Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

“How to Think Like Shakespeare” by Scott Newstok

By Glynn Young 2 Comments


In the mid-1990s, when email was all the rage and the World Wide Web was making its commercial appearance, a friend who was something of an IT guru told me about the DIKW pyramid, sometimes called the DIKW hierarchy. He explained how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes wisdom.

I confess I didn’t take this too seriously. Even this early in the IT revolution, I was already skeptical about the heaven on earth promised by proponents of information technology. I was less concerned about how data leads to wisdom and more concerned with how the technology could be used and how it was likely to change everything, for good and for bad. Twenty-five years later, if the hierarchy was accurate, then we should be drowning in wisdom, which we clearly are not. We may have more data, more information, and more knowledge, but somehow wisdom has decoupled from the train, assuming it was even there in the first place.

I was reminded of my quarter-century-old conversation while reading the excellent How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education by Scott Newstok. Newstok cites the work of Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University who was discouraged by his students repeating his lectures back to him without understanding scientific inquiry. He invited colleagues to his seminar to discuss what they didn’t know.

According to Newstok, Firestein discovered that it isn’t information that generates knowledge, but informed ignorance. “Mere data transmission doesn’t induce deep learning. It’s the ability to interact, to think hard thoughts in the presence of other people.”

So much for the DIKW hierarchy, unless the “I” stands for ignorance. And knowledge doesn’t automatically lead to wisdom.

How to Think Like Shakespeare is indeed about how William Shakespeare envisioned, researched, and wrote his plays. But it is something more than that. It is a book about thinking and education, and how we generally do both rather poorly. “Education isn’t merely accumulating data; machines can memorize far more, and far less fallibly, than humans,” Newstok says. He builds a bridge to the world of Shakespeare, explaining how students at the time were trained to think. It’s something of an alien world compared to that of our own day, when education at all levels seems more obsessed with training for future employment, being relevant, and attempting to help us harness and ride the great engine (or god) of Change.

In 14 relatively short chapters, Newstok uses Shakespeare, his life, and his writings to address various aspects of thinking and education. These include ends, craft, fitness, place, attention, technology, imitation, conversations, and more. He tells a fascinating, readable story, and he succinctly makes an impressive case. We’re doing a lot of education wrong, and Shakespeare can help us a path forward.

Scott Newstok

Newstok is the author of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance and Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epigraphs Beyond the Tomb. He’s served as the editor of Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare and Paradise Lost: A Primer. He is the director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

How to Think Like Shakespeare isn’t a how-to manual about thinking and education. It won’t teach us to write a 21st-century version of Macbeth or Henry V. But it does force us to consider how we educate and for what purpose. And it says a better alternative is ours to grasp, if we’re courageous enough to pursue it.

I was right to be skeptical about the DIWK hierarchy.

Photo by Eric, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

__________________________

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • Poets and Poems: Alison Blevins and “Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?” - July 1, 2025
  • Poets and Poems: Paul Pastor and “The Locust Years” - June 26, 2025
  • What Happened to the Fireside Poets? - June 24, 2025

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Shakespeare

Try Every Day Poems...

Comments

  1. L.L. Barkat says

    December 11, 2020 at 5:00 pm

    This sounds fabulous, Glynn.

    (And I am thinking that the hierarchy needs a little Tweetspeak in its pyramid 😉 ).

    Reply
    • Glynn says

      December 11, 2020 at 5:47 pm

      Yes! I agree!

      I think I’m always suspicious of anything that provides a simple explanation, like the DIKW hierarchy.

      I always frowned whenever someone mentioned Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” the supposed theory of human motivation that sounds eminently logical, starting with meeting basic needs of survival and moving up to self-actualization and transcendence. It sounded too good to be be true. When he proposed it in 1943, psychologists and others pointed out there was virtually no scientific basis to it, which Maslow acknowledged. But it sounded true, and it was catchy, so it became ingrained in popular psychology and even a lot of human resources theory.

      Where’s what they don’t tell you. Maslow looked at what he called the “master race” of people — Einstein, etc. — and the top 1% of college students. And even then, his methodology was faulty. He would have been better off including poetry somewhere in there.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our June Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Katie Spivey Brewster on What Happened to the Fireside Poets?
  • Dheepa R. Maturi on “108”: An Ecothriller by Former Poet Laura Dheepa Maturi
  • Dheepa R. Maturi on “108”: An Ecothriller by Former Poet Laura Dheepa Maturi
  • Megan Willome on “I Am the Arrow”: Sarah Ruden Tells Sylvia Plath’s Story

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Browse by Topic

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy