Based simply on the title, I never would have thought I would be recording a conversation with someone who wrote a book titled How  to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.  It might sound like that book from a couple of decades book which encouraged readers to become like Leonardo—I have to admit that I never did learn to write with my left hand as a way of becoming ambidextrous and thus much more creative.

But Scott Newstok is not just writing a self-help book. It's a series of meditations on certain features of education, many of them lost, and how they might be carefully rediscovered and appropriated. At the heart of it is a really great question, which has bedeviled the minds of many: how did Shakespeare get to know so much? Newstok knows that the answer is the way in which Shakespeare was taught, in both its drudgery as well as in its pedagogical creativity. By recapturing how Shakespeare was taught, we can learn a lot about how we teach, and how we might be better teachers–and students.

Scott Newstok is Professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee; and a very nice guy, as I think you'll agree.