{"id":593,"date":"2012-10-29T20:01:25","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T20:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/?page_id=593"},"modified":"2014-01-18T14:37:07","modified_gmt":"2014-01-18T14:37:07","slug":"time-served-in-prison-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/issues\/current-issue\/time-served-in-prison-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Time Served in Prison Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Niels Herold,\u00a0Oakland University \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/em><\/span>
\n in collaboration with Mr. Matt Wallace, Artistic Director of\u00a0Shakespeare Behind Bars,\u00a0Inc<\/em>. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Print as pdf<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This essay,\u00a0largely focused on a 2010 <\/span>Shakespeare Behind Bars<\/em> (<\/span>SBB<\/em>) prison production of <\/span>The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, takes its latest shape as the result of being presented at a variety of conference venues, the most important of which occurred in the seminar on <\/span>Shakespeare and Crime<\/em> at the 2011 International Shakespeare Congress in Prague.\u00a0 There the essay acquired a global perspective, as conversation about prison theater with European Shakespeareans invited me to consider the achievement of American inmate players in the context of Shakespeare in the historical Czech theater, particularly as that theater was once a rallying point for another kind of incarceration: Shakespeare behind the Iron Curtain.\u00a0 Talking about the accomplishments of American inmates in a Kentucky prison, at a world Shakespeare conference in a cultural capital famous for its political theater and now historically paroled, as it were, from a long history of totalitarian regimes, produced this essay\u2019s critical angle of approach: What do these two admittedly very different theaters have to say to each other about the performance of Shakespeare under state control?\u00a0 While this most recent version of the essay does not propose anything like a definitive answer to this question, it continues to seek a larger context for understanding American prison theater in order to ask what happens to \u201cShakespeare performed\u201d when its motives for performance are radically altered.\u00a0 This essay now finds its appropriate home in a volume that revisits the question of \u201cShakespeare and Ethics.\u201d\u00a0 Where \u201cShakespeare and the Question of Theory\u201d once banished ethical discourse from the central concerns of a materialist, historicizing approach to Shakespeare in the early modern theater, I want to argue here that the subaltern activities of inmate players \u201cinside,\u201d permitted by a state penal system to flourish behind bars, resonate far beyond the penitentiary setting of their theatrical practice, in an analytical place where they connect in important ethical ways with \u201cShakespeare Outside.\u201d<\/span>1<\/sup><\/p>\n

1. Shakespeare Inside<\/span><\/p>\n

Michael Dobson\u2019s survey of amateur Shakespearean theatricals admirably fills a vacancy in the historiography of Shakespeare at the margins, performed in conditions, for example, in which actors find themselves prisoners of war.\u00a0 Dobson\u2019s argument about this \u201cother\u201d history of Shakespeare performance records its influence on popular \u201cbig-house\u201d Shakespeares, an account that promises in its introductory proposals to be comprehensive about the effect of these \u201cnon-professionalized\u201d performances on mainstream commercial, professionalized Shakespeare production.\u00a0 That Dobson\u2019s study of this sub-cultural theater includes a chapter on prison Shakespeare in concentration camps but not in penal settings is either a mis-step or a nod to the semi<\/em>-professionalism of a theater company like Shakespeare Behind Bars<\/em>, whose full length and dressed productions of Shakespeare are something arguably more than \u201camateur.\u201d2<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>The history Dobson carefully rehearses, however, leads him to conclude that distinctions between professional and amateur Shakespeare performances are deconstructed. \u00a0\u201cThe more one examines,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe categories of \u2018professional\u2019 and \u2018amateur\u2019 across theatrical history the more precarious and complicated they appear to be, even without tracing modern Western drama back to its pre-professional religious roots in ancient Athens or medieval Europe\u201d (6).\u00a0 This conceptual dilemma raises other questions for scholarship, about Shakespeare and the problem of adaptation, as M.J. Kidnie\u2019s book of that title puts it.\u00a0 For what kind of Shakespeare do we end up with when the customary purpose for playing has been altered and the plays appropriated for other uses, like those of a prison theater company that discovers in theatrical process and performance the ethical keys to repentance and reform?