Scholars in Shakespeare, with Sean Keilen

Shakespeare famously never attended university. But not only has his work inspired generations of scholarship, his plays, too, are filled with scholarly characters. Shakespeare, it seems, took an interest in learning.

Perhaps that’s why so many people come to Shakespeare for wisdom that they can apply to their own lives. While leading the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Shakespeare Workshop, professor anddramaturg Sean Keilen noticed that people look to Shakespeare and the humanities to answer questions like “Who am I? Why am I here? And how should I live?”

Keilen’s book, Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts, illustrates how learned characters from Hamlet, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and The Tempest more can guide us to those answers —some through their wisdom, and others through their own flawed judgment.

In this episode, Keilen shares vital lessons from Shakespeare’s fictional scholars in humility, self-knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, forging connection with others.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 30, 2026. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by Sarah Lai Stirland in Santa Cruz and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Megan Fraedrich. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Sean Keilen is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also directs Shakespeare Workshop, a research center that promotes Shakespeare scholarship, community engagement, and theatrical performance. He is author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and the coeditor of Shakespeare: The Critical Complex and The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature. He is also head of dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a longstanding professional theater company.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger Director.

Here at the Folger, we spend a lot of time talking about how Shakespeare and the humanities can be useful in everyday life. We believe Shakespeare’s plays can help us think through some of the biggest questions we face right now.

That’s also the mission of today’s guest. Sean Keilen teaches Early Modern literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

He’s also Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a professional theater company. And he founded Shakespeare Workshop, a collaboration between UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Shakespeare that presents lectures, discussions, and activities open to the public.

It was in those sessions that Keilen realized that the theater-going public came to Shakespeare looking for ideas they could apply in their own lives.

That insight led to Keilen’s latest book, Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons From the Liberal Arts.

In it, he looks at the play’s scholarly characters to learn what lessons Shakespeare might have for academics like him.

Here is Sean Keilen in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

——————-

BARBARA BOGAEV: I was thinking, when you think about Shakespeare’s characters, scholars aren’t the first thing that leaps to mind. Were scholars and scholarship a real preoccupation of his?

SEAN KEILEN: Yes, I certainly believe that they were. It’s true that if you look at Shakespeare’s plays, what you tend to see are aristocrats and, among men, a lot of soldiers, and sometimes those two positions are combined in one character.

The scholar in Shakespeare isn’t so much a job, although there are schoolmasters who would count as scholars.

I think the scholar, for Shakespeare, is really a state of mind: a state of mind about the self and about other people, and about the way to use language that comes from having a little learning and from being changed by the learning that one has acquired.

BOGAEV: And that, I think, comes out of the history of scholars and scholarship and the academy, and we’re going to get into that.

But I was also thinking, maybe does it have anything to do with the “Upstart Crow” issue? That he didn’t go to university like so many of his contemporaries?

KEILEN: You’re right, he didn’t go to university. On the other hand, the grammar school education that his works clearly show that he had was much more rigorous than what we would call a “grammar school education” now.

Yes, absolutely, I would say that his depiction of the scholar and of scholarship as a way of life is downstream from a broader critique about intellectual pride and the misuse of wit in his plays more generally.

BOGAEV: Well, Love’s Labor’s Lost is the play that really takes these issues on directly. It’s not well-known though. So first, could you just remind us what it’s about?

KEILEN: Yes, it’s about 10,000 different things, so I’ll try to be concise.

The play opens with a young, unmarried King of Navarre called Ferdinand resolving to establish an academy, and he and three of his unmarried male courtier friends swear an oath to refrain from sleep, refreshment, and the company of women for three years.

And what is the purpose of doing this? The purpose is to become so famous that their eventual deaths later in life will become irrelevant. It’s a way of cheating death because they’ll be so famous for their virtuous and ascetic living.

After they swear these oaths to each other, they immediately start breaking their promises. The play makes them break their promises over and over again, each time experiencing tremendous shame that they haven’t been able to keep their word, their academic oath.

