 that's i think it's just based on the insight that as humans we use language to articulate all kinds of

00:11:23.420 complicated things and the better you can articulate that complexity the more capable you will be

00:11:30.500 of engaging with the world as a citizen as a political agent as a member of a family as a business person

00:11:38.320 whatever it is language is our vehicle for interacting with the world and expressing complexity so why not

00:11:44.360 devote incredible resources to refining language now the language that they were working on across

00:11:50.460 europe in this era was not their indigenous languages or their native vernacular languages that was the

00:11:56.380 secondary language of latin that was the international language of european pedagogy at this time but

00:12:02.500 there's remarkable consequences from that focus on a second language as well it's it if you've ever

00:12:07.560 studied a second language or struggled with a second or third language you know it actually working on that

00:12:13.960 other language helps you refine your primary language that thinking in another language helps you become more

00:12:20.360 fluent in your own language because you're thinking through the complexity of expressing yourself

00:12:24.680 in another verbal register so one of the weird byproducts of that language system that educational

00:12:31.600 system that was fixated on fluency in latin was it created great writers in french and great writers

00:12:37.160 in italian and great writers in english because of that that amazing kind of bilingual flexibility that was

00:12:43.340 that was mandated by the system so big picture how would you describe shakespearean thought like when we look at

00:12:50.180 his work particularly his work particularly his plays how do you see his thinking manifest itself

00:12:54.560 sure clearly it's immensely invested in the complexity of dialogue and the educational system encouraged that in all

00:13:03.000 kinds of remarkable ways and but it plays out on stage with a consistent investment in the dynamics of

00:13:10.360 speaking characters speaking beings interacting with each other at at a high level of verbal facility

00:13:18.240 that that that gives us pleasure to read and it gives us pleasure to witness as an audience because

00:13:24.200 you're watching amazingly articulate human beings interacting with each other and and pressing each

00:13:30.360 other to refine their thought so that i think that dialogic that that's just a that's just a raw

00:13:36.920 commitment of drama but it's something that's clearly manifested through shakespeare's mind is that the

00:13:42.400 commitment to thinking through things through multiple perspectives i think it's also in that sense

00:13:47.360 it's anti-doctrinal it's not it's not committed to making an argument for a single point you know we

00:13:54.280 don't have manifestos from shakespeare or political treatises or theological treatises we have plays and we

00:14:00.760 have poems which are multifaceted and they're giving voice to an kind of an entire chorus of characters

00:14:07.100 coming at a problem or coming at a quandary from multiple perspectives i think that that seems to me

00:14:13.800 shakespearean at its heart and then i think another characteristic of shakespearean thinking is

00:14:19.040 that commitment to finding the right words and you see this even in soliloquies where a character will

00:14:26.560 kind of ponder the best way to say the thing that they want to say and they'll tease out different

00:14:34.600 forms of saying that thing or they'll they'll lean into a single word so we have great examples of

00:14:39.880 say a character like falstaff pondering the intonations of the word honor what's honor what

00:14:45.440 do we really mean when we say honor what are the all the kinds of contexts we use when we use that

00:14:50.940 word honor or a character like edmund and king lear talking about the word bastardy what do we mean when

00:14:56.200 we say bastard what's really at stake in that word what are the social contexts of that word why do we

00:15:01.540 actually use that word what's the what are the legal ramifications of that word or even you know some of

00:15:07.240 my favorite instances of this kind of tinkering with language occur when a character says something

00:15:12.540 like they say a word and then they revise the phrasing of that word so richard ii has a meditation

00:15:19.220 on death where he says we should think of a little grave and then he kind of pauses and says a little

00:15:24.660 little grave or when prospero in the tempest talks about a vision kind of moving off into air and then

00:15:33.380 he stops himself and says into thin air so you see that the mind that's always tinkering with

00:15:39.100 refining words to say it in just the right way that that seems to me shakespearean thinking at heart

00:15:45.480 in addition to the anti-doctrinal and the dialogic commitment that is at the heart of the plays

00:15:50.780 and another aspect of shakespearean thought that at least i have fun with when i'm reading it is like

00:15:56.620 it is fun to read because he's often using puns and double entendros like absolutely and you have to

00:16:02.080 like okay he says that but like he didn't mean that like he meant something else and you have to

00:16:05.920 really think about it and it makes that makes reading it and listening to his plays a lot of fun

00:16:10.780 oh it's enormous fun i i absolutely agree i mean there's the sense of the malleability of language

00:16:16.200 and isn't it wonderful that the same word can mean three different things or you can hear that word

00:16:21.260 one way and i'd mistake the word in a different direction and then suddenly we have a debate between

00:16:26.680 us or we have some dissent between the two of us and there's even a there's even some studies that

00:16:32.600 have been done with kind of the cognitive neuroscience where they will you will be read