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>As this essay argues, productions of \u201cShakespeare inside\u201d are connected not only to mainstream Shakespeare in the present tense but to particular historical conditions of the early modern theater.\u00a0 Those connections certainly include, as Dobson notes, a transvestite theater built upon male apprenticeship and mentoring, but the early modern theater just as importantly provides American inmates today with privileged sites of access to modes of repentance inscribed in the early modern play-text.<\/span>3<\/sup> Making a similar point about prisoner-of-war productions, Dobson concludes that\u2014\u201cthe subculture which grew up around these prisoner-of-war playhouses did indeed hark back to Shakespeare\u2019s own theatrical world\u201d (139).\u00a0 This \u201creactivation,\u201d as it were, of dramaturgical practice correlates with events of religious feeling embedded in the deep structures of Shakespeare\u2019s plays\u2014of penance, forgiveness, and redemption\u2014events that rely on the particular <\/span>investment<\/em> inmate players bring to their dramatic enactments.<\/span>4<\/sup> What happens, then, to \u201cShakespeare performed\u201d when it is subjected to these other uses\u2014political, moralizing, rehabilitative, therapeutic?\u00a0 Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare, or have the plays-performances morphed into some other mode of theatre, of the Boalean <\/span>oppressed<\/em>, for instance?<\/span>5<\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0 Another question: can these other uses of performance\u2014more evidently so than commercial productions\u2014help us to situate our understanding of the plays within the historical and cultural contexts that originally produced them?\u00a0 Should we be interested in this theater \u201cinside\u201d not only for the place of its performance and what happens to inmates or a state-incarcerated people staging plays there, but for what these adaptive exploitations of Shakespeare show us about the plays themselves?\u00a0 As I have recently been asked: \u201cWhat is the equivalent in church practice of the prisoner\u2019s experience of playing a part that echoes his or her crime?\u00a0 And what is the place of individual agency in rehabilitation and in repentance to get at one of the recurring concerns of our conference?\u201d<\/span>6<\/sup><\/p>\n

The first question implies that a player\u2019s experience in <\/span>SBB<\/em> replaces the reformatory effects of religious practice behind bars.\u00a0 For many company members Shakespeare and worship provide continuous or supplementary modes of rehabilitation and redemption.\u00a0 But in an even more interesting way, this question is also an effectively historicizing one, of the sort that Sarah Beckwith interrogates as the effect of Protestant ideology on historically superannuated Catholic modes of repentance.\u00a0 Certainly, particular Shakespeare plays like <\/span>The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> are centrally about repentance, and we can feel in them the strain of strategies, ideological and theatrical, to cope with society\u2019s paradigmatically evolving ways of making people pay for their crimes.\u00a0 This reader\u2019s second important question about <\/span>agency<\/em> points to an ingeniously devised policy in <\/span>SBB<\/em>\u2019s year-long theatrical process of staging a full-length Shakespeare play, that of allowing inmates to choose their own roles\u2014to hear these roles as <\/span>callings<\/em> rather than as <\/span>casting<\/em>.\u00a0 But they do so not only through identifying with a particular character\u2019s actions or motives.\u00a0 An actor in the company since it was founded sixteen years ago, Hal Cobb, has played both Lady Macbeth and Leontes; another actor, paroled near his twenty-fourth birthday after having served seventeen years behind bars, had the courage in the very first year of his \u201cresidency\u201d with <\/span>SBB<\/em> to play a saintly Isabella in <\/span>Measure for Measure<\/em> and then in the following year a terrifically vicious Cassius in <\/span>Julius Caesar<\/em>.\u00a0 Whatever these inmates are hearing in the calling of a particular role, their determination to master that role has something to tell us not only about complex inner lives and criminal pasts but about the play they come to imaginatively inhabit.\u00a0 How, then, do the inmate actors of <\/span>SBB<\/em> at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in Kentucky\u2014in both the realization of their individual characters and their ensemble work\u2014make this \u201cinvestment\u201d count, make the play, in other words, their own?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>2. The Purgatory of Served Time<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>One of the ways in which <\/span>SBB<\/em> productions solicit or call up early modern modes of public repentance and spiritual reformation is through a secularized and \u201cpresentized\u201d experience of purgatory\u2014that metaphysical state of the soul banished from Christian belief in the early modern period by a reformist religious doctrine.