Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard

by Laura Bates

“Everyone just puts themselves into so many prisons,” Newton had said,

“What did you mean,” I asked him, “when you said that Shakespeare saved your life?” “I meant it both ways: literally and figuratively,” he told me. “Literally, Shakespeare saved my life. For so many years, I had been really self-destructive, on the razor’s edge every day. I’m confident that I would’ve done something drastic and ended up on death row. Or I would’ve one day found the courage to take my own life. So literally, he saved my life.” It sounded like he was talking about suicide, but I couldn’t believe it—I didn’t want to believe it. “And I meant it figuratively,” he continued. “Shakespeare offered me the opportunity to develop new ways of thinking through these plays. I was trying to figure out what motivated Macbeth, why his wife was able to make him do a deed that he said he didn’t want to do just by attacking his ego: ‘What, are you soft? Ain’t you man enough to do it?’ As a consequence of that, I had to ask myself what was motivating me in my deeds, and I came face-to-face with the realization that I was fake, that I was motivated by this need to impress those around me, that none of my choices were truly my own. “And as bad as that sounds, it was the most liberating thing I’d ever experienced because that meant that I had control of my life. I could be anybody I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be some fake guy that my buddies wanted me to be. When I started reading Shakespeare, I was still in segregation; that circumstance didn’t change. But I wasn’t miserable...

Maybe you associate Shakespeare to that “high falutin’” class of society, but that is not Shakespeare’s fault, and you are mistaken if you think he targeted that class. Shakespeare is telling our story! He is telling the story of complex, conflicted people who are facing real issues, who have real problems, who know what it’s like to lose, who know what it’s like to cling to the edge, and who know what it feels like to be lost. But unlike many who attempt to use our circumstances to demean us, Shakespeare uncovers the power in these circumstances and offers you the tools to shape the life that you truly desire. How can four-hundred-year-old stories do that? These stories are not merely “good stories”; they are tools that can give you back the power that the world, and you yourself, has deprived you of. When you think about the choices Macbeth makes, or the pressures Hamlet feels, you are confronted with fundamental principles that are important in our culture: honor, pride, conscience, ego. What do these words mean—to you? Make no mistake about it: this is not a simple thing to do. Shakespeare is not a cartoon or TV show used for simple entertainment. It is not a movie where your heroes and villains are obvious roles. These stories require you to actually think! I don’t mean the kind of thought required just to follow what is happening in the story. I mean the kind of thought that requires you to figure out who the hero is, and who the villain is, or even what it means to ...

He seemed fearless, and he was teaching me to be more fearless myself, not only in my prison work, but also in helping me to recognize that unfounded phobias, like fear of flying or fear of sailing, were good examples of the types of “prisons” that we all put ourselves into.

There appear to be two arguments under one subject. The first is that offering educational programs for criminals is, in effect, creating smarter criminals. It is a very tough argument to debate. What makes this argument so tough to oppose is exactly what will undo the argument. The second argument is essentially a question: Why should we do good things for those who have done bad things? So, to the first argument: The developing mind of a criminal is just that—the developing of a criminal mind. But where do we find data to support that argument? It is not as though the assumed criminal lifestyle is charted and monitored. We are left to our assumptions; why would we assume otherwise? To assume that a criminal’s developing mind is a developing criminal mind, we must assume that the very nature of every criminal is crime and that the only possible change in a criminal’s behavior can be new criminal behavior. Logic says that the only possible way to assume such a conclusion about a person is to already harbor a universal conclusion about the idea of such a person. “A tiger cannot change its stripes.” Who among us has not deceived someone, kept something that did not belong to us, snuck out at night, “borrowed” Mom’s car, or engaged in any number of such common youthful adventures? If we are arguing that such behavior can only develop, then what are we saying about ourselves? We have concluded that crime is not a nature, it is a choice, and any choice is influenced by our expe...

Shakespeare’s play opens with two short scenes that provide a framework for the play-within-a-play that is performed for the entertainment of a drunken bum who is literally picked up by a “lord” and made to believe he is, in fact, a wealthy man himself.

And the Lord is right! A person can be completely changed if the world around him is reshaped.”