Here’s some fabulous news: Shakespeare — as if you didn’t know — is good for you!
Howard Jacobson tells us in a recent column in The Independent says:
“…word is coming out of Liverpool University, where the distinguished English Professor Philip Davis has been working with a group of eminent neuroscientists, that electrodes prove what some of us already knew but had either lost the confidence to argue, or grown commonplace in arguing – namely, Shakespeare is good for the brain.
… the reason Shakespeare is beneficial to the brain is that his syntactical surprisingness, to limit ourselves only to that, creates something like a neural flash of lightning, a positive wave or surge in the brain's activity, triggering a “re-evaluation process likely to raise attention” at the time and stimulate new pathways for the brain thereafter.”