<\/span>7<\/sup>\u00a0 In the wake of such cataclysmic changes in theology and religious practice during the sixteenth century, Catholic beliefs must have lived on in individual religious sensibilities.\u00a0 The Shakespearean stage has been described, for example, as taking advantage of the Reformation by sweeping up the discarded rituals of a discredited theology for its own theatrical power and survival.<\/span>8<\/sup>\u00a0 Even when licensed by ecclesiastical authority as a belief, Purgatory as a place was never as important as the temporal trial of the souls residing “there,” a duration determined by the “good works” of surviving family and friends, whose financial contributions to the Church could shorten the tenure and torment of recently departed souls.\u00a0 It was this aspect of purgatorial existence that, once emptied out as mere superstitious belief, transferred itself to the stage.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Since Purgatory as a metaphysical construct was for Catholics a wholly practical affair helping to finance and glorify the Church, let me spend a few moments speaking about its wholly practical realities for inmates behind bars serving state-mandated time who appear to have resuscitated it as a phenomenological experience of time behind bars.\u00a0 That is, time served in prison, in accordance with the purgatorial time of Catholic souls, continues to be negotiated through “good works,” an arithmetic of behavioral points that can allow inmates to be enrolled as apprentices in the <\/span>Shakespeare Behind Bars<\/em> program.\u00a0 (Parole boards themselves act, analogously, in early modern terms, as purgatorial agents who adjust time-served according to the demonstration of “good works.”)\u00a0 When these good works, or behavioral points, are sufficiently maintained to allow an inmate to be sponsored and then apprenticed in an elite company of players, the impact of this system of regulation and control, facilitated by an inmate’s good standing in the company, registers a palpable if indeed profound set of effects on particular plays in production.\u00a0 In the 2010 <\/span>SBB<\/em> production of <\/span>The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, Leontes\u2019 long study in repentance at the intercessory (i.e., priestly hands) of Paulina\u2014which consumes his off-stage existence throughout most of the second half of the play, the Bohemian half\u2014emerges from the play’s deep structure as a ritualistic replacement on the early modern stage of Purgatorial suffering, long after Purgatory had been banished as a Greenblattian “broken ritual.”\u00a0 I want to turn now to the historical scene of another struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, in which the latter is violently extirpated from the national consciousness of what early moderns knew as Bohemia, only to be replaced in the twentieth century by the Communist appropriation of Czechoslovakia.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>3.\u00a0 A Prague Gallery of Players<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>As part of the social and cultural events surrounding the 2011 International Shakespeare Congress in Prague, host organizers mounted an \u201cOpen-Air Shakespearean Gallery\u201d next to the famous National Theater, the <\/span>Norodni<\/em>Divadlo<\/em>, a building whose complex history of construction, renovation, and artistic use \u201cis the embodiment of the will of the Czech nation for national identity.\u201d<\/span>9<\/sup> Conference participants and a wider public were thus given:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>\u2026the opportunity to view an exhibition of large scale photographs at the Piazzeta, mapping the rich tradition of Shakespearean dramaturgy at the National Theater.\u00a0 The exhibition, <\/span>Play Shakespeare<\/em>, [shows] thirty-two displays with commentaries on the most important performances of Shakespeare\u2019s dramas throughout the entire history of the National Theater.\u201d<\/span>10<\/sup><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Most of these billboards were comprised of production stills of famous Czech actors at work during the Communist regime. The photographs are themselves works of art, intimately focused as they are on the multi-layered subjectivity-effect of persons, actors, characters, and productions (in their historically contingent values).\u00a0 These billboards also adumbrate what it felt like to be acting under the historical conditions of an oppressed national identity, and the Czech actors seen realizing famous roles in <\/span>The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> pose a brilliant example of this political theater.\u00a0 Indeed, because of its Bohemian second half and textual allusiveness to Russia, <\/span>The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> has been an important play in the annals of Czech Shakespeare; it was chosen, in fact, for performance as a Charles University Workshop Production \u201ccultural event\u201d during the 2011 Prague Congress.