Prison Shakespeare

For These Deep Shames and Great Indignities

Rob Pensalfini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137450210
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the development of the global phenomenon of Prison Shakespeare, from its emergence in the 1980s to the present day. It provides a succinct history of the phenomenon and its spread before going on to explore one case study the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble's (Australia) Shakespeare Prison Project in detail. The book then analyses the phenomenon from a number of perspectives, and evaluates a number of claims made about the outcomes of such programs, particularly as they relate to offender health and behaviour. Unlike previous works on the topic, which are largely individual case studies, this book focuses not only on Prison Shakespeare's impact on the prisoners who directly participate, but also on prison culture and on broader social attitudes towards both prisoners and Shakespeare.

1

Introduction

‘It’s like these words were written just for me. This is how I felt.’

The third day of our project began much like the previous ones. Buzz at the gate and announce we were here for ‘Shakespeare’, wait for the magnetic lock to be released, and then walk a hundred metres down a gap in multiple rolls of razor-wire to reception. After having our fingerprints scanned and filling in visitor passes, we put our shoes and loose belongings, scripts, pens (no phones, food or liquids allowed) on the x-ray belt, and walked in turn through the metal detector, then the man-traps, where we once again had our fingerprints scanned. There was no random drug test today, and the dogs had not been brought in to sniff us, as they occasionally were. The four of us chatted until a guard arrived to let us through one heavy steel door into a tiny passage. Off to one side was the visitors’ side for non-contact visits, open booths where they could talk through glass to a prisoner on the other side. But we were destined for the space that lay beyond the second heavy steel door, the contact visits area. Most of the shed-like space was occupied by metal tables, each with four chairs attached, and each structure bolted to the concrete floor. One chair at each table was painted red, which is where a prisoner would sit during his visit. But at one end was a relatively open space, the children’s play area, with murals on one wall. There was a toilet at one end, but prisoners were not allowed to use it. This space would be our laboratory, our rehearsal room, and eventually our stage. For a few hours a day, a few days a week, it became a space unlike any other in the prison.

A further wait ensued while the prisoners were rounded up and then processed one at a time into the space from the other side. This particular year, prisoners were strip-searched coming into and going out of the space. They were understandably a little edgy once they arrived, though they seemed glad to see us and as always treated us like guests in their home.

For the first two days we had played games, mostly drawn from the Theatre of the Oppressed (especially see Boal, 1992). Through these we had come to know one another a little, in terms of what motivated us, what our desires, fears and to some extent our backgrounds were. This third day was the day we introduced Shakespeare. We had selected a speech for each of the participants based on what we had gleaned about them in the first two days. It was an intuitive and speculative exercise, not a biographical one. We chose speeches that felt ‘right’ for what we knew about each participant on encountering them, that we intuitively believed would resonate with that man or would provide some joy or fun for him to explore. This was easier for some men than others. As in any group, some men’s personalities came through clearly and swiftly, while other men were more guarded or reserved at the beginning of the project. For one of these latter men, for reasons that none of us could articulate, we ‘jokers’ had chosen Macbeth’s ‘Is this a dagger’ speech (Macbeth, Act II, scene 1). Knowing very little about his story, and nothing about his crime(s) (we never ask), there was something about his physicality, a contained intensity that seemed to match this speech. After half an hour or so of games, we offered each participant the speech that we had chosen for him and, in groups of three or four, explored the words and images in the speech. After working on the speech for about five minutes, this man became very animated and said ‘It’s like these words were written just for me. This is how I felt.’

The events in his own life to which he was responding actually bore very little similarity to Macbeth’s plight, but the felt experience was the same, and the speech articulated something that he had never been able to put into words. His inability to articulate this experience, he believed, was a direct cause of the chain of events that led him to his incarceration.

