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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Seven Short Poems by Lucian Staiano-Daniels.
2. Reflections on Anonymity 2 by W.D. Jackson.
3. On Learning a Poet I Admire Often Carries a Pocket Knife by David Greenspan.
4. Hautes Études and Mudra by Michael Londra.
5. Rhyme as Rhythm by Adam Piette.
6. Windows or Mirrors… by Charles Martin.
7. Three Texts by Rupert M. Loydell.
8. Two Poems by Moriana Delgado.
9. Mariangela by Ian Seed.
10. Six Prose Poems by Pietro De Marchi, translated by Peter Robinson.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections,Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but you can start here with ITEMS PUBLISHED DURING OUR 2023 HIATUS (July-August 2023):
Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | You Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying
· Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
DEPARTMENTS
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Bard-think.
A Fortnightly Review.
How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education
by Scott Newstok
Princeton University Press 2020 (paperback 2021) | pp xv + 185 | $14.95 £8.95
By ANTHONY O’HEAR.
Newstock ‘advocates face-to-face classroom teaching, a type of teaching which is alive to every moment and every individual in the classroom, as things happen…’
IN PLATO’S PHAEDRUS (274c-275c) Socrates tells the tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, who comes to Thamus, the king of Egypt, boasting of what he has done, that it will provide a ‘recipe for memory and wisdom’. But Thamus is not impressed: your invention, he says, ‘will implant forgetfulness in (men’s) souls… they will call things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks… they will be filled not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, and they will be a burden to their fellows.’
A lovely story, containing much truth. But how do we know about it? Socrates himself wrote nothing. We know about it only because Plato wrote it down. One wonders what Socrates would have made of that. An air of paradox hangs over the whole matter.
But what Newstok gives us is not the life of face-to-face teaching or conversation, but a pre-packaged book, and, it has to be said, a book that at times reads like a list of half-thoughts and clichés, filled out with the obiter dicta from all sorts of celebrities and authorities, from Einstein (inevitably, in these matters, Einstein), to Martin Luther King, to Maya Angelou, to Seamus Heaney, to E.M.Forster, to Nietzsche, to Aristotle, to Dewey, to Gramsci, to Rousseau, to Bob Dylan, to Cicero, to… — and so the list goes on. Stravinsky gets in: ’Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength’, and this from the composer of The Rite of Spring! ‘Come off it, Igor,’ one feels like saying, ‘you don’t really believe this, or you only half-believe it; much more needs to be said, much more.’ (And there are those who find some of Stravinsky’s later works too dry, too formulaic, thin because too constrained by the limits the composer then in musical combat with Schoenberg encased himself with.)
But more isn’t said, not by Newstok anyway. To take one example of where more is needed, in correctly emphasising the need for structures and rules in creative activity, Newstok doesn’t say enough about constraints that free and those that bind, or how constraint and freedom inter-mingle and transform each other (though there is a rather sentimental passage about teaching Shakespeare sonnets to prisoners in prison, where clearly an oppressive form of constraint is operative). A book can’t be a live tutorial, admittedly, but it needs to be more of discussion than we get from Newstok, especially if it is dealing with complicated and difficult topics, such as the relationship of constraint and freedom in education. A Platonic dialogue, perhaps?
But the remedy is not to focus exclusively on pre-set targets or, even less, to see pupils in terms of organisms to be trained in reproducing certain learnable skills, or to reduce success in education to what can be assessed in measurable ways. Here one can agree with Newstok on the life-denying and anti-educational reductivism of much current practice, but we should not engage in simplistic dichotomies. Can there be education without some aims (against which success is to be judged)? Without some sense of where the lesson might lead, even if we as teachers should be prepared to adapt the goal in the light of what happens as we teach? Can there be teaching without assessment of some sort? Isn’t assessment an integral part of teaching (as opposed to uncommunicative lecturing)? Have my pupils actually learned what I want them to learn? Are they picking up on the points I am so pleased with? Is my teaching any good? And while talk of targets in education is often overdone, to put it mildly, is Newstok right in targuing that the best way to hit a target is to aim above it? Don’t we say that the arrow went truly to its target (and not above it)? Odd if our aim was not the target. We need a much more nuanced discussion of all these matters than Newstok allows.
