Scott Newstok’s slim book celebrates Shakespeare and his various works. Newstok organizes his book around topics and then manages to find new insights (at least new to me) about what the Bard was thinking about.
In addition, Newstok folds in writings of writers like Borges, Hunter S. Thompson, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Bishop, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner depending on the subject of each chapter. Are you a Shakespeare fan? GRADE: B+
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
What’s Past Is Prologue ix
1 Of Thinking 1
2 Of Ends 13
3 Of Craft 25
4 Of Fit 37
5 Of Place 47
6 Of Attention 55
7 Of Technology 63
8 Of Imitation 73
9 Of Exercises 85
10 Of Conversation 97
11 Of Stock 107
12 Of Constraint 119
13 Of Making 131
14 Of Freedom 141
Kinsmen of the Shelf 153
Thanks and Thanks 165
Index 173
Only of soliloquies and summations.
Bob, to be or not to be…
Not quite sure what his thesis is but I like books about Shakespeare. We have quite a few.
Patti, I have dozens of books on Shakespeare and I couldn’t resist HOW TO THINK LIKE SHAKESPEARE.
I do like Shakespeare. Nothing can top KING LEAR, in my humble opinion. I am not able to think like Shakespeare, but I can write like him, in a way — I’m able to spell my last name a gazillion different ways. — Jerry Howze
Jerry, I admire KING LEAR but its darkness haunts me. My favorite play by Shakespeare is the obscure Troilus and Cressida.
I like Shakespeare too, though I haven’t read all of them by any means. (I got bogged down in the middle of the history plays.) We’ve seen many on Broadway, in London, even in Stratford on Avon. MEASURE FOR MEASURE remains a favorite, along with HAMLET and a couple of others.
Jeff, I’ve seen most of Shakespeare’s plays live or on video. I have a particular fondness for the video version of TWELFTH NIGHT.
HAMLET is my hobby.
Dan, remember “That one may smile and smile and be a villain”?
(Hamlet, act 1 scene 5)
One of my favorite lines!
George, I have only read Shakespeare’s works in passages or in abridged versions. Not the best way to go about it. But I do intend to read my grandfather’s old hardback of the bard’s twelve works in future. It’s been on my mind for a very long time.
Prashant, many of Shakespeare’s plays have been turned into movies. I like to read a Shakespeare play and then watch a movie version of it. It’s fun to see the words come to life!
At school I envied my friends who had English as their second foreign language (the first one was French), they would read Skakespeare’s works while I had to read thousands of years old stuff in Latin.
I only started learning English later and then I was more into “new” stuff like SF.
Much later I read some but mainly watched films (movies for you …) like McBeth and Hamlet – but of course in German translations.
But I don’t think I could learn to think (pun intended) like Shakespeare.
Wolf, I took two years of Latin in High School and one year of Spanish. I struggled with both.