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

by Laura Bates

Like war refugees, prisoners have lost everything: home, possessions, friends, and often family. For a prisoner, education has a special value as the one thing that no one can take from him.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world: And for because the world is populous And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father; and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts, And these same thoughts people this little world,

Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing. King Richard the Second, act 5, scene 5

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. —Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn’t the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking.”

‘So every bondman in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity.’ To me, that’s empowering, that we can free ourselves at any time—psychologically, I mean.”

When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. Which of the two is more prevalent in your life?

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.

“What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.”

I know what I know based on whatever my experience is, and they know what they know because of their ordeal, right?”

We cannot risk not helping. The vast majority of prisoners are going to return home. They are going to be our neighbors and they are going to be around our loved ones. The question really comes down to: what kind of prisoner do you want living next to you? No matter how you feel about the subject, the reality is that these prisoners are indeed coming home, and you do have the power to help shape what kind of neighbor they will be. Why education? Because it is the one science that overwhelmingly works.