00:16:37.200 a passage from shakespeare where there is some of that punning going on or that slippage in meaning

00:16:41.940 between words and different areas of the brain seem to light up in response to that there's a kind of

00:16:47.220 pleasure circuit that goes off by thinking that oh we normally say this in this way but if you just steer

00:16:54.060 it a little bit into a different direction or lean into the intonation of that word you realize

00:16:58.640 wow it actually it explodes in a different direction as well so there's there's enormous

00:17:02.860 pleasure in that it's a that's not unique to shakespeare of course but it's certainly at his

00:17:07.180 core that he has a deep pleasure in the flexibility of language so an aspect of shakespearean thought

00:17:13.000 in that sort of renaissance worldview that you bring up and bring delight to readers is that for them

00:17:18.920 thinking and writing could be seen as a craft now for us we often think when we hear the word craftsman

00:17:25.860 or craft we think of technical mechanical things like a carpenter or a mechanic but for shakespeare like

00:17:33.200 he's he thought of his like work with words like he thinking was actually making how do you see that

00:17:40.580 show up in his work in his thinking well i mean in some ways there's just the practical sense that the

00:17:46.980 the the the theater in which he worked was enormously collaborative and it involved a number of

00:17:55.200 people working together on creating elaborate dramatical works that sold well to those audiences

00:18:03.860 at that moment so there's there's that sense of craft as a as a collective endeavor that it's it's

00:18:10.120 not something that you you just do alone but you're you're part of a longer term community of

00:18:16.420 previous creators and your contemporary creators and the audience with which you're trying to

00:18:22.380 engage that seems to me to be at the heart of craft whether it's woodworking or whether it's word

00:18:29.420 working that you are you are not alone in making this thing and you're you're part of a kind of continuity

00:18:35.640 of practitioners who have have worked on this thing so again that's true on the the practical level of

00:18:40.700 how the theater worked in his era and it's also true in the kind of more abstract sense of being

00:18:46.900 in conversation with previous makers and previous creators so we have a number of writers in this era

00:18:52.940 who are very explicit about saying i feel like writing is a version of entering a conversation with

00:19:00.820 past writers who i'm reading and i'm responding to them and they're responding to me so the classic

00:19:07.180 example of this is niccolo machiavelli describes going into his study at the end of the day putting on his

00:19:14.300 special study robe and feeling like he is in conversation with generations of hundreds of years of other

00:19:21.060 thinkers who preceded him and that sense of that craft of thought is is like an ongoing conversation

00:19:27.140 you're not the first person to have made a wooden bucket and you're not the first person to have made a

00:19:33.480 sentence and you can learn things from other people who made wooden objects before you and you can learn

00:19:38.900 things from other people who made sentences before you and ultimately you can refine your work or refine

00:19:44.540 your craft and make a sentence that's suitable for you at this particular moment that no one else has made

00:19:50.460 before in that way even though it's drawing upon all that heritage and all that tradition of previous

00:19:55.020 writers just like a woodworker draws upon the previous heritage but also makes something new for this moment with

00:20:01.440 this set of tools no matthew crawford makes that point he's that yes yeah in his book the world beyond your head

00:20:08.320 that craftsmanship to be an original and we can talk about sort of shakespearean originality in a bit but

00:20:14.860 creativity innovation requires you to be embedded in a tradition and he talks about this with the this in his book

00:20:22.460 world beyond its head with organ makers there's like these people who make organs and renovate organs

00:20:27.340 and they're very deeply embedded in how people did it hundreds of years ago but at the same time

00:20:33.540 they're able to make innovations but those innovations mean something because they are deeply

00:20:38.400 embedded in that tradition of organ making absolutely and i i love that crawford book and it and you're right

00:20:44.460 to pinpoint that a lot of the language i'm using about craft derives from his meditations on on the same

00:20:50.000 and that language of embeddedness is perfect it's the sense of it's i'm not the first person to have made

00:20:55.360 this thing i'm not making anything from scratch but that doesn't mean that i i lack creativity or i lack

00:21:01.360 innovation and i think that's one of the the kind of sets of binaries that i'm trying to undo with

00:21:07.540 the book is to point out that being original is not the opposite of working within a tradition and

00:21:16.300 conversely benefiting from a tradition or being embedded within a tradition does not stifle your

00:21:22.380 creativity or originality it in fact it enables it in a really wonderful way there's there's a

00:21:27.380 continuity there that's part of that conversation through time rather than thinking of those things

00:21:33.020 as being in opposition to one another so i think that that sense of embeddedness is a perfect word

00:21:37.720 to describe what's going on when you are a writer or a thinker or a reader that those things are not

00:21:42.420 in opposition to one another but they're mutually productive they're mutually enriching we're gonna take a

00:21:46.860 quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show so when you're talking to

00:21:53.320 your students about you know trying to subtly show them that they can be a craftsman with their work how