BOGAEV: And comedy.

KEILEN: And comedy, right. And each time, they persuade themselves through ingenious and increasingly perverse ways of using language that in breaking their oaths, they’ve actually kept them.

And this cycle repeats three or four or five times in the play until, just at the moment where their shame at having broken their promises to be scholars becomes so excruciating that you can’t imagine a solution to it, a character comes in from offstage and announces that the King of France is dead.

And with that sort of reality check, the acknowledgment that death is a real phenomenon and can’t be cheated, they swear new oaths. But this time, they swear oaths to the women that they’re in love with, and they sort of abolish the academy and embrace a future around marriage and productive social bonds.

BOGAEV: So, it sounds like a lot of it is about vanity and overreach of scholars.

KEILEN: Yes, that’s the hard edge of it. I think that Shakespeare is very interested in the way that these scholars come to experience themselves as inherently superior to other characters in the play: women, lower class men, and so forth, and to take them, those sorts of people, as objects of ridicule.

But that hard edge of the criticism, if you want to call it that, is backed by a typically Shakespearean compassion that these four young men are afraid of death. They’re afraid of growth and change. They’re afraid of not living a significant enough life. That’s very clear from the first scene of the play, at least in the character of Ferdinand, who sets the academy in motion.

And so it applies mockery to antisocial behavior, but it also insists that the audience recognize that the target of the mockery is a human being just like us—that is, a mortal being intent on escaping from the reality of mortality.

BOGAEV: And they are really individuated characters, and they have different approaches to scholarship.

You point out that, on the one hand, there’s Ferdinand and his well-known speech about “the academy’s purpose is to make scholars famous.” But then you have his friend, Berowne, who has a different vision of the purpose of scholarship, and he’s very different from Ferdinand. He’s very witty and light and outgoing. So, what is his understanding or his approach to learning?

KEILEN: Initially, Berowne objects to the terms of the academy entirely. He says, “This is not the right season of life for us as young men to be swearing off rest, sleep, and the company of women,” right?

BOGAEV: Right. To become monks.

KEILEN: Yeah. He says, “I like everything in its season,” and in this season, he says, “Green geese are a-breeding,” right?

And that sort of pushes Ferdinand to the breaking point and says, “Well, if you’re not willing to take the oath, then get you home,” and Berowne chooses the friendship and the community of the other scholars over his reservations about the academy altogether.

And from that point in the play, you see him become sort of the embodiment of all that is tremendous about scholarship in the play, and all that is quite ridiculous and snobbish.

BOGAEV: And you just said this word, “friendship,” which is significant because you write that, “The purpose of scholarship historically is bound up with friendship.” So, trace that history for us.

KEILEN: The root of the word “college” is collegium, which means a place that people come together for refreshment.

But more generally in the book, for example, in the essay I write about Hamlet, I try to reveal that it was normal to think of the writings of ancient authors, especially wisdom authors, as life companions or as friends.

This was a prominent way of referring to the relationship between a book and a reader, especially in the context of Renaissance humanism. In this way of thinking, books offer candid criticism from the past of the way that we live in the present, and that that is, on the one hand, the center of their utility for us, but also the very essence of their friendship with us.

BOGAEV: So, that learning becomes more like a conversation?

KEILEN: Yes. I mean, we tend to think of books as static objects that are silent and that we can do things with. But as I often tell my students here at UC Santa Cruz, it’s better to think of a book neither as a living person in the way that we are, nor as a merely inanimate object, but to think of it as a kind of virtual person, who is capable of revealing you to yourself in very strange ways, provided that you approach it in the right way.

BOGAEV: Wow. What do your students say back to you when you deliver that chunk of wisdom?

KEILEN: I think they look puzzled. And I mean, one of the great things about undergraduates right now, the cohort that went through the pandemic and—in high school, they went through the pandemic and did all of their reading on Chromebooks and all of the rest of it—they have a real appetite to immerse themselves in physical books and in challenging books, and in books that resist the natural tendency of every reader to make what’s strange instantaneously familiar.