Shakespeare’s capacity to articulate the complexities of life, and the ability of his words to ‘become our own’ and to lead us to new experiences lies at the heart of all Prison Shakespeare programmes. Prison Shakespeare can be seen as both a sub-genre of prison theatre and as a phenomenon unto itself, with different roots and traditions.

Two questions immediately arise in some form or other when Prison Shakespeare is discussed: Why Shakespeare? And why prisons? That is, what effect do these sorts of project have on the prisoners who participate in it, and how does the choice of Shakespeare as a medium impact these? The first question belies an underlying assumption that anything of value that happens in a prison must be concerned with bringing about changes in prisoners. As we shall see, there are other reasons why Prison Shakespeare exists, including bringing about changes in prisons and in attitudes towards prisoners and imprisonment. As observed by Paul Heritage (interview, 2011 and Dekker, 2014), while the rhetoric around prisons is generally one of rehabilitation and protection, modern prisons on any grounds seem to be a remarkably odd way of achieving these aims, and actually function more as places for moral punishment. With this understanding, the first questions is best reframed as ‘what effect does Prison Shakespeare have’ without assuming a priori that these will be impacts on prisoner participants (alone). This book examines these two questions from a number of perspectives. As the rhetoric of Prison Shakespeare practitioners and commentators is primarily about personal growth rather than therapy, it looks at change from that perspective, informed by the dramaturgical and philosophical perspectives of Prison Shakespeare practitioners, rather than the therapeutic perspective.¹ It views Prison Shakespeare as a phenomenon unto itself, with its own history, motivations, influences, justifications, processes and, arguably, results. It argues that Prison Shakespeare can be examined and understood on its own terms, within the broader framework of prison theatre, but not always sitting comfortably under that umbrella. It shows that the motivations and methodologies of Prison Shakespeare are often quite different to those of other prison theatre practitioners, and even when practice and philosophy divide practitioners of Prison Shakespeare from one another, the common element of Shakespeare seems to drive toward similar results and conclusions.

The application of drama practice (whether critical, performance-oriented, process-oriented, or a combination of these) in marginalized communities, and with incarcerated communities in particular, has a long and reasonably well-documented history (see for example Balfour, 2004 or Schramski and Harvey, 1983 and references therein). Balfour (2004) traces the history of theatre in prison to the beginnings of incarceration itself, and notes that inmates would often take great risks in order to create art (visual or performing). The existence of prison theatre fulfils, he argues, ‘a need for creativity that goes beyond the basic perception of art as entertainment, leisure or even education’ (Balfour, 2004: 2). Emerging more recently is a phenomenon we will call Prison Shakespeare, in which prisoners are engaged in the performance or exploration of Shakespeare’s dramatic texts.

Previous studies of Prison Shakespeare have largely been descriptive and ad hoc. There are numerous case studies of varying lengths, mostly by the practitioners themselves. Amy Scott-Douglass’ Shakespeare Inside (Scott-Douglass, 2007) is an exception, having been written by a scholar who observed one programme in detail and spoke to practitioners of other programmes. While the present work contains one new case study (Chapter 3), a programme in which the author is a practitioner, the aim is to use that case study alongside other case studies, interviews, observations and literature to explore the phenomenon of Prison Shakespeare from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. All of these case studies, along with personal interviews with a number of practitioners, provided the material for Chapter 2, a history of Prison Shakespeare.

Where it has been addressed as a phenomenon beyond individual case studies, Prison Shakespeare has often been treated as a largely homogeneous practice. Ramona Wray (2011), essentially exploring one Prison Shakespeare programme which works in the medium of film (Educational Shakespeare Company, discussed in chapter 2 of the present book), has criticized both existing treatments of Prison Shakespeare and other Prison Shakespeare programmes. This volume hopefully shows that there is much more variation among these programmes than Wray credits. Wray criticizes Prison Shakespeare and its literature for having a predominantly drama-therapeutic approach. Wray is not using the term drama-therapeutic here in the narrow technical sense of having to do with the practice of the methodologies of Dramatherapy (for example as in Jones, 2010), but rather to reflect a concern that existing works present performance of Shakespeare as a force for personal change. This extends to criticism of prison theatre generally, which tends to have this sort of focus, a focus on theatre as an agent of change in the prison context, both in terms of changes in individual incarcerated participants and, in a few instances, on its capacity to inspire change within the prison context itself (see books by Thompson and Balfour).