00:21:59.260 how do you do that like what does that look like how do you how can writers and thinkers take a more

00:22:03.580 craftsman-like approach to their writing and thinking and reading there's one you know basic way that i do

00:22:09.700 it which is we do imitation in in my classes old old school imitation where i ask students to

00:22:15.240 imitate the sound of this particular writer or imitate the form of this particular writer

00:22:20.080 that's a deeply renaissance practice at heart it's it's based on the premise that when you are able

00:22:26.680 to emulate interesting challenging models it helps you stretch your own forms of creativity rather than

00:22:34.600 thinking that you create something from nothing you're actually inspired in part by engaging with

00:22:39.520 another mind who struggled with this same task before you so the great example of this from the

00:22:46.020 american tradition is benjamin franklin who had to leave school at an early age because his brother

00:22:51.200 was making him work for him and so franklin felt frustrated by his own lack of eloquence his own

00:22:56.700 lack of capacity in writing and one of the things that he did to improve his facility in writing was to

00:23:02.260 take copies of the spectator in 18th century english periodical that had wonderful essays that were

00:23:09.060 published on a on a weekly monthly basis and to read an essay that he admired put the essay aside

00:23:15.460 and then try to reconstruct the moves of that of that essay in some ways it's almost this is

00:23:20.860 crawford-like as well one of the things that you're doing is you're trying to get under the hood of the

00:23:25.220 machine and figure out how this thing works to kind of get into the inside workings of this verbal

00:23:30.780 artifact or this creation see how it moves see how it functions see see what's successful what's not

00:23:37.340 successful and then ultimately internalize those practices as you're as you're emulating them in

00:23:43.320 order to become a more fluent writer and a more compelling thinker yourself so we do that on a

00:23:48.460 on a basic level in terms of imitating models but we also do it on the the larger level of trying to

00:23:53.540 think our way into you know what's going on here in this thing that we're reading why is why would a

00:23:59.720 writer express this in this way are there other ways that they could have expressed this and with

00:24:04.240 shakespeare we're lucky because about half of the plays we have both cordo versions of the plays

00:24:10.200 which are the paperbacks that would have been published during his lifetime and the hardcover

00:24:15.220 collected work that was published after he died so we can often compare a single line or a single

00:24:20.560 phrase or speech across two different versions and think about the dynamics of why is this one

00:24:26.180 different than this one this this phrase is just slightly different but it changes our reading of

00:24:30.340 the entire speech because of that that one variable word so we i try to kind of stage the writers that

00:24:36.600 we read as writers in process or writers that are themselves struggling with articulating what they

00:24:42.040 want to do and then i hope that that's a a model for the students themselves as they're thinking their

00:24:47.260 way into how do i articulate myself as best as i can i want to mind this vein here about of originality

00:24:54.460 and in using tradition to become original because we think of shakespeare as an original there's like

00:25:00.400 no one like him before and there's no one like him after but as you point out in the book if you look

00:25:05.040 at his work you discovered that he copied and sometimes you know even a lot of thinker writers

00:25:10.760 did this they just out like just plagiarized stuff but for them that that doesn't jive with our modern

00:25:16.480 idea of originality originality is like you just come up with something completely new

00:25:19.660 but for the renaissance thinker like shakespeare like original that's not what originality was

00:25:25.720 so what walk us through like our difference of how we think of originality and how shakespeare and his

00:25:32.220 thinkers made a thought of originality and how that they're like that renaissance shakespearean

00:25:37.020 idea of originality can actually help you become more original there's a lot going on there it sounds

00:25:42.900 like a kind of looping paradox but i think if you if you dig your way into it we have we have many

00:25:47.360 examples of of creative human beings across all kinds of endeavors who became as accomplished as

00:25:56.860 they were not by starting from scratch but rather by imitating or emulating figures whom they admired so

00:26:04.940 i think one of the easiest ways for us to get our head around this is to think about the physical

00:26:09.640 arts so whether that's playing a musical instrument or performing high-level dance or even even doing

00:26:16.860 sport i think we're very quick to acknowledge that in those physical endeavors imitation at early as

00:26:24.980 well as late levels of performance is is immensely productive so think about a kid imitating a swing of

00:26:34.020 their favorite baseball player and doing that over and over again until some of those moves become

00:26:41.260 internalized as part of their own repertory of moves that they can make when they ultimately become a

00:26:48.080 professional player whatever whatever the sport or whatever the bodily function it's partly because

00:26:53.760 you're looking up to someone who does this thing really well that you are able to do that thing well

00:26:58.560 eventually by imitating them and that that sense that we have of creativity is emerging from

00:27:05.300 i think a kind of naive version of originality comes about in the mid 1700s early 1800s where you

00:27:13.180 are yearning for saying something that's never been said before but it's a it's a kind of an odd thing

00:27:18.440 because it contradicts again i think what most of us experience as how originality actually works that

