 Welcome everyone to how to think like Shakespeare with Scott Newstock. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And this event was produced in collaboration with the San Francisco Writers Conference. Together we provide high quality or we aim to provide high quality learning experiences for writers at low cost or free. And I'd like to thank those of you who elected to support this event and pay a little something to attend because especially now it goes a long way to help us do more in these especially challenging times. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library that oldest, the oldest in fact designed to serve the general public in California. We're also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. And due to the shelter in place almost all of our activities are virtual, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year. And with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. I just want to make a comment to Michael I see your comment about closed captioning and I'll fix that shortly. Our speaker today is Scott Newstock who's a professor of English and founding director of the Pierce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. He's also a parent and award winning teacher, and the author of quoting death in early modern England, as well as being the editor of several other books. He resides in Memphis, Tennessee, and I'm going to put his you his website in the chat space. I just started I just want to encourage our guests to use the chat space, because that is how I'm going to pose questions to Scott, and we will get to those at the end of his talk. Are we ready. Scott, I'm ready. Perfect. So why don't you go ahead. I'm going to meet myself. Thank you, Taryn. It's really great to be in conversation with the Mechanics Institute today. One thing that I love about learning about the Mechanics Institute is how much it accords with the spirit of my book. If you look at the forward to the history of the Mechanics Institute by Kevin star the former California State Librarian. What really focuses on that 19th century of mechanic in the Walt Whitman sense as being a skilled maker of things, an artisan a fabricator a master of technique, and that's exactly the kind of spirit that animates my book how to think like Shakespeare. What he's pointing to is probably from I hear America singing. I hear America singing the very carols I hear those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blind and strong carpenters mason's boatman deckhand shoemakers woodcutters plow boys, each singing what belongs to him and her and to no one else. What I think is exactly in the spirit of Shakespeare and Shakespeare's thinking about mechanics you might recall that in the play, a Midsummer Night's dream. We have a number of artisans, bellows Mender weaver tinker. The group of people those actors who puck dismissively calls rude mechanicals, but I actually think that Shakespeare's very fond of these figures these artisans these makers these mechanics. And in fact I think he probably thought of himself as a maker in that in that same way as the Whitman sense of what it means to be a mechanic. Now I'm, I'm, as I was telling Taryn right before we started my semester just started yesterday, and my students often make a mistake and their first papers when they're talking about Shakespeare and spelling his profession they spell it play right w r i t e now that makes sense, because it, that's what a writer does presumably is that the right, but what's fascinating is that the correct spelling is w r i g h t. And that comes from an old English root, meaning to make or to forge or to fabricate or craft something. So a playwright is someone who crafts plays just like a boat right is someone who builds boats or a candle right to someone who makes candles, or a wheel right as a person who makes wheels, a playwright is someone who makes plays. So you can think about the process of being a playwright and as a maker as a as a creator, the, the more helpful it is for approaching Shakespeare and then also helping our own creation and our own making and our own lives. Now obviously, as Emerson pointed out Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare and I'm not saying that just by looking at this book you're going to figure out how to write, how to write like Shakespeare but I do think that if you can work your way into the kind of puzzle of Shakespeare's own intellectual formation is own education, you can start to recognize some maybe cognitive habits or practices or strategies that you can use for refining your own writing and speaking and thinking. So today is just give a very quick survey of my book, which is divided into 14 brief chapters. And I'll give you a couple of examples along the way of the kinds of practices or the kinds of exercises that Shakespeare would have undergone in his own education as well as in his career, and how those can apply to us still today. The book opens with the chapter on thinking and it talks about how difficult it is to describe thinking and how difficult it is to depict thinking and how we struggle in different ways to imagine what thinking looks like. I find fascinating that when Shakespeare describes thinking one consistent thing that he does is he turns to the language of craft. He makes an analog between the work in the workshop of making things and the craft of thought. So for instance, he speaks of thoughts world like a potter's wheel, or he has a character talk about the quick forge and working house of thought and a number of characters describe the process of thinking as something like hammering thoughts as if they were in a blacksmith shop. And so word for thinking forgative, which looks like that word should come from the same root is forget, but actually comes from the root for forge again to craft or to make something. So in his work, he tends to turn towards that language of craft, when attempting to describe the complexity of thinking. In the second chapter, I talk about the ends of education and how dangerous it is when we turn means into ends or or means overtake ends. So in particular, I think it's unhelpful in education to focus too much on testing too much on assessment I feel like that ends up contorting the learning process and and kind of evacuates the joy out of learning itself. What's the opposite of something like assessment or what's a counter narrative to to that that quantitative narrow sense of learning as assessment in the third chapter I suggest that it is craft it's the language of craft that is most helpful as a way to articulate learning in any tradition and learning about anything so whether that's making a vase or that is making a play or learning mathematics, those are all better described as crafts they're handed down between generations. It's an ongoing tradition but tradition that's revised, they're developed within a community, and they are things that you can refine in collaboration with others that to me describes all of what I love about education in my own time as a student as well as my time as a teacher and I think it applies to to multiple realms when you when you do think about thinking and education. As you might know Shakespeare himself grew up in a craft workshop his father made gloves and one of the things you need to do as an artisan is think about fit, literally fit with making gloves that would fit the customers hands but also more generally fit or congruence between the thing that you're making in the market or audience that you're seeking and I think that's crucial to thinking and and and education as well a kind of congruent congruence between the task at hand the materials you have the community with which you're you're working. So that relates to the physical aspect of education about being in the same place at the same time, obviously the global pandemic of the last year and a half has forced all of us to scramble to improvise with not being in the same place at the same time and it's allowed things like this conversation to take place from afar across the globe. Having been said I think there's been a great loss in terms of not being in the same room at the same time with the group of people. I think they're there all kinds of things that are very difficult to replicate online in the in the kind of dynamic give and take that we love about education so this is a satirical postcard from the early 20th century of a an artist making fun of a fantastic idea of what education will be like in the future you see the teacher on the side there shoving books into a hopper and then this student assistant is grinding them up and then they're being electronically or digitally zapped into the students heads. So they're in the same room but they're not really in the same place are they they're not really co-present to one another they're not they're not thinking alongside one another and I, I, I love the dynamic of thinking alongside other human beings in a room The forum that we're in right now allows me to speak unidirectionally and you to pose the questions in the chat but it's not quite the same thing as me reading your body language and some of you whispering to each other and someone getting visibly irritated and getting into a heated discussion. That's just really something that I think is precious that is not replicable in this forum. Something that people have talked about is crucial to education and crucial to thinking. Since the beginning of thinking about education is practices of attention, how we are easily distractible it's a very human thing to be distractible and, and the kinds of habits we need to pay in order to focus our attention whether that's attending a performance of a play together, or reading a text together slowly and puzzling out over its words. That's long been a crucial aspect of, of how we, how we learn together. So the book has a short chapter on technology and the main thing that I'm trying to convey in that chapter is simply that I think it's mistaken to limit technology to only digital technology. That's a kind of conflation that we make in our world today when we talk about technology we always think it's a computer it's the internet or it's our phones or it's it's something digital or something electronic. So technology comes from that root technique as, as the founders of the mechanics Institute new and technique relates to being an artisan or a craftsperson in, in, in all kinds of wonderful ways. So for example, a book is a technology. It's a, it's a thing that can be used and can be used in all wonderfully different kinds of ways. But it's, it's a viable technology and it remains a viable technology to this day, writing on a piece of paper is a technology and incredibly powerful technology that's lasted for millennia. So that the main, the main suggestion of that chapter is just to remind us to think of that fully expansive sense of what technology is and not to be narrowly limited to the most recent iteration of digital technology. A lot of philosophers have talked about the human dynamics of imitation and how we learn from one another and developmentally how we learn to become fully autonomous human beings through the process of imitation and 16th century educational theorists knew this, and they applied it in all wonderful ways. So here's a great example of an application of imitation in order to prove your writing it's something that writers do to this day. It was a practice called double translation. And the, the principle was articulated in England by a school master named Roger Asham, who was also the early tutor to Queen, the later Queen Elizabeth. This is, this is Asham's exercise that's designed around the practice of imitation or double translation. Here's, here is what Asham suggests here in the school master, the child must take a book and sitting in some place where no one's prompting that child. Let the child translate into English, a lesson, a source from Latin, Cicero for example, then the child takes the English version of the Latin shows it to the teacher and lets the teacher take away from the child, the Latin source, take a break for an hour, at least, and then let the child translate that English translation back into Latin in another book, a fresh blank page. And the child brings that double turned Latin or that double translated Latin, and then the teacher compares the original, in this case it's Cicero, and the child's double translated Latin. So it's created a circuit across the language translation it's the double translation where you're now comparing Latin to Latin, and you're seeing how far away you are from that. So if you've ever, if you've ever messed around with Google translate you know how garbled that can come back when you go through that process, or if you've ever attempted to imitate another writer with in another language, you know how difficult that is. But it also teaches you about how to emulate someone else's voice and inadvertently it teaches you how to be a better writer in your own language because you're paying so much careful local attention to the process of articulation of a writer that you inadvertently become a master of your own writing. So here's a kind of flow chart quickly of what Asham was recommending you take a Latin source you translate it to English, you take a pause for an hour. Then you take the English source you translate it back into Latin, and then you compare that original Latin to the double translated Latin. And this is something I was just talking to a translator that I know test Lewis. I recommended in translation exercises today to see how, how close you can get back to that original through that process so that's a very strict form of imitation. But the goal is to become fluent in your own articulation of yourself, and it's something that later writers have recommended as well Benjamin Franklin famously was frustrated as a teenager by his own lack of eloquence, in part because he pulled them out of school to work in a print shop. So, Franklin would read an essay from the 18th century periodical the spectator, put it aside, try to reconstruct that essay from memory, and then he would compare his reconstructed version with the original, and that's, that's an English English translation as it were, but it really helped him become a better writer by imitating a good model. So it's something that contemporary on computer programmers recommend as well is take a good model, examine it, take notes on how it works, try to rewrite the program independently on your own, and then go back and compare it to the original program that you admired in the first place. So it's just a, it's just a, again, a basic fact that humans are imitated animals you might as take it might as well take advantage of that and use it to your own benefit to imitate good models, and then become a better autonomous person on your own ultimately. There were a wonderful series of exercises in the Shakespeare's youthful classroom that helped him and his whole cohort his whole generation of writers. This is probably the most famous one. It's, it's a practice called copia. And it was first articulated by the great Dutch humanist, desiderious Erasmus in the beginning of the 16th century and it was practiced all the way through the 18th century. It's a Latin word that gives us our obviously gives us the English word copy like a photocopy, but it also gives us that word copiousness, like a cornucopia or profusion. So, one of the things that Erasmus recommended was to think about how many different ways you could say the same thing. So this is kind of the opposite of imitation. So this is what Erasmus is recommending. How can you exactly imitate another writer in order to become a better writer yourself. Erasmus is saying how can you say the same thing in in as many different ways as you can possibly imagine. So kind of as a stunt as a rhetorical stunt. Erasmus says, let's take just one example of an everyday phrase your letter please me greatly. So an analog today might be thanks for your email. An everyday totally ordinary statement, boring. Of course, there's no way you could say that any better that's just what it is your letter please me greatly. And then Erasmus goes through a series of variations where I'll either replace a subject with another word or he'll invert the word order or he'll think of a synonym for the verb or he'll find another way to rearrange the sentence and he just goes on and on and on and there is a no small measure refreshed in spirit by your grace's hand from your affectionate letter I received unbelievable pleasure your affectionate letter brought me unbelievable pleasure your pages pages engendered in me and unfamiliar delight. Your lines conveyed to me the greatest joy. The greatest joy was brought to me by your lines and another 125 more variations beyond that so my students tend to chuckle when they look at this but the point is Erasmus is urging you to think about all of the verbal resources that you have to hand to articulate your thought and the premise being that the more you the more you force yourself to be clear the more you're also forcing yourself to clarify your thinking and express it in the most direct and accurate way possible. So, this is exhausting, obviously, but it is, it is a good practice for helping yourself to become more articulate and more clear about what it is. You're trying to convey to your reader. Erasmus's point is that the goal of imitation and the goal of exercises like this is not to sound like another writer. In fact, trying to sound exactly like them is is often the worst thing you could do. What you really want to do to sound like Cicero is to write in the Ciceronian spirit, which you really want to do is to aim for their higher virtues and not just their local virtues of their thinking and their writing. So, education, highly valued conversation debate staging voices in conversation with another imagining yourself in other subject positions that are not like your own subject position. It also valued the principle of stock or kind of gathering an inventory of knowledge so you could create new knowledge. And in fact this is that word inventory is related to a keyword. You might have heard statements like this online that say Shakespeare invented 1700 words, and then someone will rebut that and they'll say no actually Shakespeare did not invent 1700 words, but they're both kind of playing off of the wrong notion of what it means to invent a word. This word inventio this Latin term was known as the kind of the process of discovering the best available means of persuasion. What we notice here is that in order to invent something you first have to have an inventory, you first have to know something. You have to have built up a base of knowledge so that you can create something new and scientists often confirm this that they, they didn't create something from nothing. When they made an invention they were, they were gathering together things that that existed before them in a new configuration. That sense of invention coming out of the inventory of your already existing knowledge or your stock of knowledge so here's just one example from from Shakespeare from Macbeth. This is guilty Macbeth wondering if all great Neptune's ocean can wash this blood blood clean from my hand he's asking himself this question, then answers his own question. In my the ocean won't wash the blood off of my hand in fact the opposite will happen no this my hand will rather the multitudinous sees in Carnedine. In Carnedine is a word that he makes up from a Latin root from his inventory of knowing Latin. It's it's a word that you probably don't know in fact he knows you don't know it know it because he just made up that word. And in fact he glosses it in the play itself it in Carnedine means to turn something read, you can see that root carnae there or flesh. It that he's, he's taken this Latinate word that he's invented and that he's told you what it means in the very next line but he's created he's invented something from his inventory. And if you look up the word in Carnedine in the Oxford English dictionary you'll see that Shakespeare's credited with inventing that word, and it's a word he only uses once in his whole career he never uses that word. Again, in the 12th chapter I look at the sonnet form as a as a productive form of constraint it's a very rigid form it has only 14 lines but millions of sonnets have been written in all global languages and people have used it as a vehicle for all kinds of creativity so the wonderful ways in which having a constraint can actually induce creativity. In the penultimate chapter, I do kind of what I've been doing with you here right now is talking about the practice of making and how making applies to everything from a physical object to a computer program to an eloquent speech. And then I conclude the book with the chapter on freedom, the premise being not that freedom means you can do whatever you want but rather that freedom is working through and inheriting and making your own an intellectual tradition, and then producing things in conversation with that tradition so I end the book with this wonderful essay by James Baldwin titled. It's a great title, the title is why I stopped hating Shakespeare, and Baldwin brilliantly entices you with that title to question wait, why would, why would someone hate Shakespeare in the first place and then why would they stop hating Shakespeare what would what would make them change their relationship to Shakespeare, which for Baldwin really is emblematic of inheriting the European literary tradition in general. And the breakthrough that he has where he starts to think of Shakespeare as a peer and as someone that belongs to him as much as Shakespeare belongs to all of us, and and not someone that is alien to any of us but is is part of our common cultural heritage. So with that quick whirlwind tour of those 14 brief brief chapters, I think I will pause and ask Taryn if she wants to open it up for questions here. Sure does. There's been a lively chat of comments about things that you have said. Yeah I'm happy to elaborate on on everything I just wanted to kind of give a brief brief overview of the of the Ark of the book here. No it's it's been great and I have put the link to buy the book or to borrow the book from Mechanics Institute in the chat and I just want to reassure everyone that I will send you an email. Monday with the link again in case you change your mind. Does anyone have any questions or comments that you would like me to pose to Scott if you do go ahead and put that in the chat. Everyone stunned by what you what you talked about so far. The chapters are, let me let me let me emphasize that the chapters are meant to be kind of springboards for thought they're not really meant to either prescribe how we should think, or I certainly don't know how Shakespeare thought but I do know the ways in which that generation of writers came to be interesting writers came to have great facility with language, which is not different from thinking that the in their era. The rhetoric itself was considered the kind of fabric of thought like you it wasn't rhetoric wasn't something separate from your thought but rhetoric truly was the kind of infrastructure or scaffolding or material that gave you the basis for further inquiry. I don't know what the equivalent today would be would be something like almost like the way we think of DNA today as being like the infrastructure for life. The rhetoric was the fabric of thought, and it was, and if, if you think that being a human being that interacts with other people and speaks to other people is an important thing to do, then practicing how to how to think and how to speak and how to write better makes sense and that almost the entire educational system was devoted to to that. Yes, and back there is a question here about that. Michelle asks what kind of education did Shakespeare receive. So it was in Latin, and that's, that's, if you, once you say that you, it's fascinating because you know he didn't have classes in English he wasn't being taught in English he went through that double translation process but it was, it was mainly a school system that was developed to give boys girls were excluded unless you were an aristocrat and you could afford a private tutor to give boys fluency in Latin, either for going into the church or being advisors at court or dealing with other circumstances where in Latin, but as a byproduct of that there were all kinds of, you were exposed to great models of writers, and you were exposed to all kinds of strategies for turning language to your advantage so there's lots of things about that schooling system that we wouldn't want to do was it was brutal. It was 10 or 12 hours a day it was often five and a half six days a week with few few breaks built into that calendar, but it did give an extraordinary verbal fluency and practice and thinking your way into other other minds as it were. Yeah, I'm feeling like my K through 12 was lacking. I mean there were there were other subject you know logic was involved at some stages and dialectic and some mathematics not not laboratory science the way we think of it today but, but really a series of of practices designed to give you almost native fluency in this other language and certainly in in writing it but also in speaking it and performing it they would perform plays that they would compose for each other or they would perform classical plays so. And, and, and practice and improvisation as well and speaking extemp extempore. There's a comment here related to this by Justin, he says there seems to be a contradiction with the notion Shakespeare knew little Latin and less Greek. Could you please let us know how you researched his possible educational background, since his early life has very little documentation. Justin's picking up on the famous dis by Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Johnson, when Johnson writes a very ambivalent. Elegy for Shakespeare that prefaces the posthumous collected works in 1623 of the first folio Johnson says, even though you had small Latin and less Greek. You were still a good writer. Now that is a that's a that's Johnson saying I have a lot of Latin and Greek I worked really hard to be fluent in Latin and Greek. But I, as I like to point out to my students. And this is no, no, just to my colleagues here at Rhodes in the classics department. The school boys who had small Latin and less Greek probably had better Latin than most professional scholars of Latin today, after having frankly having been beaten into them for a decade. And you can. That's that's a complicated statement by Johnson, and you have to kind of know about Ben Johnson and and what his, his kind of competitive relationship is to Shakespeare in order to put that into context. He, it's partly a way to say I'm a very classically learned author and you weren't, but it's like it's relative in terms of what what counts for being fluent in Latin and fluent in in Greek. It's like a school yard taunt I'm smart. I'm backing up a little bit Jennifer has a question about, were there further techniques to use inventory for invention in I mean the the main, the main. In classical rhetoric it's the first of five stages of making a speech, but I think it's intriguing just to stop with that insight that the premise of inventory is that you know a bunch of stuff before you even begin to make a speech. When you sit down with a blank piece of paper and go. Okay, how can I make something up but rather you are widely read in, you know the broad sense of being educated and liberally, liberally educated, and then also deeply read in a particular field that then allows you to make that first stage of what's the inventory what can I select from the stuff that I know, or the rhetorical moves I can, I can make. Again that was formulated, you know, more than 1000 years before Shakespeare's schooling, but the premise was that you don't begin any process of inventing something from nothing you need a full and broad and deep education. And