So it’s actually a very good time to be teaching them in the way that I try to.

BOGAEV: Oh, interesting. So, you really see a difference from before the pandemic? That’s… wow.

KEILEN: Most certainly.

BOGAEV: And a positive one.

So, I think this is a theme that we’re going to come back to, I think, in the course of this conversation, about how the academy is so insular. And theater, say, is community and turns you towards other people, and is another way… or that’s the modality that maybe the academy is really missing?

KEILEN: Yes, certainly one of my interests in the three plays or four plays that I write about in the book is the way that the scholar protagonists of each play retreat from what you might call common life—life with other people—into a special world of their own creation; experience many frustrations, ordeals, humiliations there; and eventually exit from the special world that they have created for themselves into the sphere of common life again, into relationships with other people.

And the example of Hamlet is much more complicated maybe than the example of Love’s Labor’s Lost. But it’s the same sort of arc of movement away from other people and back toward other people through very challenging experiences.

BOGAEV: Yes. Let’s talk about Hamlet, another one of Shakespeare’s scholars. You hone in on a declaration that he makes after he finds out from the ghost that his uncle murdered his father, and Hamlet then says that he will obliterate all traces of the books that have made an impression on him.

[CLIP from the Folger Audio edition of Hamlet, with Zach Appelman as Hamlet.]

HAMLET: Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.

BOGAEV: Now, how do you interpret this speech and this idea of renouncing his books?

KEILEN: So, it is a pivotal moment in the play, although it happens very early, at the end of Act 1. And as you just very nicely summarized, what Hamlet announces that he’s doing is that, having heard what the ghost has to say, he is erasing his commonplace book, in effect—also called the “bosom book” in Shakespeare’s period because it was carried in a pocket inside a jacket next to the heart.

So he’s abandoning all of the wise sayings he’s ever written down, arguably for the purpose of living through existential challenges, and in their place, he’s going to hold fast to what he calls the ghost’s “commandment.”

So, in place of everything that he’s learned about how to live, instead he’s just going to remember, “Remember me,” and perhaps beyond that, what the ghost has told him about the circumstances of Hamlet’s father’s death.

That is the beginning of Hamlet’s somewhat indifferent career as a revenger. What Shakespeare does in this play, as everybody who’s ever seen it knows, is to show Hamlet refraining from killing his uncle for a very long time.

I think when you focus on the fact that his delay starts with him erasing his commonplace book, you can come to see the tragedy as a tragedy of Hamlet overcoming his wisdom and, in fact, becoming a murderer.

He’s overcoming the skepticism that that wisdom tradition he’d recorded in his commonplace book would have cultivated in him.

BOGAEV: So, this is another variation on insulating and isolating yourself from other minds, in that he renounces scholars and scholarship and all of the wisdom of the ages–the adages and the quotes that you would write down in your commonplace book?

KEILEN: Yes. In cutting himself off from the wisdom tradition, he’s also cutting himself off from the people who love him: his mother, Ophelia, and his best friend, Horatio.

BOGAEV: Yeah, and you say that Hamlet’s friend Horatio, who was also his school friend or his university friend, that he’s also a scholar, but a very different kind of scholar than Hamlet. So how does he differ? And I suppose you see it in the text in his reaction to the play, but also to his reaction to the ghost, right?

KEILEN: Yes. At the start of the play, the soldiers on the battlements who have seen the ghost call upon Horatio, who is a scholar, to help them interpret this mystery that has occurred. Horatio has a number of different suggestions about what the appearance of the ghost might mean.

In essence, he tries to contextualize the ghost’s appearance historically. First, in relation to the near present, there appears to be a war brewing between Denmark and Norway, and maybe the ghost is a manifestation of that calamity that’s about to occur.

And then he moves further back in time and remembers that on the eve of the assassination of Julius Caesar, graves stood tenantless and corpses gibbered in the streets.

And so Horatio’s approach to the enigma of the ghost is to take the wonder out of it to a certain extent by showing that it’s not unprecedented, and that even though it probably means something very serious, it nevertheless has a context which explains it.

BOGAEV: So, Horatio here is being skeptical and rational and falling back on his history and his books and being dispassionate, as opposed to Hamlet, who’s all about passion and also self-involvement. Is that the contrast you see there?

KEILEN: That’s a very nice way of putting it. That Horatio is dispassionate and Hamlet is passionate.

When the ghost begins speaking to Hamlet in their private conversation, Hamlet and the audience are the only people who ever hear what the ghost has to say directly about the circumstances of Hamlet’s father’s murder.

One of the most fascinating things about that scene between Hamlet and the ghost is that the ghost begins to use words and metaphors and imagery that Hamlet has used in his first soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 2, and that no other character in the play will use.

For example, the only two characters who ever refer to the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude as “bestial” are Hamlet and the ghost, which strongly suggests that Hamlet is hearing what he has already concluded at the level of his feelings, and the ghost is playing that back to him for one reason or another.

BOGAEV: You have a great way of describing this. You say that “It’s as if Hamlet is talking to himself in a mirror, but he doesn’t know it when he’s talking.”

KEILEN: Doesn’t recognize his own reflection. Yeah, that is kind of the way that I see it.

As opposed to Horatio, who is much more tentative about reaching a conclusion about what the ghost means, and that dynamic between them repeats at the end of The Mousetrap.

When Claudius leaves The Mousetrap before the performance is over in Act 3, Hamlet concludes that his departure clearly, explicitly, and unequivocally confirms that he is a murderer, and Horatio will not go there with him.

All that he will say is that he noted the king when he left, and that his departure was therefore noteworthy. But he draws no conclusions from it because he doesn’t know what it means.

BOGAEV: So, Hamlet is operating as a scholar, say, in this echo chamber of his own mind, and Horatio, it sounds like, is working with all the tools at hand and also a good dose of skepticism.

And then you have Polonius, who a lot of people just laugh at, and I love that you quote Coleridge: “Polonius is a man of maxims…. And a man of maxims is [only] like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head.”

KEILEN: Yeah, poor old Polonius. I mean, I do have a lot of… you know, seeing productions of Hamlet and then studying Hamlet in school myself, and then coming to teach Hamlet eventually, I was very inclined to think of him and everything he says as clownish. There is something—

BOGAEV: He is played that way.

KEILEN: He certainly is played that way. There is something ludicrous about him. He’s a foil for Hamlet’s own search for the truth in the play. Polonius is trying to get to the bottom of Hamlet’s madness, which is parallel to Hamlet’s attempt to get to the bottom of his father’s murder or to the deception of his uncle.

And so, when you look at Hamlet from the perspective of Polonius, I think you’re meant to see that there is something ridiculous about Polonius. But that he’s also… there’s also something potentially ludicrous about the way Hamlet is pursuing the truth. The parallelism works both ways.

A discovery for me sort of going back over the long critical tradition on Hamlet is that, while almost from the beginning of the critical tradition in the 18th century, Polonius is recognized as a clownish figure, a person about whom Shakespeare is making fun, the things that he says, especially his long speech full of wise sayings to his son Laertes when Laertes is embarking for France—those precepts were regarded as golden.

So that is a distinction modern Shakespeare scholarship has lost, I think: The difference between the value of what Polonius says and the person who says it or the reasons why he’s saying it. But we should not conclude, I believe, that because he is foolish, the wisdom that he articulates is foolish.

In other words, we shouldn’t get on Hamlet’s bandwagon and conclude that society is so corrupted by people like Claudius that we simply can’t and should not turn to wisdom for some kind of guidance for living in such a world.

BOGAEV: Though in the end, you write that the wisdom for us in Hamlet comes into focus in comparing these different scholars– but you call them readers in this context: Hamlet, Horatio, and Polonius. So how does the comparison of those three speak to the liberal arts or the study of literature today?