00:27:24.820 that there's an immense debt to the past and no one really ever escapes it as ralph waldo emerson says

00:27:31.200 even the originals are not original that there's an imitation model and suggestion to the archangels if we if we

00:27:37.340 know their history so on a practical level how does this work it's it's thinking of yourself again in embedded

00:27:44.000 or in continuity with a series of previous creators within your field but that doesn't mean that you are

00:27:52.720 making up something from scratch the the original part is the way you are reconfiguring the past for the present

00:27:58.020 moment so there's a great figure a great image that the 16th century writer contemporary of shakespeare

00:28:05.560 michelle de montaigne brings up which is actually a very old classical image of making something is like

00:28:11.540 the way a bee goes from flower to flower it picks up the pollen and the nectar and brings it back to the

00:28:18.800 hive and make something new which is the honey and montaigne he's going back to a number of roman and greek

00:28:24.900 authors which is kind of a joke itself because he himself is being like the bee in terms of picking

00:28:29.820 up this image of the bee but montaigne is emphasizing that it's the it's the making of the honey that's

00:28:35.360 the new thing that's the original thing it's the blending of of your inspiration and your sources and

00:28:40.460 your contemporary world that is the new thing but the new thing is not the the nectar and the pollen

00:28:46.180 itself the new thing is the recombination that's in a way you've digested this thing or it's gone

00:28:51.260 through your guts and you've made it your own that's that's the original thing all right so

00:28:55.220 the way you do this read widely if you're a writer do some of the exercises you talked about earlier

00:29:00.560 you know say you're going to write this from perspective of shakespeare like how shakespeare

00:29:04.980 would write this essay i mean you could even do and you talk about this in the book we've written

00:29:08.860 about this on our website copy work where you just like you basically just like hunter s thompson did

00:29:14.820 this like he wrote the great gatsby typed it out because he just wanted to know what it felt like

00:29:19.140 yeah to write a great novel and like jack london did this with uh stevenson i mean it's a tradition

00:29:25.440 of you just you just copy it and then you you start to start internalizing those habits but as you said

00:29:30.280 somewhere along the line of that alchemy you start adding in your own little flair to it yeah i mean

00:29:35.860 stevenson recommends it as well either there we have a number of examples of creators who say

00:29:41.420 you know judd apatow did that early as well he would just transcribe saturday night live episodes just

00:29:47.320 trying to get the feeling of the timing of the of the skits and the sense is that you you're kind

00:29:52.760 of putting yourself in the subject position of another creator and trying to think through as you

00:29:58.380 said with the hunter s thompson you know what does it feel like to write like that and it doesn't mean

00:30:02.100 that you that you have to write like that but it it is helpful it is productive to go through that

00:30:07.300 that process of doing something that's uncomfortable for you again to use the the bodily analogy i ran

00:30:14.580 track in college and i remember our coach having us do all kinds of odd running exercises for warm-up

00:30:20.600 where we would we would run backwards and we would run kind of sideways scissor steps and we would skip

00:30:26.380 and kick our legs in all kinds of odd ways and the point wasn't that we would ever do that in a race

00:30:31.560 but the point was we were kind of stretching ourselves in all kinds of other directions so that way

00:30:35.940 when we did come back to our natural gait or our native kind of bodily motion that we would be better

00:30:43.120 at it for having stretched ourselves in all those other other directions so yeah i do i will encourage

00:30:48.560 students to say transcribe this poem but write it out as if you are writing it yourself for the first

00:30:54.420 time and ask ask yourself why would i say from fairest creatures we desire increase that's a little

00:31:00.520 weird i could have said we desire increase from fairest creatures so why would i invert the structure

00:31:05.180 of that sentence and why do we why do we like beautiful creatures to reproduce and then the next line

00:31:11.520 starts to answer that question that you posed in the first line so again seeing seeing writing as a

00:31:16.940 form of thinking or as a form of human expression rather than i don't know frankly seeing it as

00:31:21.900 something that you just kind of brutally extract meaning from for the multiple choice question that

00:31:26.580 you have to answer for the quiz so i mean thinking requires you talked about this earlier sort of

00:31:31.980 shakespeare's education so oftentimes wrote exercises and they they seem boring and mind-numbing

00:31:38.360 and they just but there's there's a trick there there's something to it it'll help you actually

00:31:43.000 internalize this stuff yeah i mean here's one of the wrote things that was recommended early in the

00:31:48.740 16th century by erasmus and it was adopted by educators across europe and it's still used by artists

00:31:54.120 to this day what something as wrote as transcribing phrases and quotations that you hear from singers

00:32:03.380 and thinkers and politicians and writers whom you admire just making a notebook of that that sounds

00:32:09.340 really basic that sounds even almost remedial but we know that in many cases we have a fantastic

00:32:16.080 examples of writers who kind of created that own personal archive of great phrasing and great thoughts