\u00a0 Clearly, Czechs feel a special connection to Shakespeare through it.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the Bohemian half of <\/span>The Winter’s Tale <\/em>is a pastoral <\/span>heterotopia<\/em> for native English country and custom, it must have signified in richly ironic ways for Czech actors under Communism.\u00a0 Much of the play comes ready-made, we might argue, for such ironic performance by a company politically attuned to the early modern theater\u2019s obsession with double plots, double places, double time schemata, all of which disrupt the classical unities of time and place and contribute to what seems essentially Shakespearean.\u00a0 This penchant for stratagems of disguise and espial, of imposture and impersonation, gives shape to a psychology of mobile and fluid identities, at once exploratory and self-preservative in hostile social and political worlds where Shakespeare\u2019s plays have sometimes made their scenes, as the Czech moment under Communism provides one powerful example.\u00a0 For the early modern theater\u2019s obsession with doubleness\u2014of being one person behind another, in one place and another in the same and at a different time\u2014must have invested the Shakespearean performance text for Czech actors with a mimetic intensity that makes any account of their purpose for playing intriguingly complex.\u00a0 And just as we understand these performances of Shakespeare as allegories of national pride conveyed underneath (or through) the layering of impersonated identity on the stage, so, too, what American inmate actors are expressing makes their purpose for playing something more complex than the notion of the therapeutic might imply.<\/span>11<\/sup> For <\/span>inside<\/em> and <\/span>outside<\/em> as categories of performed identity relate here to each other in the complicated ways that <\/span>amateur<\/em> and <\/span>professional<\/em> do for Dobson; professional actors (like Denholm Elliot in Silesia, 1943) explore their thespian selves inside concentration camp confines, while professional actors \u201coutside,\u201d at the Narodni Divadlo, act out the political drama of an occupation as \u201cinside\u201d narrative, one that Czech political sensibility was subtly attuned to while party apparatchiks looked the other way.\u00a0 Officially, a Czech actor could infuse a Shakespearean line like Romeo\u2019s cynical remark about the gold he buys to ease his way out of this world\u2014\u201cworse poison to men\u2019s souls\u201d (5.1.80)\u2014with a Marxist agenda of ridding the world of capital.\u00a0 A Czech audience could in turn hear this line as a subtle condemnation of a spiritually devoid materialism, that of grinding factory profits and ecological waste, the destructive fruits of Soviet occupation.<\/span>12<\/sup><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>4. <\/span>The Winter\u2019s Tale <\/em>at Luther Luckett<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look \u201cinside\u201d now at two production stills from the 2010 <\/span>SBB<\/em> account of <\/span>The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Jerry Guenthner as Autolycus in the SBB<\/em> 2010 production of The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>. Photo courtesy of Matt Wallace.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Hall Cobb as Leontes in the SBB<\/em> production of The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, 2010. Photo courtesy of Matt Wallace.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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When this essay was presented as a paper at the 2011 Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, I showed these two photos interspersed with those of the Czech actors in the \u201cOpen-Air Shakespeare Gallery\u201d (the impossibility of acquiring permission to reprint them here explains their absence).\u00a0 What struck me as an inspiring point of departure for juxtaposing American and Czech Shakespeareans was the way in which multiple identities create for both a sort of palimpsest of subjectivity effects.\u00a0 In one portrait gallery, Czech national pride ironically peers forth from professionally mastered impersonations; in the other (Images 1 and 2 above), inmates confront us with the look of men whose crimes have defined them as felons but whose personation now of a Shakespeare character does not so much put that criminality under erasure as allow it to co-exist in a doubling of identity, as if to say, \u201cI am a committer of heinous crimes, indeed, but I am also a character in Shakespeare whose poetic intentionality creates the conditions for permitting me to enact an \u2018otherness\u2019 that may reverse my illegitimacy in the eyes of my peers.\u201d\u00a0 Most inmates serving time for serious crimes enter prison hiding their selves in shame, guilt, or disavowal, wishing their crimes behind them or non-existent.\u00a0 As a self fully immersed in the otherness of a Shakespeare character, in other words, an inmate player\u2019s existence\u2014like that of Czech players liberated from the effects on their professional selves of a totalitarian regime\u2014is no longer defined only by his crime<\/em>.\u00a0 Rather than disaffecting or mentally deranging, it is precisely the metamorphosis of human identity into multiple parts that seems to liberate inmate actors into the acknowledgement of their crimes, and make possible their goodness and potential as human beings who have redemptively served<\/em> their time.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Image 2, a production from The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, Hal Cobb as Leontes is flanked by \u201claw enforcement courtiers,\u201d SBB<\/em>\u2019s idea of the Sicilian king\u2019s paranoid court transformed into a totalitarian state.\u00a0 In other SBB<\/em> productions, like that of Measure for Measure<\/em> (2007), the correctional facility venue is called up and parodied in subtle ways that both acknowledge and critique the severities of life behind bars.\u00a0 The prisoner Barnardine, for example, was costumed in an orange jumpsuit (requisite attire for inmates in transit between penitentiary locations operated by the Kentucky Department of Corrections), which articulated precise and purposive connections between inmate theater and the state that licenses it.\u00a0 As the billboards of Czech actors in the exhibition Play Shakespeare<\/em> similarly demonstrate, such negotiations in a prison theater company between Shakespeare\u2019s authoritative textuality and the police state resonate with those that charged famous productions of Shakespeare in former Czechoslovakia, like that of Love\u2019s Labor\u2019s Lost<\/em> and of The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, in which Russia and Muscovy (Hermione\u2019s birthplace) signaled an ironic awareness for Czechs of their iron-curtained country.13<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

I want to pursue for a minute this analogy between inmate<\/em> and occupied<\/em> players by looking at the way the famous Czech Shakespeare scholar, Zden\u011bk St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd, writes about double time.\u00a0 In his collected essays on Shakespeare, The Whirligig of Time<\/em>, St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd put it this way back in 1969, a year not without its whirligigery in the history of Czech politics:<\/span><\/p>\n

The essential features of the double-time structure are two different, or even contradictory, time schemes running parallel through the play. The one scheme comprises references to a short duration of action and thus creates the impression that the whole plot does not last longer than a day, or a few days at the most.\u00a0 Accordingly, it can be called short time<\/em>, or dramatic time<\/em>. The other scheme, usually termed long time<\/em>, or psychological<\/em> or historical time<\/em>, contains references and allusions to events that imply a much longer duration, sometimes of weeks or years. The former time scheme gives the play a dramatic impetus, the latter a historical or psychological depth projected mostly into characters and their conflicts. The theatergoer or the casual reader perceives both times as one aesthetic whole without realizing their opposing natures. (St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd 79; italics original)<\/span><\/p>\n

What’s unusual about this analysis is not its scholarly focus on double time as a formal aspect of Shakespeare\u2019s art (in St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd’s words, \u201can aesthetic fusion . . . fully achieved only in the plays of Shakespeare\u201d [79]); indeed, this critical focus on formal effects accords with what was happening pretty much everywhere in Shakespeare studies during those years.\u00a0 Of importance, rather, is St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd thinking these thoughts right before, even perhaps concurrently with, the momentous political changes his country was undergoing in 1969.\u00a0 His critical attention, in other words, to two different time schemes \u201crunning parallel throughout the play\u201d must have applied in his mind as well to the \u201cproduction values\u201d of Shakespearean performance in the former Czechoslovakia, when the \u201cshort time\u201d that \u201cgives the play dramatic impetus\u201d was running parallel to an historical time that left its very form and pressure on the unfolding events of the Prague Spring.\u00a0 Indeed, as The Whirligig of Time<\/em> repeatedly demonstrates, the \u201cnew interpretations\u201d of Shakespeare that are the object of St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd’s critical and scholarly focus \u201care in accord,\u201d as he wrote even earlier in 1964:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026with the traditional Czech approach to Shakespeare, which has always tended to combine aesthetic enjoyment with moral and political issues of the times\u2026.for a truly national theater should not only preserve the best values of the past but also interpret them in such a way that they indicate new developments in human sensibility, thinking, and action\u2014exactly as Shakespeare’s theater did in his own time. (St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd 174)<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin Hilsk\u045e, the most famous of Czech translators of Shakespeare, describes the ways in which the reception of the National Theater\u2019s 1971 production of Love\u2019s Labor\u2019s Lost<\/em> merged short \u201cdramatic\u201d and longtime \u201chistorical\u201d schemata to transform Shakespeare\u2019s play-text into an uproariously funny and ideologically astute commentary on Czech accommodations toward the Soviet occupation.\u00a0 Both Hilsk\u045e and St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd’s performance discourse is full of descriptions of Shakespeare at the Narodni Divadlo<\/em> that do \u201cexactly as Shakespeare\u2019s theater did in his time\u201d (St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd 174), and a whole chapter alone in St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd, for instance, is devoted to \u201cPlace and Time in The Winter’s Tale<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 My point is this: pace<\/em> St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd, inmate actors in a Shakespeare theater behind bars have a heightened awareness, too, of double time\u2014that long time of their prison sentence and the short time that can liberate them from the historical conditions of their incarceration.<\/em>\u00a0 Both inmates and Czechs inside the iron curtain mount Shakespeare productions with the permission of a granting state absolutism.\u00a0 Consider, for St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd\u2019s formulation from an inmate actor’s point of view:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026there is no escaping the fact that drama always imposes upon its creator a heightened awareness of time for the simple reason that it is normally designed for a public performance that, for sheer physical necessity, cannot last more than a few hours. This necessity does not, to be sure, limit the freedom of a real artist.\u00a0 On the contrary, it may inspire him to a work freed of all superfluities that expresses the conflicts of life in the most compact form. (St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd 80)<\/span><\/p>\n

Now with Mr. Matt Wallaces\u2019s collaboration, I want to try to show how inmate actors through their innovative theatricality express this double time of confinement and performance as a mode of dramatic production that both historicizes and presentizes Shakespeare\u2019s\u2014doubly \u201cBohemian\u201d \u2014play-text, The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>.14<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>5. \u201cThe Argument of Time\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>In Shakespeare\u2019s performance text, the appearance of Time as a character at the beginning of Act 4 conjoins two mirroring halves of a poetic action through the agency of what it argues.\u00a0 Time works through procreating Nature and also through cultural custom, its passage revolving to a transformative means: Perdita the planted barn evolves into the shepherd\u2019s daughter whose unknown royalty crowns the crown prince\u2019s romantic and marital desires.\u00a0 Customary time, however, is that marked not by Nature but by human laws and the conventions of art (like that which characterologically invests time with rhetorical argument and poetic means).\u00a0 Custom\u2014what humans make of time, as the play famously debates in the exchange between Perdita and Bohemia\u2014either counters Nature or amends \u201cher,\u201d having been made in the first place through her procreative matrix.\u00a0 The \u201cArgument of Time\u201d in this play is thus the way in which the laws of nature and of human society are correlatively fulfilled.<\/span><\/p>\n

A poignant example of inmates fulfilling the laws of nature and those of society, of inhabiting and making the play their own, is the SBB<\/em> rendition of Time.\u00a0 Like most theatrical solutions to dramaturgical problems, the SBB<\/em> process of discovery for representing this scene was as interesting as its staged performance.\u00a0 Here is the director\u2019s account of how the company came to solve what for prison inmates is, after all, the paramount difficulty of \u201ctime served.\u201d\u00a0 Mr. Matt Wallace carefully describes the process as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n

From the\u00a0moment that I chose The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> for our 2010 season, I knew the “Time” section would resonate deeply\u00a0with the men.\u00a0 I just wasn’t sure how.\u00a0\u00a0I wanted them to interpret and express it in a personal way, specific to their experiences.\u00a0 So when we first approached the scene, I facilitated a discussion on what the word “time” meant to each of them and was struck by the varying opinions and feelings.\u00a0 A veteran of the ensemble stated that it meant nothing to him.\u00a0 Everything remained so similar and consistent on the inside for him that it was relative and had no significance.\u00a0 Others shared different stories of what “doing time\u201d meant to them\u2013monotony, anguish, loss, sadness, fear.\u00a0 For two of our ensemble members the \u201c16 years\u201d evoked an extraordinary resonance because that was how long each of them had been in prison before going up before the parole board in 2010 on life sentences (one was paroled and one received a deferment.)\u00a0 I asked the ensemble how we could integrate everyone and their \u201ctime\u201d into the piece.\u00a0 One of our veterans, Andre, who had served 30 years in prison, proposed that they enter and state to the audience their years served before Ron, who was originally cast as the character Time, spoke the monologue.\u00a0 I asked each man to think about what saying the word \u201cTime\u201d meant to him and to channel that as they entered and stated their years served.\u00a0 We explored the piece with each man entering, stating his years served and then moving throughout the space.\u00a0 When the next man entered, everyone would halt, the man would give his time, and then the ensemble would resume movement\u2026.When we came back to the scene weeks later, Ron proposed that we divide the lines up, and I had him assign a couplet to each ensemble member.\u00a0 Ron chose which couplet would be most appropriate for each man.\u00a0 After each one entered and stated his years served, he would line up to later speak a couplet in turn.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to the oral impact, I wanted to visually represent the years.\u00a0 I asked our costume designer to incorporate a number of their years served on the front of their shirt.\u00a0 With the ensemble\u2019s permission, I also asked her to place their inmate ID number on the back of their shirt, to drive home the anonymity and degradation they face in prison [See Images 3 and 4 below].\u00a0 During the performances for other inmates at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, I didn’t expect such a reaction at them seeing the inmate numbers of their fellow inmates in the play.\u00a0 (I hadn\u2019t known at the time that inmate numbers were assigned consecutively, so men who have served more years have lower inmate numbers.)\u00a0 The silence in the room was stunning as young inmates in the audience watched the inmate numbers on some of the veterans’ shirts, perhaps taking in how long they were going to be incarcerated.\u00a0 For the public audience members, particularly those who have been there year after year and had no idea how long some of these men have been incarcerated, it was a powerful experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

Notwithstanding their shared status in the company as two of its founding members\u2014their achieved status as the Burbage and Armin of the Shakespeare Behind Bars<\/em> program\u2014Hal Cobb and Jerry Guenthner are, as Mr. Wallace describes them, \u201cmodel artists and ensemble members, ready to give one hundred percent and open to feedback, allowing it to shape the direction they are going and open up new doors in their discovery process.\u201d\u00a0 The company decision to take its intermission right before Time speaks at the beginning of Act Four seemed naturally to allow for the perceptions by many ensemble members that Act One belonged to Hal as Act Two did to Jerry\u2014Big G as he\u2019s fondly called.\u00a0 Matt Wallace gives us a picture of the way in which Hal and Big G helped each other with their roles in The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

G totally embodied Autolycus and brought his zest for life and spirit to the role.\u00a0 The audience was in the palm of his hand.\u00a0 He and Hal collaborated in creating\u00a0the\u00a0ukelele tunes\u00a0that Autolycus used to charm the\u00a0crowd.\u00a0 It was good to see G in a role like this\u00a0and seeing his light shine so bright.\u00a0 As G is a mentor\u00a0on the yard to many and model inmate on the right track, the inmate audiences particularly enjoyed seeing G regress as the thief and king of the pickpockets.\u00a0\u00a0Since G was not in the first half of the play, he was able to sit out in the crowd and take in the first act.\u00a0 It was moving to see him\u00a0in the back of the house\u00a0rooting his partners along and beaming like a proud father.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hal took on Leontes with an amazing fearlessness, particularly considering the similarities to his own life and crime.\u00a0\u00a0Time’s speech of 16 years had a powerful\u00a0significance as it was the number on his shirt of time he had served.\u00a0\u00a0Near the end of the process, he was able to access the rage and jealousy of the character\u00a0which allowed him further to fall as he became\u00a0the broken man of the second half of the play.\u00a0\u00a0As\u00a0personal and difficult as this role was for\u00a0Hal, it allowed him, even if only as Leontes, to experience forgiveness.