Thinking about The Progymnasmata

 One of the many wonders of Scott Newstok’s How to Think like Shakespeare is his account of The Progymnasmata.

Newstok’s book is about thinking. He contends that thinking ought to be a significant part of education. You probably have guessed that I would agree.

The Progymnasmata was a textbook on rhetoric. We’d say it was for students in junior high and high school. It was compiled in the first century of the Common Era. Some of the exercises had been around for centuries.

Rhetoric was perhaps the art in ancient Greece. Life in a Greek polis must have been an extraordinary exercise in influence. Every student of classical Greek is struck by how often the word peitho occurs. The language itself seems to be about persuading others or being persuaded by them.

A polis — that is, a community — is not a collection of buildings. It’s a collection of people, and they are held together by trust. The art of persuading your neighbors was central to Greek life, and they called it “rhetoric.”

To thinkers like Aristotle, it seemed natural that human beings lived in communities. It also seemed natural that they would try to influence each other by persuasion, rather than coercion.

The Progymnasmata’s program for teaching rhetoric is in 14 steps. Students began by retelling fables. They ended by writing arguments in support of legislation.

In between, the students had to learn to write in the voice of other people, including mythological characters. Newstok includes the example of Niobe, who insulted the goddess Leto. Niobe bragged that she had 14 children, while the goddess had only two, Artemis and Apollo. In revenge, Artemis and Apollo, hunters with divine powers, declared open season on Niobe’s children. What would it have been like to have seen child after child die?

Professor Newstok’s point is that earlier generations learned to write from the point of view of others. That was the assignment. Young boys had to try to get into the character of a mature woman who’d lost children and try to find words for her.

Today, young writers are encouraged to write what they know and frequently are discouraged from trying anything else. And so we have men who are fearful of writing in the voice of a woman. And questions about what a person of one race can write about a person of another race are now explosive, even among people who agree that “race” is a conceptual mess.

Shakespeare, by endless practice, learned to “throw his soul” into the body of another person, in the lovely phrase of Elizabeth Montagu.

We admire his ability to empathize with his characters, to find words for women and men, young and old, people who are white and people who are not.

But we don’t think much about why he was able to do that, while we so often cannot.

You might think Professor Newstok’s book is about education. I’m pretty sure it’s primarily about thinking. If you like to think, find this book. It’s pure pleasure.

• Sources: Scott Newstok, How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020.