00:32:22.080 and great thinkers whom they admired and then that at some point that became a kind of a trove for

00:32:28.820 their own creation when they were later making a speech or later drafting a letter or producing an

00:32:36.040 essay or creating a new manifesto that they had absorbed those words and thoughts of others that

00:32:41.560 helped them become their best most articulate selves so that is wrote in the sense of you know it doesn't

00:32:47.680 sound like a form of creativity if i tell you to sit down and write other people's words down

00:32:51.620 but in the long run it does end up helping you articulate yourself in the best possible way so

00:32:57.600 that's that's one example of that wrote process the imitation that we were talking about earlier

00:33:01.640 fits along those lines the ben franklin experience of trying to reconstruct what someone else has said

00:33:09.200 using their words you're you're trying to think your way into a different voice and again the

00:33:14.160 pedagogy in this period would have encouraged that you know a little eight-year-old boy from

00:33:18.500 stratford would have been asked to imagine himself as a widow from the trojan war now that's that's

00:33:26.880 distant in time that's different distance in in gender that's distant in nation and all kinds of

00:33:32.760 circumstances but that's an that's an amazing exercise to kind of stretch yourself into a different

00:33:37.840 different subject position and i have students who've done this with kind of writing back to a

00:33:42.460 shakespearean character or writing in the voice of a of a new character that they've added to the play

00:33:47.260 that they've they've kind of inserted themselves into the dialogue there and it's it's fun and it's

00:33:52.020 productive and it's it's a it's a great way to stretch your mind all right so extra wrote exercises

00:33:56.780 can be fun you can make them fun i think so i think i think i think i think they can be i think that if

00:34:02.460 you go into them in the spirit of this is part of the creative process and rather than thinking of

00:34:07.320 this this is something that i have to do but actually this this is one of the things that led to

00:34:11.320 this great thing that i'm reading in the first place and it could lead to me in all kinds of

00:34:15.220 unexpected directions so you mentioned earlier one sort of way of shakespearean thinking you see

00:34:20.880 show up in his plays is this dialogue conversation how do you think conversation can help with an

00:34:28.740 education or help us learn well it's you know there's a great phrase from w.h. Auden where he

00:34:34.600 talks about reading as breaking bread with the dead or there's a writer who was contemporaneous to

00:34:39.960 shakespeare who called reading a kind of conversation with the deceased where you you listen to the

00:34:45.120 dead with your eyes i think it's it's remarkable that we have that capacity to engage with previous

00:34:52.380 generations who have entirely different life experiences from us in in all kinds of unimaginable

00:34:57.620 ways and yet they still speak to us across time and we have these we have a great example of this in

00:35:04.240 james baldwin discussing reading 19th century russian novelists and thinking that you know what do they

00:35:10.040 have to say to me but in fact wow they they have an amazing way to articulate human suffering and

00:35:15.820 responses to human suffering that are not dissimilar to my own frustrated attempts to articulate human

00:35:21.540 suffering and responses to human suffering so i think the more you can imagine i can imagine it's

00:35:27.400 even the wrong word the more you can recognize that reading is a form of conversation and and writing is a

00:35:33.940 form of conversation the more you feel like you're an active participant in an ongoing larger conversation

00:35:39.900 of intellectual history rather than again i think one of the frustrations i feel with students coming

00:35:45.880 into college from their high school experiences is that i don't think they feel empowered in that way

00:35:51.980 that they are in conversation with a larger intellectual tradition that it seems like again it's more that i need to

00:35:58.900 read this thing in order to pass this quiz or to pass this exam but the writing itself that they're

00:36:04.460 reading seems like it's so abstracted from why any human being would have written it in the first place

00:36:09.500 it like going back to your texas poet that poet did not write that poem to be on that exam she wrote

00:36:15.800 it for all kinds of complicated reasons that she might not even understand herself fully but but the task was

00:36:23.160 not to create an object that would be kind of dissected in this way the task was to create an object that

00:36:28.100 that was legible to other human beings in different spaces and in different moments in time so the

00:36:34.740 pedagogy in this period really emphasized that sense of conversation by placing the students in

00:36:40.580 conversation with writers from all kinds of other eras and all kinds of other traditions and i think

00:36:47.480 that's a that's just a healthy thing for all for all human beings to do as much as possible

00:36:51.800 and i think this idea that students you feel like students don't feel empowered to take part in

00:36:57.280 conversation contributes to this dynamic i think everyone's experience they've been to college or

00:37:01.660 in high school or the teacher is trying to get a discussion going and they say the teacher throws

00:37:06.520 out a question and no one says anything because i maybe they think well there's there's a right answer

00:37:12.960 i don't know what the right answer is so i'm not going to say anything so i'll look stupid but i'm sure

00:37:18.100 you genuinely you throw a question out there because you're you're trying to get a conversation going

00:37:21.680 and see where it goes yeah i think those the best questions there are live questions there you know

00:37:27.480 i don't really know why this word works this way in this particular speech and i i'm eager to hear

00:37:33.340 what they have to say and every class this is a cliche but every class that i have i learn something new

00:37:39.140 i see something that i had not seen before i hear something that i had not not heard before and that's

00:37:43.540 one of the many many pleasures of teaching and i think you're right it's if it feels to the student

00:37:48.880 that the question is thrown out there for you know what color am i thinking of or what number do i

00:37:54.520 have in my head that's that's not a fun question to to answer and it doesn't feel empowering but but

00:38:00.480 the more you can stage education and this this form of reading as as an ongoing conversation the more i

00:38:05.740 think you enable everybody to feel like they're participating in that there's a there's a great

00:38:10.200 metaphor for conversation that kenneth burke one of my intellectual heroes comes up with which is that

00:38:15.860 intellectual history is like a parlor conversation you you arrive late the conversation's been going

00:38:22.360 on before you arrived you don't really know what's going on when you first walk into the room

00:38:27.100 people are chatting and but eventually you kind of figure out what's at stake in the

00:38:31.420 argument and ultimately you start to make your own claims and someone comes to your defense and

00:38:37.060 someone else knocks you down and you kind of leave in a heated moment and the conversation still goes on

00:38:42.620 after your departure you're not the first person to have had that conversation and you're not the

00:38:47.500 last person to have had that conversation in some ways that's very much like the model of the

00:38:52.140 socratic platonic dialogues where they almost always start in the middle of a conversation someone

00:38:57.080 walks in and says hey what are you talking about and like oh well this guy here thinks he knows what

00:39:01.000 justice is well what do you mean about justice well i think justice means this on the other hand he

00:39:04.600 thinks this and it gets heated and then it ends inconclusively and that that might be frustrating if

00:39:10.020 you're used to feeling like you want to be told the answers but if you want to engage in intellectual

00:39:14.960 exchange that really is the model of how it works yeah i like when things in inconclusively because

00:39:20.760 because then you can pick it up later on like i have i've had i love those conversations where you

00:39:24.760 have your with your friends where it just goes around in circles and then you kind of feel like

00:39:29.480 you're getting somewhere with it but then you don't and then you're like well we'll pick this up next

00:39:33.460 time we convene together absolutely absolutely and a good a good class feels like that too

00:39:37.760 yeah i i i would say that's right i the college classes that i enjoyed were like that you looked

00:39:42.720 forward to going to to class because then you could talk about the stuff you were chewing on from

00:39:46.960 the last class so besides writing plays something else shakespeare is famous for i think gets

00:39:53.780 overlooked oftentimes is that he wrote poems he wrote sonnets he made the sonnet a thing for those

00:39:59.120 who aren't familiar with sonnets what makes a sonnet a sonnet and then um how do you think a sonnet

00:40:04.880 can spur creativity sure so a sonnet initially means something like a little sound or a little

00:40:13.700 song but eventually the form becomes stabilized as a 14 line unit of poetry so even that once i say that

00:40:21.780 i have to start qualifying that because there are 15 line sonnets and there are 12 line sonnets and

00:40:26.020 there are 28 line sonnets and seven line sonnets so already in some ways the very abstract notion of the

00:40:31.540 form is is playing with the boundaries of of attending to the form or ignoring the form or

00:40:36.400 stretching the form or rebelling against the form but the form is a 14 line poem and in some ways

00:40:42.820 that's about as arbitrary as you could get i could i could say it's a you should write a 27 line poem or

00:40:48.640 you should write a five line poem but it settles into this 14 line unit and then it's invented in

00:40:55.500 italy refined in italy and across europe and then translated into british writing in the 16th century

00:41:02.640 so by the time shakespeare's writing sonnets he is writing in a very old form in fact there had been

00:41:09.320 a kind of fad for sonnets about a decade before he wrote sonnets and they were out of date by the time

00:41:15.580 that he was composing his sonnet sequence so in in some ways this invites all of these larger

00:41:21.660 conversations about what is literary form what are literary constraints how are constraints enabling

00:41:28.360 how do you revive a tired form a tired genre you know this is like the equivalent of in cinema history

00:41:36.140 once once film noir kind of has its day in the 1940s and 50s and then it gets exhausted how do you revive

00:41:42.980 film noir in the 70s 80s and up until this day so you know in shakespeare's case what's the form that

00:41:50.200 he's inherited he's inherited this 14 line form the poems were often about a man idealizing a

00:41:57.000 an unattainable woman a female beloved object how does he revive that form one of the ways he revives

00:42:04.240 it is by not having the sonnets the first 126 sonnets that he writes addressed to a female they're

00:42:10.720 addressed to a younger male friend who he's encouraging to get married that's already he's he's kind of taking

