What We’re Reading This Summer: Shakespeare, of Course

Somewhere in the interlude between Olympiad Day and first-day rosters, when our faculty lounges are slowly being cleared of coffee mugs, red pens, and half-used lesson planners, there is a quieter rhythm to school life—what T.S. Eliot once called “the still point of the turning world.” At Cincinnati Classical Academy, we’re not immune to the allure of summer ease. But we are, perhaps, a little stubborn in our conviction that summer should nourish more than one’s tan. For that reason, we’ve selected two works for our summer faculty and staff reading: Scott Newstok’s How to Think Like Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—as both a reprieve from the quotidian and a reentry into the perennial.

 

This pairing wasn’t made casually. Newstok’s book, published in 2020 to quiet fanfare but lasting relevance, is not a how-to guide so much as a love letter to the life of the mind. Subtitled Lessons from a Renaissance Education, it draws on the Elizabethan classroom to gently (and sometimes sharply) rebuke our present habits of educational shallowness. Newstok is not interested in novelty for novelty’s sake. He is interested in memory, imitation, rhetoric, dialogue, form—in short, the tools that have shaped human thought for centuries. For educators working in the classical tradition, his ideas are less revolutionary than restorative. 

 

He reminds us what we already know, and why it matters.

 

Julius Caesar, meanwhile, needs no introduction, though it always benefits from a second reading—or a seventh. It is a play about power, certainly, but also about persuasion. Brutus, so sure of his republican ideals, believes reason will sway the Roman crowd; Antony, more cunning, knows better. The tragedy is not only in Caesar’s fall, but in the way words—noble, slippery, incendiary—can remake a world. And, by the way, this is also required reading for all freshmen at CLASSICAL as part of their Ancient Literature syllabus.

 

Why these two texts, together, now? Because they sharpen each other. How to Think Like Shakespeare gives us a vision of the kind of education that might have produced a Brutus—or better, that might help a Brutus see more clearly. And Julius Caesar gives us the living stakes of that education, dramatized in all their urgency. For classical educators, this pairing is an invitation to ask not just what we teach, but how and why. What habits of mind are we forming? What kind of citizen, thinker, speaker, or soul are we shaping in the classroom?

 

When faculty and staff return in August to begin preparations for the 2025–26 academic year, these questions will be more than rhetorical. We’ll engage both works in conversation—through discussions, seminars, and perhaps the kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue that happens best in hallways and lunchrooms. The point is not to extract pedagogical tips from Shakespeare, as if he were writing for Edutopia. It is to reacquaint ourselves with the discipline and delight of thinking deeply, of listening to the past, and of carrying it forward with purpose.

 

So, as the summer days stretch out before us, these two books will quietly accompany us—on porches and airplanes, in moments of quiet or caffeination. They are not burdens. They are, as ever, companions.

 

If you are interested in joining us on this summer read, these two books are readily available at your local bookseller.