again, I, you can, if you look at interviews with inventors, they will often say, you know I did not come up with this on my own it was the synthesis of other inventors and other scientists insights that led me to this, this particular breakthrough. Okay, wow suddenly there's a ton of questions. Something offensive. No, no. So, Rick asks, did you, he joined a little bit late, did you address the need for distinguishing Shakespeare's mind and opinions from those of his characters, how much of Shakespeare was in the man was in his was in his writing, I guess he's asking. Yeah, you know I'm, I say early on in the book that I'm reluctant to attribute personal opinions to any particular character I mean partly the genius of being a playwright is being able to project yourself into lots of different kinds of subject positions and another aspect that would have been done and in the 16th century classroom was something called ethopoeia or the or the making of character. So for example. So here you are a little 10 year old school boy in a rural school in rural English school and I tell you, why don't you imagine yourself in the position of a widow of a slain Trojan warrior. What does that feel like to speak from that position. So it's, you know, it's a different gender, it's a different nation it's a different era it's a different age, but it is trying to stretch your imagination into a different subject position so, you know that in a funny kind of exercise and a lot of these exercises were indirectly great preparation for being dramatists, you know they didn't creative writing didn't exist until the early 20th century as a as a discipline. But this was like great training in creative writing was imagining yourself into other subject position so you know famously, John Keats in the early 19th century says that one of the things that was great about Shakespeare was his almost ability to evacuate and project himself into other other voices and other other minds and other characters so I don't think it's it's productive or I'm not. It's something I worry about about trying to isolate like the Shakespeare think X or the Shakespeare think rather, I'm trying to step back to kind of the practices that you can see at play, working their way out in in the works as well as how that emerge from the pedagogical habits and practices that that he would have experienced growing up. Do you, the sounds to me like something that our writers would really dig knowing more about. Do you have any sources or any, does it does a chapter of your book cover that topic. Yeah, I mean that the book is very hasty in the sense that I don't really touch on anything in depth or in detail but every time I'm making an observation like this I do have a suggestion for further reading so there are notes in the book that if you're if you're interested in at the Puyah look at Lynn enterline's book on Shakespeare school room or if you're interested on the the 14 step process of writing exercises that are called the pro gymnast moda. Here's here's a book on that with a modern day analog and often they'll be a link to an online resource to so. My book is like a sampler I guess I would say and it's it's it's it gives a lot of leads for other other paths to go and it incorporates a ton of quotations from other other voices and other writers as a as a sampler of drawing together a wide range of thinkers and artists and creators. Perfect. Bobby has it has a question. This is kind of similar to what we're talking about here or applicable since Shakespeare's work is meant to be performed not just read how important do you think it is that the actors understand this concept when playing their part. So, so I think I don't like the opposition between performed in red, I think those are mutually wonderfully reinforcing activities. So I, I have heard, like directors, sometimes have a kind of antagonistic relationship to Shakespeare teachers and say something like she makes Shakespeare's not meant to be read but performed but there's no way you can perform it without first reading and in fact, actors are incredibly sophisticated about their reading and about their thinking their way into why those lines are constructed that way and and bringing to bear their their knowledge of the words and their knowledge of the verse. So, again, I don't, I don't think of those as an either or choice and in fact we, we've learned a great deal in the last couple of decades of research about how how Shakespeare's works were read. And how it looks like it looks likely that in the last half of his career he was increasingly self conscious about how they appeared on the page so it. There's a great book by a scholar named Lucas Urna called Shakespeare as a poet playwright Shakespeare is a literary dramatist, which is meant to capture that sense of someone who both cares about how they're read on the page and how they're performed on the stage. You know, in terms of my own experience and my own teaching, I love having students read the plays closely and I love have having them attend the plays and those things are both enriching for for for the other so reading helps understand performance better performance helps you understand reading better recitation memorization helps you understand the reading better too so it's not only that they were meant to be performed they also had a complex life as things that were intended to be read. And there's a couple of questions here that kind of that relate to each other. Sharon and Robert. You have the same question basically but how, how much do you think Shakespeare was influenced or did he steal from other writers