There is tradition, but there is also the individual talent, as Eliot, a great modernist as well as a traditionalist, taught. You can’t just imitate, you must bring something to what you do, but how do you balance the two? It is in making judgements of this sort that what is needed is not just the words, the principles, but the experience and sensitivity to make the right balance. It is precisely this which Wagner explores to such profound and enlivening effect in Die Meistersinger, and which Eliot illuminates so clearly in his famous essay. In comparison, a chatty and quotation-laden book like Newstok’s is all too likely to seem preachy and flat-footed. It is at points like these that Socrates’s animadversions against writing seem much to the point, and the same applies in the world of education more generally, where judgement and experience are of the essence rather than words, even well-intentioned words like those of Newstok and of the multitude he quotes.
Finally, to Newstok’s title. His book does not really tell us how to think like Shakespeare, and only en passant and rather impressionalistically about Renaissance education (pupils sitting at desks, etc., but not much about the curriculum at the Stratford Grammar School). As Newstok quite correctly observes, Shakespeare was, for the most part, a playwright, and we cannot infer what he himself thought from what his characters are made to say. We can, of course, deduce something about the range of his experience and the flexibility of his mind from his writing, though whether that would help us to emulate his brilliance and poetic conjoining of ideas is another question.
On the question as to our knowledge (or rather ignorance) of what Shakespeare the dramatist actually thought himself, early on in the book Newstok does make a valid and salutary point. He mentions the number of times people quote Polonius’s speech to Laertes as a model for our own behaviour. Jumping over the blather in the speech about borrowing and lending, about being familiar, but not too familiar, about being costly in one’s apparel but not expert in fashion, to-day’s commentators tend to hone in on its closing exhortation ‘this above all, to thine own self be true’. How many times have we heard this in degree ceremonies, commencement addresses, prizegivings, speeches from eminent big-wigs, and the rest? None of them realise that the whole speech, and especially the peroration about being true to oneself, is an expression of worldly cynicism in a corrupt court, the type of behaviour which men (and women) like Polonius have made careers out of, with wealth, acclaim and college masterships the reward.
Yes, indeed, to thine own self be true; and forget all other selves, forget the imperfections, weaknesses and self-centeredness of thine own self. Forget one’s own sinfulness. Do whatever is required to promote one’s own self, while trimming and tacking in the calculating journey through life which Polonius has been advocating. Newstock speaks here of ‘moral entrepreurship’, which I think is good, but I wish he had developed this point more. If he had, he might have said more about the way a true education will take one out of one’s own petty self, giving us aspirations, ideals, thoughts and perspectives which take one beyond not just self, but also beyond one’s own time and its prejudices and fashions. In Dante’s Paradiso, the blessed do not look at themselves or even at each other. They look at the divine light, which the purification of self in Purgatory has enabled them to endure. Poetry, says Eliot (in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’), is not ‘the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’.
And so education should be, whether Shakespearean, Renaissance, or contemporary. This is why craft, imitation and constraint are all, in due measure, essential to it, and why self-expression and ‘personalised learning’ are antithetical to it. Newstok, to his credit, is on the right side here, and laments that in to-day’s classroom focusing with one’s whole attention on a common worthwhile object – beyond oneself – has become a forgotten skill. But his book gives at most a hint of what is required, not the deeper reasons for it, nor the reason why education, being in Plato’s terms, a care of the soul, requires human interaction, with all the uncertaintly, unpredictability and unformalizable knowledge that entails.
♦
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Publication: Tuesday, 17 May 2022, at 17:17.
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