Sean Keilen, professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz, founding director of Shakespeare Workshop, and author of Shakespeare Scholars (Princeton University Press, 2026), joins moderator and Graham School instructor Chris Jones to draw three lessons from the liberal arts out of Shakespeare’s plays. The conversation opens with a foundational question: what does it mean to be a scholar in Shakespeare’s world? Keilen argues that in plays from Hamlet to Love’s Labour’s Lost, scholarship is less a credential than a state of mind, defined by intellectual pride and a resistance to human mortality. Ferdinand of Navarre’s academy and Prospero’s pursuit of the liberal arts in The Tempest both illustrate how learning can be driven by the desire for fame rather than genuine human flourishing. Keilen traces the phrase “liberal arts” back to its classical roots as seven areas of study distinct from the servile arts, and shows how Prospero’s arc models adult learning: not the accumulation of power, but the relinquishing of it.
The conversation moves through Hamlet and the three scholarly minds Shakespeare places there: Horatio, who reaches for historical precedent in the face of mystery; Hamlet, who abandons prior wisdom and commits to passionate certitude; and Polonius, whose misapplied knowledge becomes a running joke with a fatal punchline. The discussion turns to the state of humanities education today, with Keilen arguing that research university priorities have crowded out the older purpose of the liberal arts as an end in themselves. Audience questions address Shakespeare’s accessibility over time, theater companies and the question of trusting audiences with ambiguity, and how younger readers encounter Shakespeare through classroom and stage. The conversation closes on Shakespeare’s characters caught between incompatible social roles as the source of something like the modern sense of self.
Lecturer bio:
Sean Keilen is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz and the founding director of Shakespeare Workshop, a center dedicated to the contemplation and enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays with people from all walks of life. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts (Princeton 2026). Before that, he wrote or edited books and essays about Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the absorption of the classical tradition by writers in early modern England. Professor Keilen is also the Head of Dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a professional theater company founded in 1981.