00:42:18.040 the the form in a new direction that's not something that many other writers had done

00:42:22.780 before him so this you feel like the more you read any writer and you realize who they're responding

00:42:28.980 to the more you see their innovation in inheriting a form and then making it original or making it new

00:42:35.320 for their moment or renewing it for their particular moment and then another aspect of the sonnet is that

00:42:41.080 there's a constraint to it you know as you said there's caveats there's like seven line sonnets five line

00:42:45.800 sonnets but there's also but like ideally you there's a number of lines you're you're limited to

00:42:50.460 and you people might see that well that's just not gonna that constraint is going to not allow me to be

00:42:56.240 creative but as you make the case it can actually make you more creative because you have to work

00:43:01.140 within those constraints think about the way that sports have constraints that we say this game should

00:43:07.780 last for 60 minutes or this game should last for nine innings and that's artificial and it's arbitrary

00:43:15.680 and maybe it was invented in the 19th century but we still do it today because that's the constraint

00:43:21.460 how well can you play within nine innings or within 60 minutes or if you think about those cooking shows

00:43:27.020 where you're given a set of five ingredients and you're given a time limit of course you could make

00:43:32.220 something different if you had different ingredients or if you had a different time limit but the

00:43:35.500 the idea is that how well can you play within the constraints that we have given you what marvelous

00:43:40.640 dishes can you create given that i say these are your five ingredients these are your tools you can

00:43:46.260 use and this is your team go so the sonnet is kind of like that what what can you do in 14 lines well you

00:43:52.100 can do anything really and what can you do within a very tight kind of rhyme scheme it really enables all

00:43:59.040 kinds of ingenuity in terms of working within those forms in order to make new things that were

00:44:05.000 unexpected before in some ways the formlessness if i said write a poem of any length that you want

00:44:10.600 about any topic that you want in some ways that's that's the paralyzing thing it's almost more helpful

00:44:15.060 if i say write a 14 line poem or if you know on a more practical level if i told my students write a

00:44:20.700 paper about any topic any length i don't care that that would be stultifying but if i say i want you to

00:44:27.060 write the best paper you can that's only 300 words long about this one word that's constraining but

00:44:33.540 all kinds of wonderful things emerge from that constraint and yeah i think people seen that how

00:44:38.440 constraints can help in other facets of life besides thinking reading writing like in businesses

00:44:44.080 typically businesses who have to bootstrap and figure out how can i get this thing going with

00:44:48.360 my limited budget they come with some creative solutions compared to like the vc that has millions

00:44:53.400 of dollars so much money they just got they got to blow it on ping pong tables and

00:44:58.080 yeah they end up burning burning through it i mean this is not to this is not to glorify

00:45:02.840 you know impoverished conditions but it is it is the case that all kinds of ingenuity emerges from

00:45:09.080 working creatively within limited constraints and and with limited resources and we have we have

00:45:16.160 numerous examples of people doing amazing things with with limited resources that are kind of as you

00:45:21.560 said the opposite of burning through millions of dollars because in some ways you don't have a

00:45:25.680 constraint that that would have been more productive for you yeah i mean going back to

00:45:29.120 i think about writers who did this like when they first started like stephen king talks about

00:45:33.240 when he was first starting to write it was just like he was in his cramped kitchen

00:45:36.300 uh his wife's in the laundry room yeah the laundry room and he was writing this stuff

00:45:40.960 and i feel like and he's writing great stuff i feel like a lot of people like i'm gonna be a

00:45:45.020 writer i gotta get a writing cabin and i gotta have my pens and paper and lots of time

00:45:52.220 and stephen king would say like no that's ridiculous if you're gonna write just write

00:45:56.000 you gotta work with what you got yeah we have beautiful examples of you know emily dickinson

00:46:00.040 writing on the back of an envelope and a and little scraps of paper here and there and

00:46:05.400 and in some ways those small units of paper constrained her but they also liberated her in other

00:46:12.460 in other really remarkable ways all right so this is uh we've had like a wide ranging i'd say

00:46:17.020 shakespearean conversation we've talked about tradition craftsmanship we've talked about

00:46:22.220 conversation we've talked about constraints i'm curious i mean this your college professor

00:46:28.320 the people you work with are they're young people in college trying you're trying to

00:46:32.100 shape those minds what about people who you know college they're done with college they're

00:46:36.520 in a career but they still they miss that life of the mind and they want to kind of get a taste

00:46:43.320 of that college experience again where you're speaking you're talking to friends two o'clock

00:46:48.680 in the morning about some platonic dialogue or piece of literature how can like those people

00:46:55.060 have you know start thinking shakespearean in their day-to-day life well i mean you know that

00:47:01.220 there there many people have their own ongoing reading groups there there are also continuing

00:47:06.100 education courses at many colleges and many community colleges across the country i mean it

