1044 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXIV, NO.

Part 4 is in some ways the weakest, simply because the cohesion and development
found in the other parts is here strained by the diversity of the articles. Despite the evi-
dent clash, the authors themselves manage to write competent pieces about less prom-
inent authors. For example, Mathilde Bernard presents a straightforward reading on
myth and fable in the works of Guillaume Guéroult, though the analysis could benefit
from further distinction of Calvin’s and the Huguenots’ views. Matthieu de La Gorge’s
essay on Pierre Viret’s view of Greco-Roman myth as biblical plagiarism surprises.
Padraic Lamb examines Anglican minister Stephan Batman, but settles this sudden geo-
graphic displacement with clarification of Reformist attitudes and anti-Catholic senti-
ment in England vis-à-vis Continental discourse. In the final two essays, Inès
Kirschleger and Christabelle Thouin-Dieuaide discuss Calvinist influences in the earlier
part of the seventeenth century. Part 5 addresses the overarching question, and the
essays ultimately demonstrate authors’ often paradoxical solutions in a religious dis-
course that shifts through the decades. Nadia Cernogora and Gilles Couffignal discover
an intentional distancing from Ronsardian poetics in the second half of the sixteenth
century. Audrey Duru shows that for André Mage, at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, fable can cautiously serve as an experience that leads to a spiritual rebirth.
In Adrienne Petit’s study, Antoine de Nervèze, a Catholic, and Nicolas Des
Escuteaux, a Protestant, exemplify another shift in religious discourse.
Overall, this collection of conference essays reads as a cohesive discussion, with the
minor exception of a few moments in part 4. The fact that this part stands out further
demonstrates the overall cohesion of the collection. For this reason, this anthology’s
strengths lie in the cyclical and focused presentation, and in the ways various contrib-
utors engage discursively.

Jenifer Branton-Desris, Moravian College

doi:10.1017/rqx.2021.178

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.

Scott Newstok.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. xvi + 186 pp. $19.95.

We live in an era of assessment. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the adop-
tion of the Common Core in 2010 together entrenched a program of standardization
and relentless testing for primary and secondary school students; at colleges, students are
met with syllabi headed with lists of “learning outcomes,” the pleonasm serving as a
reassuring if ironic promise of managerial efficiency. “Passing the test,” Scott
Newstok suggests, is increasingly the purpose of education, with the result that we
have begun to forget why we learn in the first place. In How to Think Like
Shakespeare, Newstok encourages us to remember, offering a new argument for the

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 REVIEWS 1045

value of liberal education—and a new program for its practice—by turning to

Shakespeare and the early modern schoolroom.
That schoolroom was no paradise, as Newstok makes clear. It was a place of intense
discipline, physically exhausting and mentally demanding. But its discipline was
directed toward an ambitious end: the mastery of the arts of grammar and rhetoric,
with the flexible powers of thought and expression that came with them. The remark-
able effect of this “apparently inflexible program of study,” argues Newstok, was to pro-
duce “liberated thinking” (xi). For Newstok, the tension between discipline and liberty
is one of a number of false binaries that blinker our thinking about education. Teachers
in the sixteenth century, he argues, knew better than we do that “play emerges through
work, creativity through imitation, autonomy through tradition, innovation through con-
straints, freedom through discipline” (xii).
How to Think Like Shakespeare makes this case over fourteen short, compelling chap-
ters. The first several criticize the prevailing curricular emphasis on assessment and tech-
nical skills. They propose instead a pedagogy rooted in rhetoric, an art that Newstok
suggestively glosses as “the craft of future discourse” (23). The heart of the book exam-
ines the forms that this rhetorical education took, and might take again. Students
learned to imitate with care—in the exacting exercise of double translation, for
instance—so that they might develop an eloquence of their own. They practiced
ethopoeia, writing not what they knew but they imagined others to feel, in an act of
“sympathetic projection” (104). The art of commonplacing built stores of knowledge
and eloquence, and Erasmian copia—which Newstok frames as resourcefulness, “the
ingenuity to make something out of the resources you have” (94)—taught students
to search their mental inventories for the apt thought, the fit expression.
Little of this will be new to scholars of the Renaissance. But the virtue of How to
Think Like Shakespeare is its performance of its central claims: that originality emerges
out of tradition and through imitation; that education is an ongoing conversation with
others, and with the past. Newstok’s prose bristles with quotations (rendered in italics,
rather than inverted commas) that are drawn from a wide and varied reading:
Shakespeare and Cicero and Erasmus, yes, but also Weil and Baldwin and Arendt
and bell hooks. Behind How to Think Like Shakespeare, we are invited to imagine
Newstok’s own commonplace book, the scene of his ongoing encounter with the learn-
ing and literature of the past.
As with any manifesto, there are moments in How to Think Like Shakespeare where a
reader will wish for greater nuance. Newstok’s celebration of the Shakespearean school-
room, for instance, might elicit skepticism from those who recall Shakespeare’s own
frustrations with humanist education. Hamlet, one of Newstok’s touchstones, stages
a number of familiar schoolroom practices: the ethopoeia of the player’s performance
of Hecuba, the in utramque partem framing of “To be or not to be.” Yet these echoes
often seem to be sources of unease, as if they are to blame for Hamlet’s self-alienation: in
learning to play the parts of others with ease, do we forget how to know ourselves? No

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 1046 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXIV, NO. 3

doubt every curriculum has its discontents. Newstok could do more, however, to reckon
with the fact that Shakespeare—the most brilliant product of this curriculum—was also
one of its most penetrating critics.
But this may be asking How to Think Like Shakespeare to be something it is not,
rather than the book that it is: a bracing, witty argument for a pedagogy that is at
once old and new. In his final chapter, Newstok reimagines the liberal arts as “crafts
of freedom,” ways of helping us to “reach our fullest capacities . . . by emulating aspi-
rational models” (151). We can sense the true stakes of Newstok’s book in the utopian
horizon that freedom invokes. But Newstok doesn’t promise utopia. Instead, what he
demonstrates in his playful, infectiously enthusiastic pages is a more modest and more
proximate idea of freedom: the kind that appears in the sheer joy of reading and learn-
ing. That joy, and the freedom it brings, come when we care about what we study. And
no one has ever cared—not really—about a test.

Samuel Fallon, SUNY Geneseo

doi:10.1017/rqx.2021.179

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature.

Candace Barrington and Sebastian Sobecki, eds.
Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
xiv + 220 pp. $24.99.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature provides a useful
introduction to the intersection of law and literature from the Middle Ages. Most of
the relevant issues are covered here: royal authority versus the common law, the tran-
sition from law French to English, the legacy of the Magna Carta, marriage contracts,
the canon and civil law courts, the inheritance from Rome, and the law of treason. Also
included are a number of fascinating essays on how law relates to important medieval
literary topics and works, including the works of the major figures from the period:
William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Malory.
Many of the questions explored here are ones that will be familiar to scholars of early
modern literature. Was the sovereign above the law or was he subject to the law, as early
seventeenth-century jurists such as Sir Edward Coke held? Related to this question, to
what extent were the claims for the immemorial and preeminent character of the com-
mon law made by common-law jurists rooted in actual medieval history? Paul Raffield,
writing on custom and the common law, shows that by the late medieval period, there
already existed a broad consensus that “the will of the prince does not have the force of
law, unless it is compliant with the principles of common law” (47–48). But earlier in
the period, there was considerable disagreement on such issues, especially given the
political inheritances that occurred from the Danish and Norman invasions. One of

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