Paul Heritage (interview, 2011) offers some historical perspective on the drama-therapeutic focus of prison theatre criticism, explaining that, in the United Kingdom at least, the rise of prison theatre – facilitated by theatre-makers – in the 1980s was concomitant with, and independent of, the rise of the discipline of Dramatherapy within therapy (as distinct also from Psychodrama). Dramatherapists made a number of direct or veiled attacks on Prison Theatre practitioners, particularly around their ‘qualification’ to work in the system, being artists and not therapists. Many prison theatre practitioners and commentators felt obligated to justify their work in terms of therapeutic outcomes and there was a narrowing of the frame within which arts work in prisons was seen to take place. Aesthetics alone was not an option, while rights-led, political, transformative agendas often gave way to a focus on an individual and personal notion of change.

It is also important to note that prison theatre programmes generally have a precarious existence, and are often obliged to turn to justifications and analyses of their work that support the stated goals of the prison system in which they are housed. Thus, as White notes, the claims and arguments in the literature ‘have been angled directly at prison authorities’ (White, 1998: 183).

Regardless of the reasons, Wray’s criticism still has some validity. Many practitioners of Prison Shakespeare describe their programmes in terms of the transformative power of Shakespeare’s texts on prisoners, and point anecdotally to long-term behavioural and attitudinal impacts on prisoners who participate in them. We turn to these claims, but also examine other effects of Prison Shakespeare, in Chapter 5.

Wray further criticizes the coverage of Prison Shakespeare for its focus on process rather than performance. Heritage notes that in prison theatre generally ‘the performance is often seen merely as an affirmative adjunct of real work that is happening in the workshops’ (Heritage, 1998: 37). For many practitioners, the focus on process over performance is justified, and indeed many prison theatre projects (and the earliest Prison Shakespeare projects) do not have performance, in the sense of sharing with a wider audience, as an outcome at all. The importance of the element of performance is a major difference among prison theatre projects of all sorts. It is true that most prison theatre practitioners, and indeed most Prison Shakespeare practitioners, tend to focus on the value of the rehearsal/workshop process, but a higher value generally seems to be placed on performance in front of an audience by contemporary Prison Shakespeare practitioners than by other prison theatre practitioners.

Wray’s final criticism of Prison Shakespeare commentary is that prisoner statements tend to remain uninterrogated. ‘The outcome is a kind of universalising discourse about Shakespeare that would not be acceptable in alternative critical situations’ (Wray, 2011). She criticizes Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars for ignoring the larger context, citing Richard Burt’s observation that ‘no political explanation of crime or critique of the penal system is ever voiced’ (Burt, 2006: 159). The literature on Prison Shakespeare, it can be alleged, does not pay enough attention to the politics of the prison system and the programme’s role within it. A few such explorations do exist in works on Prison Shakespeare, and such critiques are not uncommon within the programmes themselves. In this book, Chapter 4 is an attempt to outline aspects of the prison context, and the prisoner’s lived experience, so as to provide a background for understanding the observations and claims from the world of prison theatre explored in subsequent chapters. It situates Prison Shakespeare within a theory of crime and violence, utilizing Gilligan’s (1996) hypotheses about the genesis of violence and the kind of stories that explore and explain it. Later chapters look at how Prison Shakespeare works as a specific kind of Prison Theatre, and therefore incorporates leading studies on Prison Theatre and attempts to situate Prison Shakespeare within that in a way which has not been done before. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the specifics of Shakespeare performance in the prison context, and include statements by prisoners, prison staff and other stakeholders including audience members, about the impact of Prison Shakespeare programmes.