00:47:11.220 basically i would say work backwards from thinking about the kinds of environments that you

00:47:16.780 either have enjoyed or or are yearning for and feel like you're lacking in your life and then find

00:47:22.160 ways to construct those communities so what what does that look like like-minded other people who

00:47:28.400 are eager to read things along with others and be in conversation about them so again that could

00:47:34.020 that's can be as informal as a reading group or something that's organized online to something that's

00:47:39.520 more formally structured through a continuing education course at a local university but i think the

00:47:45.340 the idea is you know what what are the conditions that would allow those kinds of conversations to

00:47:50.080 flourish or those kinds of conversations to take place in some ways they're really basic like you

00:47:55.500 need time and you need space and you need a kind of forum or a platform that will allow those

00:48:01.860 conversations the time and space to unfold sometimes it means having someone else that has done the

00:48:09.340 reading before and can help spur that conversation but sometimes it's just peer-to-peer and it's lateral and it

00:48:14.620 doesn't need a kind of larger organizing principle or or a teacher figure to come in there but one

00:48:21.040 thing i do recommend really is you know start with something that you love or a figure or a writer whom

00:48:26.820 you already admire and kind of work your way back into their own intellectual formation that could be a

00:48:32.640 musician that could be a painter that could be a poet that could be a novelist but think through i think

00:48:38.640 that's just incredibly enriching to try to work your way into how did how did george elliott become such a

00:48:43.820 great writer who who were the contemporaries that she was engaging with who was she in conversation

00:48:49.620 with who was she reading we actually have her notebooks and her commonplace books she called

00:48:54.100 them her her minds for her work like she was mining this material for for later refinement and in a way

00:49:01.220 you know a favorite thinker or artist or figure can become a kind of syllabus for you it can become

00:49:06.460 an inspired nodal point for you to move in other directions and think about their influences as well as the

00:49:13.440 people who succeeded them who have responded to george elliott or emily dickinson or james baldwin

00:49:19.120 or whomever you're you're picking up on but i think that's a good way to to kind of structure a

00:49:23.800 reading or a series of conversations is start with something that you love and then work back to their

00:49:28.300 roots and then think about their kind of branches that that emerge out of them no that's a fun one we

00:49:32.920 we do a series on the site called the libraries of famous men where we find people so we've done

00:49:37.660 like bruce lee we've done jack london i think it's interesting because like i think oftentimes when people

00:49:42.120 this is i don't know what this quote that i heard from somewhere i can't remember where it was

00:49:45.800 but it was like don't read your your mentor like don't read what don't read your mentor's books read

00:49:52.500 what your mentors read or something like that it's the same idea like you can really figure out the

00:49:58.100 people you admire by reading what they read and form their mind i love it and it's just a it's an

00:50:04.260 incredibly enriching experience it doesn't take away from from those mentors or those people whom you

00:50:09.540 admire it it makes them all the more fascinating and and it makes their achievement all the more

00:50:14.220 intriguing because they weren't making up something from nothing they were synthesizing an amazing

00:50:18.460 series of books and figures and inspirations that preceded them and they and they made them fit for

00:50:24.960 their moment they they translated them or they they turned them into the honey that they needed to have

00:50:29.200 for their particular moment in time their task at that in their lives well scott this has been a great

00:50:34.540 conversation is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work

00:50:37.500 sure i i teach at rhodes college in memphis so i'm on the rhodes college website there i also

00:50:44.160 am the director of the pierce shakespeare endowment at rhodes and we do a lot of free public programming

00:50:49.500 some of which is has been online or or been broadcast online so that's available to everyone

00:50:55.040 and then i also have a website scott newstock.com that describes my books fantastic well scott

00:51:00.400 newstock thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank you brett this is a real pleasure

00:51:03.920 my guest today was scott newstock he's the author of the book how to think like shakespeare it's

00:51:08.660 available on amazon.com you can find out more information about his work at his website scott

00:51:12.580 newstock.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash renaissance thinking where you find

00:51:17.260 links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic

00:51:19.580 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at

00:51:30.460 art of manliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written

00:51:34.260 over the years about pretty much anything you can think of and if you'd like to enjoy ad-free

00:51:37.360 episodes of the aom podcast you can do so on stitcher premium head over to stitcher premium.com

00:51:41.320 sign up use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial once you're signed up download the

00:51:45.240 stitcher app on android or ios and you start enjoying ad-free episodes of the aom podcast and

00:51:49.440 if you haven't done so already i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us your view on apple

00:51:52.200 podcast or stitcher it helps out a lot and if you've done that already thank you please consider

00:51:56.040 sharing the show with a friend or family member you think we get something out of it

00:51:59.220 as always thank you for the continued support until next time it's brett mckay

00:52:02.520 reminding you not only list aom podcast but put what you've heard into action

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

How to Think Like a Renaissance Man

Episode Stats

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript