By Daniel Blank
IN ONE OF Borges’s final short stories, a Shakespearean scholar named Hermann Sörgel is offered an unusual possession at a conference in London. The object, which also gives the story its title, is Shakespeare’s memory, a collection of the playwright’s own remembrances “from his youngest boyhood days to early April, 1616.” Sörgel hesitates before accepting, but after brief reflection deems it the ultimate end of his scholarly endeavors: “Had I not spent a lifetime […] in pursuit of Shakespeare? Was it not fair that at the end of my labors I find him?”
“Shakespeare’s Memory” captures the essence of a longstanding desire — to know what the writer was thinking as he wrote Hamlet, King Lear, and the Sonnets. Like centuries of readers and theatergoers, Sörgel wishes to “possess Shakespeare […] as no one had ever possessed anyone before.” By entering Shakespeare’s mind, Sörgel imagines, the mysteries of Shakespeare’s stories will be revealed. As the Shakespearean devotee Henry N. Paul wrote in 1950, craving precisely the kind of talisman Borges conjures: “The internal forces [of Shakespeare’s writing] can only be known by peering into the laboratory of the dramatist’s mind as he did his work.”
Enter Scott Newstok, whose clever new book, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, arises out of a similar desire. To think like Shakespeare, he declares early on, “we need to reconsider the habits that shaped his mind.” To some extent, this methodology follows in the path of recent scholarship seeking to reconstruct Shakespeare’s education in order to understand his patterns of thought. In the past decade or so, a number of valuable studies have elucidated the complex connection between Shakespeare’s poems and plays and the kinds of pedagogy that he would have encountered in the early modern grammar school. Their goal is not to reduce the playwright’s output to his past experiences, but to develop a powerful lens that allows us to see more clearly its origins and its inspirations.
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