that were contemporaries of his, how much of an influence did his sphere have on his work. Amazing influence as all writers are influenced by what they read both of their predecessors and their peers. So, in fact, one of the great, I think, enriching pleasures of engaging with any writer is thinking your way into their library or their, their archive and I have a colleague who's teaching a seminar on on Tony Morrison and William Faulkner right now and you know Morrison wrote her graduate thesis on Faulkner and wolf. And it's, it's, it doesn't take away from Morrison's achievement to think about how she engaged and rewrote and took her own version of Faulkner in in new directions and likewise. It doesn't take away from any artists achievement to think about how they're in dialogue with their predecessors and with their peers so you know there we have tons of examples of Shakespeare learning things from classical sources and transforming them in his works and then also ways in which he learned and competed with his contemporaries Probably the major example that is often brought up is his relationship to his exact contemporary Christopher Marlowe who's born the same year that he is arrives in London slightly earlier than Shakespeare does and has a great breakout success with the kind of first blockbuster of the London professional stage with the tambourine plays. Kind of like the imagine that if you're the same age as George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, and you're an aspiring filmmaker and they've already made jaws and Star Wars and it's 1980 and you're you're just trying to break into the movies. How intimidating that must have been to have an exact contemporary doing what you want to do really well and very successfully. So, we've got great examples of Shakespeare in a brilliantly, both complimentary and combative dialogue with with Marlowe across his career even after Marlowe's Marlowe's death. Yeah, I wish I had a relationship with someone like that. I think I'm someone who looks at you like, like Shakespeare looks at Marlowe or something like that. Yeah. There you go. Let's see Wayne has a question that is so deep that I'm going to just read it out loud verbatim. How did thinkers then separate the expressive power of a language from the logical or empirical power. I don't tend to think of those things as separate. At least in my experience as a teacher. I tend to go with the old saw that you don't often know what you want to say until you've tried to say it, and then you try to say it better, and then you refine your thought further. I don't articulate it even, even better so kind of in the Erasmian spirit of taking an everyday thought and trying to find better ways to say it, I don't, I don't think that those things are as distinct as they might appear on the surface obviously, you know, you can teach logic separately from teaching writing, but, but we, you know, language is such a, again, the kind of fabric of our thought that it's, it's hard to disentangle those I think you can refine them separately but they are they are deeply interwoven. And then this is kind of a burning question Helen wonders I'm sure we're all thinking this. What is your stance on Shakespeare being Edward Devere. You put me in an impossible position because if you, if I say that there's there's no way I can answer that correctly right because I'm part of the conspiracy of professors that are, are trying to suppress that and deny the, the alternative authorship conspiracy so no matter what I say I'm going to be disappointing to anyone who wants to hear me. But, but, and this will if anyone is a Devere fan they won't like hearing this either but I think James Shapiro's work on contested will is a very helpful way to think you're think into the question of when did those conspiracy alternative ideas first come to be proposed and why were so many of them made by Americans in the 19th century and what was going on with the idea of authorship that had changed in the 19th century that would lead you to presume in a kind of elitist way that someone that was a good writer had to be part of the aristocracy. I think it's discounting the sophistication of that Latin rhetorical education. And I think it is also discounting that that approach is discounting the incredibly dynamic environment of the professional theater which was collaborative and competitive, and led to some extraordinary production in the 1590s and the early, early 1600s. So, you know, but, but, like many conspiracy theories no matter what you say you won't dissuade someone who's already persuaded of it, if you, if you're interested in learning about the history of how and why those theories began to be proposed, the James Shapiro book contested will is something I recommend, but again, that something a book that's despised by those who believe those conspiracies. I have to admit it has a great title now. It doesn't have a great title that has a great title and you know what, you know what's what what's a separate kind of motivation for wanting to believe that things are not as they seem in general or wanting to kind of find your way behind what you think is an overinflated genius. I don't know I remember. Well, I think I think there are lots of lots of reasons why that's appealing as a way to think about about an author. It just does not align with anything that we know about his biographical record and and the way theater worked at that period. Okay. Now, a lot of people had some questions that kind of dance around what I'm going to ask you how did you get into how did you start. What interests you about Shakespeare how did you, how did you write this book like what, what motivated at all. It's been interested in the long history of rhetoric in the long history of the practice of teaching language and teaching composition. And that's part of what drew me to the historical period of 1500 to 1700 in the first place was some of these educational practices that were refined and were articulated in handbooks to better writing and to better speaking. And I think it's a fascinating and rich period in part because it's looking back to earlier eras and trying to recuperate earlier educational practices for new nations that are emerging or new nation states that are emerging, and, and continues to be intriguing to us to this day 400 plus years later. So, you know that's the big answer is that that's intriguing to me about the era in general and then you know Shakespeare's career in particular intersects with that and I think there's some marvelous things that you can learn the more you learn about that rhetorical tradition. The book, the book emerged out of I think to converging strands one being. I was reading a lot of great work about these intellectual habits and practices from the 16th century and and what professional theater was like in the late 16th century. At the same time that my own kids were going through various stages of schooling, and we're feeling frustrated about some of the educational reforms that they were encountering. So you know I on the one hand I had kind of my professional hat on of of paying attention to work in my field from 400 years ago, and then also some frustration about what I'd seen in education in in my kids schooling, not that they had teachers that weren't devoted and caring and and loving teachers, but that the system and the system of a series of reforms over the last couple of decades had taken away some of the things that I think are enduring and valuable about education. So the book really came together as when I was trying to figure out what was frustrating about this and what was still valuable and viable about about these historical practices and how they can remain valuable to us today. So again, what do you think about new math, or whatever you call it. I'm joking. Yes. You know I just want to reassure some of the people in the chat space that I will include a, not the full chat transcript because there's some things that maybe aren't super important in there, like, Hello's and that sort of thing but usually I include an edited version of the chat. In my email to everyone with links to the book and stuff like that so look in your inbox on Monday or Tuesday if it's a especially busy Monday. All right, does anyone have any last questions for Scott, before we thank him profusely. Oh, here we go. Justin asks, he's curious where Shakespeare might have developed the three dimensionality of self over hearing the three dimensionality of self over hearing. I don't know I mean I think I, I like to think of Shakespeare as a certain kind of artists that had a sponge like capability of absorbing things around him. If you've ever seen the kind of movie bio pic documentary 32 short films about Glenn Gould, there's a about the Canadian pianist. There's a great scene where he's in a, I think it's a coffee shop or some public venue, and he's kind of listening to bits of conversation and almost orchestrating them in his head as he's, as he's drawing them together. That to me seems very Shakespearean it's also what I associate with the creator like Orson Welles, someone who's able to pick up on other voices and, and absorb them and synthesize them into a kind of dynamic production. I don't know if that is, I don't know how trainable that is I do think that learning how to listen to other writers is something that trains you how to attend to voice and how to pick up on other other voices and eventually again imitate them and incorporate them into your own voice but three dimensionality I don't know what Justin's getting at there I think that's a very abstract thing and I don't know if that is as teachable in the same way. Okay, and then I just got a note from Manas who asks. Is, are you specialized, I do specialize in poetry of Shakespeare as well or mainly are you interested in how he thinks. Again I don't think that those are separate things I think I think he thinks through the words, and the words think helped me think when I when I struggle with them and when I dig into them and when I piece them apart in the classroom so absolutely I love the poetry and, and we're reading the sonnets in my classes right now as we speak so I think I think they're endlessly rewarding to return to. Well, I want to thank you so much for this discussion of your book, and the more that you talk the more I think oh I've got to remember to look for that topic in the book itself. So I think all of our minds are busily clicking through what you just said. So the chat is lit up with thanks. And so I hope I hope you sell a few books. We do have the book in our library so if you are a mechanics member, rush out now and check it out before I grab it. I'm just kidding. I didn't flip through it when I bought it. But yeah, I want to thank you so much for reaching out to me because you, you did you, you emailed me months ago and I'm so glad that we were able to host you. I'm glad I'm really glad thank you very much Sharon it's nice to talk to you. Likewise, I hope you have a great rest of the day and a great school year. And, and I think we all look forward to reading the book. Thank you. Take care everyone have a wonderful weekend and look out for my email on Monday. Thanks so much. Bye bye.