KEILEN: Generally speaking, I think that the way we educate now in the humanities is meant to empower students to act on convictions, and, through acting on convictions, to change the world. Nothing wrong with that.

The downside of it is that conviction is often a state of mind in which one becomes immune to the challenge and interest of other points of view. It’s a form of certitude about the way things are or should be that rejects conversation with other ways of seeing things. And that’s Hamlet in a nutshell, right?

Horatio, although he’s a very strange character in the play— he doesn’t have very many lines, although he’s often present. But at the end of the play, he steps forward and tells everybody that he can offer a truthful account of everything that has happened in the play, and he has a marvelous speech to that effect.

I mean, one of the most amazing things about this play is that, at the end, the people in the room with Hamlet and Horatio who have seen Gertrude be poisoned, Laertes die of a poisoned sword, Hamlet kill Claudius, and Hamlet then himself die from a poisoned wound—none of those people understand that Claudius killed Hamlet’s father. None of the people who witnessed that massacre understand what the root cause of the massacre really was.

So, the presumption is that Horatio is going to share that information with the people who listen to his speech after the end of the play.

But knowing what we know about Horatio at that point, he is presumably also going to say something about Hamlet’s melancholy and insanity that will contextualize what happened in a way that Hamlet would not have done.

And then as for Polonius, Polonius is a kind of figure for people like me right now in the university, that despite our best efforts to transmit the past to the present in the hopes that it will be useful as some kind of wisdom for living, we are fatally concerned with our own expertise and potentially hopelessly out of touch with what our students actually want or need.

So, the play is full of scholars. None of them are in a totally ideal position for contemporary scholars, but I end up resting on Horatio because he is the scholar who tries most to be at the service of the truth and is most skeptical about the conclusions that he himself draws.

BOGAEV: You’re making me really feel for you as a teacher of literature in a time when the liberal arts are under attack, that you feel like Polonius.

KEILEN: Thank you for saying that. One of the downsides of being on the receiving end of eye-watering hostility, if you want to call it that, from the public sphere and currently from the federal government, is that it puts all scholars in the humanities in a defensive position. And I don’t think we do our best work as teachers or writers or readers when we’re in a position of defending shrinking territory.

And so, in a way, I tried to model in the book a different spirit of engagement. To the best of my ability, I try to model the lessons about the scholarly state of mind that Shakespeare’s plays appear to offer us.

I try to be humble, I try to show that I am seeking wisdom, I try to know myself through the readings of Shakespeare’s plays that I offer in order to get out of that position of being Polonius right now and become some other kind of figure. Because I think an interesting contrast case to the scholars in Hamlet is Rosalind from As You Like It.

BOGAEV: Yes, who you say—and others—she’s like a foil to Hamlet.

KEILEN: Most certainly. So, Shakespeare is writing Hamlet and As You Like It almost within the same year, and I think he develops in Rosalind habits of mind that are quite different from the habits of mind that Hamlet exemplifies or the scholars in Love’s Labor’s Lost exemplify.

You can see it in the way the two plays are constructed. Hamlet has many long-winded soliloquies in which we develop a sense of intimacy with him and his griefs and grievances.

BOGAEV: And Rosalind’s all about conversation.

KEILEN: That’s right. She has not a soliloquy in the entire play. You only ever see her in conversation with other people and growing and changing in conversation with them. And by virtue of exposing herself to those risks of conversation—and remember, she’s in disguise for a big chunk of the play as a boy called Ganymede. That’s a risk for her as a young, unmarried girl in a forest.

By exposing herself to the risk of conversation with other people, she is also able to help them to grow and change into different versions of themselves. And I think that’s a clear alternative to the way Shakespeare models scholarly life in Hamlet.

BOGAEV: And you’re saying that’s a parallel or a lesson for us today too?

KEILEN: Well, yeah, we got to get out there. Professors have got to get off campus and into the communities that they serve. Especially those of us who teach at public universities and are, by definition, public servants.

