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April 21, 2020
Scott Newstok's Playlist for His Book "How to Think like Shakespeare"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Scott Newstok's How to Think like Shakespeare is a valuable resource on creativity and growth.
Chapter 16 wrote of the book:
"As a concise history of Western pedagogical development, How To Think Like Shakespeare succeeds beautifully. . . . By the end of How To Think Like Shakespeare, [Newstok] has us thoroughly convinced. To think and create effectively requires one to train and practice. By apprenticing ourselves to the past, we can ourselves become links in the glorious chain of human intellectual achievement."
In his own words, here is Scott Newstok's Book Notes music playlist for his book How to Think like Shakespeare:
How to Think like Shakespeare is my love letter to the craft of thought — a book that ponders what we’ve lost in education today, and how we might begin to recover it. While I draw from Shakespeare’s world and works, I also lift liberally from many other artists past and present, in hopes of inspiring us to recuperate lost habits of mind. This includes a number of musicians, as I know Shakespeare tuned in to them as much as we do.
When “faced with a scholarly book,” Nietzsche instead chose to “to think outdoors walking, leaping, climbing, dancing,” insisting: “Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?” I hope this playlist helps us dance.
Billy Bragg, “Jerusalem” (2011)
Throughout the book, I’ve stitched together an almost endless collection of scattered thoughts and observations into a kind of patchwork, or cento, of passages that have inspired me, with quotations coming “swift as thought,” as Homer used to say. I do this precisely because thinking like Shakespeare means thinking with “each other’s / harvest.” In fact, one of the first epigraphs is a quotation from Virginia Woolf of another quotation: “‘I will not cease from mental fight,’ Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.” Originally written as a preface to Blake’s visionary Milton, and set to music in 1916, “Jerusalem” has become a stirring alternative anthem; Billy Bragg gets the tone right in this live version.
Natalie Merchant, “Topsyturvey-World,” Leave Your Sleep (2010)
The chapter on “fit” recalls that while it’s hard to identify “good fit,” bad fit is obvious. I illustrate this with a satirical 17th-century woodcut, depicting a mis-fit man, his boots on his hands and his gloves on his feet. The world is turned upside down, with “the cart before the horse, and the cat had the dire disaster / To be worried by the mouse.” That’s from Victorian poet William Brighty Rands’s “Topsyturvey-World,” set to music by Natalie Merchant. My neighbor Jim Spake played sax on this same album, a lovely romp through musical genres.
The Bad Plus, “Pound for Pound,” Made Possible (2012)
My friend Scott Samuelson introduced me to this marvelous piece. I wept the first time I heard it, and wept again when I recently saw them perform this in concert. While the early part of the song sounded like their recording, their new pianist, Orrin Evans, took the melody in ecstatically new directions. What a great example of copia, or the humanist ideal of copiously saying the same thing in as many different ways as possible. Another word for copia ought to be “resourcefulness”—the ingenuity to make something out of the resources you have (and being full of resources in the first place). In a fireworks display of verbal agility, Erasmus rang the changes on the phrase tuae litterae me magnopere delectarunt, “Your letter has pleased me greatly,” which he varies through different verbs, adjectives, word order . . . you name it. How many different ways can you say “the same thing”? (He came up with over 140!) copia’s exercises in variation make you appreciate (and expand) the range of possibility, in order to say it (or play) right for the occasion.
John Coltrane, “Greensleeves,” Live At The Village Vanguard (1961)
Michel de Montaigne picked up a centuries-old metaphor for the process of productive artistic digestion. A creator ought to resemble a bee, gathering nectar from many flowers, then transforming it into honey, as bees summarise the garden. The honey metaphor corrects our naive notion that creation consists of making something from nothing. You need stock. John Coltrane concurred: “You’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.” Just listen to him fuse experimental jazz, South Asian melodic modes, Russian music theory, and the ballad “Greensleeves” (already troped by Shakespeare!) and you’ll hear how engaging with the past generates rather than limits. Improvisation contributes to the common stock.
Al Bowlly, “Love Is The Sweetest Thing” (1932)
I teach Shakespeare at Rhodes College, where we’ve been lucky to host director Nick Hutchison for recurrent artistic residencies. When he directed As You Like It in 2013, the finale concluded with Al Bowlly’s moony crooning. In rehearsals, Nick makes actors do exactly what Tudor educator Richard Mulcaster advocated: repeat a speech, varying between intonations “harsh and hard, now smooth and sweet.” Verbal exercises stretch your range, so that when the time comes, you can perform with just the right pitch for The oldest yet, the latest thing.
Felix Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61: VII. Nocturne (2018)
In untold and unanticipated ways, becoming a parent at first unsettled, but eventually trued what I thought about education. I’ll never forget the day my wife and I had a spirit-crushing exchange with our seven-year-old daughter. We inquired whether she had learned any new words that month. This otherwise vivacious child contemplated a moment, looked at us coldly, and whispered: assessment. We had to laugh in bitter recognition; she was right, we’d never uttered that word in our home. But I’ll also never forget attending the Ballet Memphis production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when this incidental music hovered over Titania and Oberon’s reunion, and that same daughter leaned over to whisper to me: “I’m so happy, my eyes are wet.”
