In college, I took a pair of Shakespeare survey courses that taught me two divergent but complementary ways of reading classic fiction. The professor in one class frequently asked us to put ourselves in the characters' shoes'by asking us, for instance, to contemplate how heavy our heads might be if we, like Henry IV, wore the crown, or to imagine ourselves as Juliet on the balcony. The other professor emphasized everything in the plays that was alien to modern ears: how, for example, King Lear's resentful banishment of his daughter Cordelia didn't necessarily read as cruel, because it reflected a world that prized fealty over love. I suspect the second teacher would have been intrigued by a young academic field, the subject of a new Atlantic article by Gal Beckerman, that questions our tendency to see ourselves mirrored in figures of the past. Beckerman focuses on Rob Boddice, a historian who challenges the assumption that 'people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks...
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