BOGAEV: What do these lessons that we’re talking about from Shakespeare, from Shakespeare’s plays about scholars grappling with the meaning and purpose of liberal arts, what do they mean to us today?

KEILEN: So, if I could start to answer that question by speaking somewhat personally, around the time that I moved to UC Santa Cruz and joined the Literature department here, I really felt stuck in questions and topics that I had come to feel were esoteric.

The things I was thinking about, the things I was writing about, were very far from the existential concerns of, say, Shakespeare’s plays, and very, very far from the experiences I’d had in a liberal arts college that had moved me to become a teacher of literature to begin with.

In short, I had been professionalized, and the way that I had been professionalized was to believe that the purpose of the literary criticism I was engaged in was to reconstruct the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, and/or in which his plays were seen for the first time, rather than engaging in literary criticism for the purpose of demonstrating how reading Shakespeare or seeing Shakespeare had changed some fundamental thing for me, right?

Now don’t get me wrong. This whole conversation has been a demonstration of how important it is to know something about history when you’re reading an old author like Shakespeare. You cannot do right by the past without knowing how strange it is.

But when the purpose of literary criticism comes to be historical inquiry, when you’re holding a play so far away from yourself that you can no longer feel the claim that it makes on your own experience, something is amiss, and that is where I was when I came to Santa Cruz. Now, when I came to Santa Cruz, I lucked into having an opportunity to work with Santa Cruz Shakespeare, which is a professional theater company that has been performing Shakespeare here every summer for the past 45 years.

And in working with the actors and directors there and working with their audiences in all sorts of public programming over the years, I realized that while all of those people, like me, are interested in history, they’re curious about Shakespeare’s period, the way he was educated, and so on and so forth—that for them, there were much more fundamental questions on the table every time they went to the theater. For example: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I love, or how should I live?

And I needed to learn how to engage them, these audiences, in the conversation that they wanted to have in order to fulfill my role as a public servant and as a volunteer member of this acting company, and it was in doing that that I sort of rediscovered why the liberal arts are important.

So, working with Santa Cruz Shakespeare has shown me that my work as a scholar can be a contribution to an open-ended aesthetic experience shared by many people, and where my job is not to have the final word, or to stake a claim to intellectual authority, or to enter into the kind of gladiatorial combat of peer-reviewed publication.

And so this is a long-winded answer to your question, but I think the lesson for literary studies, the lesson for the humanities in general, is that they are for making relationships with other people who don’t already share your point of view, and in that way, really experiencing what we think of as human life: engagement with other people.

BOGAEV: Those are prescriptions for the academy. That’s what I’m hearing. That the academy should value scholars’ public-facing work more rather than just publish, publish, publish in academic publications.

KEILEN: Certainly, I agree with all of that. We need to share our research and teaching with the public in ways that we don’t now, because it’s not rewarded or it’s regarded as intellectually unsophisticated to do so. But I would say the root of the problem is that English—that is, literary criticism in English—has only been a discipline for about 100 years, and it has not ever been comfortable with its status as a discipline. As a result, it has really doubled down in countless ways on the distinction between the scholar and the so- called layperson.

I’m not suggesting that people who go to school for a long time don’t learn valuable things that they can then share with people who chose other walks of life. I mean, that is the essence of a relationship between teachers and students.

But I am saying that people like me tend instinctively to overestimate the difference between us and people who don’t work as scholars in universities. That is the essence of what Shakespeare has sort of revealed to me about myself in midlife, and I would not have discovered it if I hadn’t had a job, ironically enough, in the university that put me in contact with the Shakespeare-loving public.

BOGAEV: Well, I’m so glad you do that work and also that you wrote this book. Thank you.

KEILEN: Thank you, Barbara.

——————–

KARIM-COOPER:  That was Sean Keilen, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Shakespeare Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts is out now from Princeton University Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Sarah Lai Stirland in Santa Cruz and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps others find the show.

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