Building Community with Prison Shakespeare
By Will Nickols
“I went a couple of years not talking to anybody at all…. I had just developed so much hatred for everything and everybody that it bled out to those around me.”
That’s Larry Newton, an inmate serving a life sentence in Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Indiana, describing his first few years in prison. Ten years later, Newton was leading a group of inmates in a discussion about—of all things—Shakespeare: “But what makes Hamlet’s revenge honorable? And what is honor anyways?”
This transformation, recounted in Laura Bates’s book Shakespeare Saved My Life, might sound like one person’s rare stroke of luck. But Prison Shakespeare programs in the United States—groups where inmates read, discuss, analyze, and perform Shakespeare with the assistance of local volunteers—have helped create hundreds of these transformations. In Kentucky’s Shakespeare Behind Bars, Detroit Public Theater’s Shakespeare in Prison program, or the Marin Shakespeare Company’s prison program wing, an inmate might beatbox a song as Ariel from The Tempest, deliver Julius Caesar’s obituary to a crowd of inmates in the prison yard as Antony in Julius Caesar, or flee the murdered Tybalt before police arrive while playing Romeo in an adapted Romeo and Juliet.
This piece considers two questions: Why are volunteers bringing Shakespeare to prison? And why are prisoners embracing it?
Some scholars argue that prisoners embrace Shakespeare because his work provides an opportunity for reflection and change, allowing inmates to compare their motivations and actions to those of Shakespeare’s characters. Other scholars argue Shakespeare provides inmates with a cathartic outlet, enabling them to vent their frustrations with their situation. For example, writing about Cesare deve morire, a film following a production of Julius Caesar in an Italian prison, Shakespeare scholar Maurizio Calbi argues that “there is no doubt that the final cries of ‘freedom, freedom’…by the actors/prisoners powerfully express the desire to escape the unnatural state of the jail.” Conversely, as Dr. Bates recounts in her book, a few people dismiss Prison Shakespeare as just a way for inmates to demonstrate their educational pursuits and good behavior when seeking an early parole from a parole board, rather than a truly meaningful or transformative experience.
It is true that Shakespeare isn’t necessarily popular with each and every inmate. In Cesare deve morire, two inmates who are not in the performance see one of the cast members, Salvatore, reciting his lines on the stairway. Noticing this, they respond, “Instead of doing his time properly, he’s playing the fool!” In Hank Rogerson’s 2005 film Shakespeare Behind Bars, which follows a dozen American inmates in their study and performance of The Tempest, the transition scenes show the majority of inmates lifting weights in the yard, playing volleyball, or shooting billiards, while the smaller group of Shakespeare performers rehearse their lines.
Nor does Shakespeare need to appeal to every person. Some Prison Shakespeare programs have been criticized for embodying the “Shakespeare missionary complex” —in the words of Dawn Monique Williams, “It’s the mobile-unit Shakespeare as it’s going into prison and urbanised communities … perpetuating the idea that to have culture, to be cultured, to be learned, to be educated, you must love and appreciate Shakespeare.” The idea behind these programs should not be, and need not be, the notion that you must love Shakespeare, or that “Shakespeare will ‘improve’ people” because of some innate cultural superiority.
But there are inmates who are drawn to Prison Shakespeare programs, and among this group, two motives come up again and again: finding a community, and solving a creative challenge. In Shakespeare Behind Bars, one member, Gene, ties his participation to the challenge, stating, “I’m doing something I didn’t think I had any possibility of doing … man, I like this play.” Likewise, the newest member, Rick, recounts that after seeing the Shakespeare cast create “this whole other world,” he decided he had to “be a part of something like that.” His involvement came from his appreciation of the creative process.
Similarly, in Cesare deve morire, a creative pursuit drives the members: Salvatore is concerned that he understands his lines but cannot get them across to the audience; Cosimo, Salvatore, and Vincenzo practice their lines in their rooms long past the end of formal rehearsals; and the one scene of major jubilation within the generally grim film comes at the conclusion of their on-stage performance—a sign that their greatest joy comes from completing a challenging task.
Out of these challenges grows a sense of community. When rehearsing the “Beware the Ides of March” scene, the director asks the inmates to use their native dialects. One inmate, Vittorio, begins, “Quiet, all of you, let [the Soothsayer] approach,” but then explains to the director that he has no dialect because he is “a citizen of the world” —a point he proves by recreating an American ballad and a haka dance to the uproarious (and appreciative) laughter of the other inmates.
There’s a similar moment in Shakespeare Behind Bars when the cast is rehearsing the scene in The Tempest in which Miranda learns of her family history. Red (playing Miranda) asks Hal (Prospero), “Sir, are you not my father?” With the director’s nudging, Red explains how he, like Miranda, did not know his family history until he was fifteen. His further reflection, “This part is just perfectly, truly for me,” breaks abruptly with his previous reluctance to play the only female role—so much so that the other members begin to crack jokes until everyone is laughing.
Community and creativity draw the inmates to Shakespeare. Volunteers, on the other hand, are often drawn to run these programs for three different kinds of reasons. First, their work as teachers, theater directors, or scholars means they’ve built up a body of knowledge about Shakespeare that they can and want to share. At the same time, Shakespeare provides an open medium that accommodates many different interpretations—their own and the actors’. Second, they’re excited about the opportunity that Shakespeare, as a dramatist, affords for inmates to act as well to read. With Shakespeare, they can draw on the community-building quality of theater to facilitate friendships that extend outside the program and eventually reduce recidivism. Third, Shakespeare’s challenging language provides a unique educational opportunity, and education has also been shown to reduce recidivism and help former prisoners transition to a life outside of prison—another benefit that volunteers value.
There are many serious problems with our current system of incarceration that Prison Shakespeare programs—and prison education programs generally—don't address. Some might argue that such programs tackle the wrong problem, addressing the experience of people inside prisons when the goal should be to abolish prisons altogether. But while these systems exist, Shakespeare programs can be a way to help prisoners avoid being drawn back into them. The program “Shakespeare Behind Bars,” for example, documents a 6% recidivism rate among participants rate versus the United States’ national 83% average. Documenting other measures of success, public health scholars have found that Prison Shakespeare participants see noticeable improvements in their relationships with other members of the program, their relationships with inmates outside of the program, and their abilities to access outside resources through the program facilitators and volunteers.
Looking at participant commentaries on the experience, it becomes clearer why the particular challenges of Shakespeare’s work contribute to this success. Leonard, a member of the Shakespeare Behind Bars cast, described his revelations while grappling with the role of Antonio in The Tempest:
“You forgive someone because it benefits you … well that’s not the reason to; you forgive someone because it benefits them … but they may take that benefit like Antonio and go off to do something even worse … it’s really hard to find a reason other than the fact that if there is no forgiveness in the world, then there’s just this moral anarchy.”
With such thought-provoking material in the plays, it’s no wonder Shakespeare can help lead to transformation.
Will Nickols is a first-year student at Harvard College, where he plans to major in statistics and biology. In his free time, Will enjoys running, powerlifting, and—of course—reading English literature.
For a further perspective on Shakespeare and prison
The Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare Trilogy, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and starring Dame Harriet Walter, staged Julius Caesar, Henry IV, and The Tempest with an all-female cast and set the plays in a women’s prison, “with inspiration from a collaboration between actors, prisoners, and the production team in partnership with the theater company Clean Break and the York St. John University Prison Partnership Project.” You can learn more here and here about how Dame Harriet and the other actors were inspired by the stories of the incarcerated women they met, and here about why Lloyd chose to set the plays in prison.