Evidence emerges, in Chapter 5, that Prison Shakespeare programmes have the potential to build a number of capacities in their participants by virtue of the practice of performing Shakespeare’s texts. These capacities include trust, collaboration, confidence, imagination and the capacity to sustain complexity. All of these capacities are crucial to overcoming the prisoner’s condition, as outlined in Chapter 4. These are capacities that are not generally developed, nor encouraged, within the prison context. It will be seen that a major factor contributing to the development of these capacities is the creation of a safe or sacred imaginative or play space in which the usual environment of the prison is effectively temporarily suspended. Chapter 5 also demonstrates that the impact of Prison Shakespeare programmes is not limited to the prisoners who directly participate in them, but also potentially on prisons themselves and on how prisons and prisoners are viewed by the broader community in which they are situated. It also explores some of the risks of, and challenges faced by, Prison Shakespeare. In order to interrogate, in the latter part of Chapter 6, which aspects of these outcomes and risks may be specific to Shakespeare, the last part of Chapter 5 attempts to identify aspects of outcomes that may be said to hold of theatre programmes generally.

Chapter 6 engages with the ‘universalising discourse’ which Wray criticizes in Prison Shakespeare, in an attempt to ask whether there is anything unique or special about Shakespeare in this context. Many Prison Shakespeare practitioners, myself included, hold that Shakespeare’s works contain in and of themselves the means to develop resistance against social mechanisms that silence marginalized voices, and resistance to old patterns and habits of thinking on both the individual and social level. As Neils Herold points out, this is heightened within the prison context:

What is collaboratively produced is a radical version of what Carol Rutter has termed Maverick Shakespeare – Shakespeare in performance by itinerant ‘fringe’ companies, un-nationalized and disassociated from The Culture Metropolis. After all, what more radical location for culture could we imagine than the concrete-block theatre of cruelty and redemption that is the dystopia of prison life? How much more maverick could Shakespeare get? (Herold, 2008: 155)

The latter part of Chapter 6 then returns to the question of whether any of the observations made in Chapter 5, could be said to be unique or specific to Shakespeare. It concludes that there are some outcomes, at various levels, that may be specific to or heightened in Prison Shakespeare specifically. These outcomes result from some combination of Shakespeare’s cultural capital and aspects of Shakespeare’s writing that are inherently prone to provoking empathetic responses in actor and audience alike.

2

The History of Prison Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s plays have been performed for over four hundred years, and the use of drama either as recreation or rehabilitation in a prison context goes back in written record almost a century, or over two centuries if we include the Australian convict theatres of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Jordan, 2002). Balfour (2004) gives evidence that art created by prisoners is as old as incarceration itself, and that there was probably a theatrical component to that from very early on. Early documented examples of non-incarcerated artists going into prisons to facilitate dramatic activities include J. L. Moreno’s work with Psychodrama in prisons in the middle part of the twentieth century. In terms of formal (sanctioned) performance, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was first produced by prisoners in 1953 in Lüttringhausen Prison, near Wuppertal (Germany), less than a year after its premier production in France (the translation was done by one of the prisoners), and also had a much-celebrated production in San Quentin Prison (California) in 1957.

Shakespeare’s plays have notably been read by prominent political prisoners in recent times. The best-known instance is the Robben Island Bible, a volume of Shakespeare’s collected works owned by Sonny Venkatrathnam, a prisoner on South Africa’s Robben Island from 1972 to 1978. The book’s name came from the fact that it was ‘disguised’ as a Hindu holy text and passed from prisoner to prisoner (prisoners were only allowed one book other than religious texts). Prison...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The History of Prison Shakespeare
• 3 The Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s Shakespeare Prison Project
• 4 The Prisoner’s Condition
• 5 The Claims of Prison Shakespeare
• 6 What’s So Special About Shakespeare?
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index