Better Thinking & Incentives: Lessons From Shakespeare
Reading Time: 6 minutes
At Farnam Street, we aim to master the best of what other people have figured out. Not surprisingly, it’s quite a lot. The past is full of useful lessons that have much to teach us. Sometimes, we just need to remember what we’re looking for and why.
Life can be overwhelming. It seems like there’s a new technology, a new hack, a new way of doing things, or a new way we need to be every five minutes. Figuring out what to pay attention to is hard. It’s also a task we take seriously at Farnam Street. If we want to be a signal in the noise, we have to find other signals ourselves.
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David George Moore
It’s been my privilege to be in the personal spaces of several writers. Among others, Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz warmly welcomed me at his home on Martha’s Vineyard as did William F. Buckley at his place on Long Island Sound.
I have interviewed over 200 authors. Everyone has their own style with reading, capturing what they have read, research, and then writing. As I writer myself, I have settled on an approach I feel comfortable with.
Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. Among other works, he is the author of the recently released How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education. How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Skills for Scholars): Newstok, Scott: 9780691227696: Amazon.com: Books
To coincide with the publication of
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, we talked to some of the contributors of the volume. We asked them what they hope students and teachers would gain from their chapter, and where they hope the field will go in the future. Read on for their responses…
Scott Newstok, Rhodes College
Chapter: How to Think Like Ira Aldridge
What we can learn from the first black Shakespearean to achieve international professional renown? From 1825 until 1867, Aldridge toured throughout Europe. Just before his death, he was on the cusp of a return to his native United States. His cosmopolitan life was marked by triumphs as well as persistently racist responses to his roles. My chapter surveys seven of Ira Aldridge’s strategies for succeeding on the nineteenth-century stage: