“And I will undertake all these to teach”

Sean Keilen’s Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts may be the best book about liberal education that I’ve ever read. Keilen maintains throughout the book a double focus. Focus one is Shakespeare’s portrayal of scholars in three plays, and the lessons they must learn about the relationship between scholarship and life. The first play under consideration is Love’s Labor’s Lost, in which we see four young men declare themselves emancipated from non-scholarly concerns – from politics, from marriage, from society altogether – and withdraw into a purely scholarly world. During the course of the play, they learn some difficult lessons about their own humanity. Keilen: “Love’s Labours Lost is a sustained reflection on obscure motives and intractable states of mind that lead scholars to believe they are, or must become, different from and better than everybody else – even though, as Shakespeare’s suggests repeatedly, this alienating belief is vain and foolish and exposes…