Prince, “A Case of You,” Piano & A Microphone (1983; 2018)
I want How to Think like Shakespeare to be handy—in the words of Prince, “a handbook for the brilliant community.” When he died in 2016, it was moving to find fans bidding him adieu with Horatio’s words to Hamlet:
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
The posthumous release of Piano & A Microphone, including this fleetingly intense riff on Joni Mitchell, has been a balm.
“The Strangers’ Case,” The Booke of Sir Thomas More
Can drama help you think your way into other minds? Shakespeare seemed to believe it could, as when Sir Thomas More rebukes the unruly London mob, urging them to imagine themselves in the position of wretched strangers (that is, refugees): Whither would you go? . . . Why, you must needs be strangers . . . what would you think / To be thus used? This speech was recorded by refugees from the International Rescue Committee alongside actors from Shakespeare’s Globe, a “rallying cry for humanity.”
Béla Fleck, “Arkansas Traveler,” Tales from the Acoustic Planet (1995)
This gentle lick opens my friend John Latimer’s weekly public radio program on natural phenomena. John spent his career documenting seasonal changes to flora and fauna along his rural postal delivery route in northern Minnesota. His notebooks spanning four decades track animal migrations, seasonal flowering, changes in the weather. These phenological notes are now being studied by Harvard scientists for evidence of climate change—knowledge in the field. In short, making is thinking. Or, as the editors of the 1623 Folio praised Shakespeare, His mind and hand went together.
Paul Kelly and Alice Keath, Sonnet 73, Seven Sonnets & a Song (2016)
A letter from a former student renewed my appreciation of how empathy can be exercised through verse. Christopher Grubb, now a physician, related how sonnet 73, which he memorized for our class, inspires his approach to patients. The speaker compares his waning life to a tree, shedding its leaves:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
Talk about useless knowledge! Or is it? Shakespeare enacts a double empathy here—that’s to say, the speaker (me) imagines the addressee (thou) imagining the declining speaker: That time of year thou mayst in me behold. (He even tinkers with thought in action, moving from some leaves, then to no leaves, and back to few leaves, recoiling from the brink of his own mortality.) As Australian rocker Paul Kelly explains: “Just about anything you want to say, Shakespeare's said it already.”
Staples Singers, “Uncloudy Day” (1956)
Bob Dylan recounts an epiphany through late-night radio: I remember listening to the Staple Singers’ “Uncloudy Day.” And it was the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard. It was like the fog rolling in. What was that? How do you make that? . . . I felt that life itself was a mystery. This is how one tunes in to the past, dials in to a tradition. As someone who grew up in Dylan’s Duluth and now resides in Mavis’s Memphis, I love that idea of the Staples’ voices reaching him across the airwaves, all the way from the Delta to the top of Highway 61. What a haunting harmonizing!
Bob Dylan “Something There is About You” (Live, 1974)
Like so many creators, Shakespeare and Dylan gather and absorb material from the past, remixing it into something rich and strange. Dylan and Shakespeare have even shared the occasional rhyme. Christopher Ricks, a tireless champion of Dylan’s lyricism, noted that “rhymes for truth are few . . . perhaps the only word into metaphorical relation with which a rhyme can creatively bring truth [is] the word youth,” comparing the first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 to Dylan’s “Something There Is about You,” which “deftly supplements his rhyme of youth and truth with the names of Ruth and Duluth.” Dylan recently confided: “These songs of mine, they’re like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far.” This rollicking tour version lets “the phantoms of my youth” loose.
Joan Armatrading, “Flout Em And Scout Em,” The Tempest Songs (2016)
This cascading song was one of 16 Armatrading was commissioned to compose for the Donmar Warehouse’s indelible trilogy of plays with all-female casts, including Harriet Walter as Prospero. When Caliban cries out for freedom, he falls for a drunk Stephano, who sings, “Thought is free.” As John Berryman points out, “This phrase embodies one of the dramatist’s most daring and schematic ironies.” At this precise moment, Caliban is not free—he’s just transferred his slavery to a new master. Real freedom would demand not only being slave to no man, but being his own master. Armatrading’s fleetingly brief round catches the jaunty delusion of false freedom.
Nina Simone, “How it Feels to be Free” (live at Montreux, 1976)
I close the book by considering an essay James Baldwin composed for the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth: “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” That title hints at many subtle turns — too many to recount fully here. Suffice it to say that Baldwin ultimately aligns Shakespeare with the blues, jazz, and the sorrow songs: “The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density, and its beat: this was the authority of the language which produced me, and it was also the authority of Shakespeare.” And I can’t think of a better instance of such candor, irony, density and beat than in this performance, which oscillates between tenderness and fury . . . and all the shadings in between.
Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.
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