As a teacher of Shakespeare, I’ve had to cultivate a strategic resistance to Shakespeare’s charms and powers. That is to say, how else can I teach my students to write and think in interesting and effective ways if, like my students, I am altogether too inclined to collapse into abject admiration before the most striking of passages? At times, it’s a wonder any of us can think clearly in the presence of those works. Such resistance is important not because the disenchantment of literature is virtuous or provides its own reward but because the most important respect we can pay an author is that of willing and energetic engagement with the complex thoughts, feelings, and experiences that literature provokes in us. It’s easy to be a fan; to really enter into literature takes a stronger temperament. So I confess it was with some skepticism, too, that I turned my attention to a recent documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars, directed by Hank Rogerson. How wrong I was.
My skepticism, in this case, derives from another habit I try to break in the students I teach: the unthinking celebration of the almost miraculous and life-saving power of Shakespearean drama. It’s the same skepticism I have of anthologies of poems interested in their therapeutic function. How can we respect the complexity of great writing if what we really want is a kind of Hallmark card affirmation of a nearly religious faith in our own capacity for recovery? I feared that this documentary would provide a facile narrative about the redemptive power of Shakespeare. I was wrong, though redemption wasn’t banished from the scene of the film. The documentary traces a Shakespeare performance program and culls 93 brilliant minutes out of 170 hours of footage shot at Luther Luckett Prison in Kentucky, where the inmates mounted a production of The Tempest, a play I had just seen this summer in the Miller Outdoor Theater in Houston.
The first thing I should say is that this was no new program at Luther Luckett. Indeed, in the previous ambitious season Titus Andronicus was on the program. So this is serious Shakespeare. The film is heart-breaking and often hard to watch in the most non-Hallmark card ways imaginable. Each inmate speaks for himself about his crimes, about the consequences of those crimes, and about what The Tempest has come to mean to him. All think of it as a play about a fundamental choice between revenge and forgiveness. So they talk about how hard it is for their families and victims to forgive them, about trying to forgive themselves for their crimes, and about their struggle to make something of their lives after so much violent waste. We see them studying their lines alone in their cells, like Prospero alone in his cell plotting in a state of deprivation his fabulous spells and revenges. We see them reflect on their lines, process their own histories through the characters they play, and come to think of their own imprisonment through the terms of the play. The prison is like an island, several of them say. And not all make it off the island–solitary confinement, prosecution, transfer, and even suicide interfere with a production finally and powerfully performed first for the relatives of the actors and then for the prison population at large.
The movie is a kind of gift to is audience, and the gift it gives us–in an age in which almost few wish to make strong and specific claims for the power of literature–is painful relevance. Cleverly, and perverely, the film allows us to become attached to the inmates before they narrate their crimes, many of which are murders, often murders: family, children, friends, strangers. So the film tests our capacity for sympathy. Or, more accurately, it tests our ability to believe we can feel sympathy for anyone. In The Tempest Miranda claims: “O I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer.” Certain kinds of compassion are easy, when catastrophes occur or when the victims are easy to feel for. Shakespeare experiments with the limits of sympathy in The Tempest in a way brilliantly realized by Shakespeare Behind Bars.
Shakespeare is the great commodity, the prime selling point of English language and its literary world. Thinking about Shakespeare is always thinking about how we use Shakespeare and what we want from him. Shakespeare Behind Bars is one of the most honest portraits of how important great works like The Tempest are–not because they give us cultural capital, clever references for parties, or some greater share of what it is to be civilized. Rather, literature like The Tempest lives on because it comes to be embedded in the most pedestrian of places, for in those places it becomes not a luxury but a necessity.