In Boston, a program called “Shakespeare in the Courts” puts juvenile offenders on the stage.
Some of the students would rather go to jail than study Shakespeare. (Surprise!)
The program costs less than locking kids up; it seems like a novel way to punish people while educating them. It also “raises their self-esteem.”
Strange that we live in a society that views the arts as punitive. What next? Drug runners forced to listen to Wagner’s Ring cycle? Counterfeiters studying Ruscha? Milton for Murderers?
To be honest, if I was a juvenile offender, of course, I’d rather put on a pair of tights and perform Henry V than go to jail, and yes, of course, the idea of literature “healing” people by forcing them beyond their own boundaries is beautiful.
I mean one of the reasons why I am a fiction writer is that I think of myself as an actor without a makeup artist and with terrible stage fright. Not only do I get to be someone else but I also get to access more of my self through othering. Somehow in the act of being the other we access parts of ourselves that we didn’t know we had.
But when did we become a society of putting out fires rather than preventing them? If literature and theatre raises the self-esteem of youth, where was Shakespeare before each crime? Were these kids not paying attention? Or was no one paying attention to them?
I grew up in a clich?? of a single-parent, immigrant family with a mom that worked 80 hours per week. The only free hobby I could find was going to the library.
Crack cocaine was too expensive for me.
As a teenager, I went to the library and borrowed about 10 poetry and philosophy books at a time. I was hungry not only for language but to be somewhere else.
I was fortunate enough to grow up in an artistic family that thought my bookish ways were “cute” or just an indication of how “shy” or “smart” I am.
But what about the kids who don’t even have that? For some kids, the drugs are cheaper than the books, or at least easier to access.
Back in the old school, Shakespeare-time, HE WAS ENTERTAINMENT!
Now, the groundlings are in a prison. But can they get out?