\u00a0 Hal is an exceptional man and artist and he was a phenomenal Leontes.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>6.\u00a0 In the Service of Time<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Critical skepticism from some quarters about this production process has to do with questions of political resistance, or rather, the lack of it.\u00a0 Are <\/span>SBB<\/em> actors and their productions critically analytic in their representative take on the institutionality that confines them, even while it allows them to play on?\u00a0 In the prisoner of war camps that Dobson examines, moral questions arise as to the motives and tactics of survival behind concentration camp wire.\u00a0 Dobson, for example, comments in this vein on the borrowed German theaters English prisoners used to reproduce the glories of their national poet:<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, these theaters were actually German, and even the revues mounted in them sometimes betrayed as vivid an engagement with German culture as with British.\u00a0 In Stalag 383, for instance, the revue Bally Who<\/em> included a skit on Goethe called \u201cSoust.\u201d\u00a0 Did such Allied actors as these really perform strictly as homesick warriors, bravely sustaining their comrades\u2019 national identity in the interests of combatant morale, or were they for the time being good puppet citizens of Fortress Europe, entertaining their captors and keeping their colleagues from more belligerent thoughts?\u00a0 Theater as elaborate as this would have been impossible without at the very least the toleration of the Nazi authorities, and this toleration often extended to actual assistance\u2026.(141; italics original)<\/span><\/p>\n

The political question Dobson asks about the prisoner of war actors applies with equal force to both SBB<\/em> players and to professional Czech Shakespeareans under Communism (formerly, of course, under Fascist occupation).\u00a0 Are these actors, in spite of the aesthetic power of their performances, \u201cgood puppets\u201d under state exploitation and control?\u00a0 (Is this the New Historicist mechanism of \u201ccontainment through subversion,\u201d deployed by authorities who give prisoners their occasional gibes, gambols, and flashes of merriment, in order to ventilate seditious yearnings and fantasies of escape?)<\/span><\/p>\n

Another scholarly objection to Shakespeare used for rehabilitative purposes is that SBB<\/em>\u2019s reliance on developing an inmate\u2019s personal relationship with a character implies an \u201cinvestment\u201d in a certain mode of representation that many academic Shakespeareans would question, as they once did the \u201ccharacter criticism\u201d that comprised the core focus of Shakespeare studies.\u00a0 But in a recent collection of essays about the rejuvenation of character criticism in Shakespeare Studies, Paul Yachnin and Jessica Sleights fully recognize that \u201creadings of Shakespeare [\u2018presupposing\u2019] an inward agential personhood are certainly anachronistic and probably politically retrograde\u201d (3).\u00a0 Conceding, as well, that \u201c\u2018character\u2019 as a valid analytic category became anathema for many scholars,\u201d Yachnin and Sleights nevertheless argue that \u201cWhile we have an obligation as scholars to apply the twin pressures of history and theory to the claims of non-specialists, ignoring their contributions risks impoverishing our understanding of the ethical dimensions of early modern drama\u201d (3-4).\u00a0 If SBB<\/em> productions do not exactly look like Boal\u2019s Theater of the Oppressed <\/em>or resemble the complexly encoded performance texts of a Czech National Theater operating behind the iron curtain, SBB<\/em> actors nevertheless play with subversion, as they do with \u201ctime served\u201d in The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, in ways that respectfully acknowledge the authority of the institutional power which\u2014like the absolute power of early modern monarchies\u2014continues to grant them their playing privileges.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the time came in the summer of 2009 for self-casting the play, there couldn\u2019t have been much disagreement within the company over who should play Leontes and who Autolychus.\u00a0 But would Hal Cobb be able to bring to the role of Leontes a sufficient professionalism to prevent him from reliving the events of his horrific crimes, crimes which are mirrored for him in Shakespeare\u2019s four hundred-year-old play with uncanny and astounding precision?\u00a0 In the post-production, inmate publication of The Observer<\/em>, Cobb reflected on his work in the play as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n

When someone responsible for the death of others chooses to honestly and truthfully portray a character responsible for the death of others, he cannot avoid change at a core level.\u00a0 When a perpetrator of crime chooses to portray a victim of crime, he must first examine the effects of his choices on others and find a deeper personal responsibility.\u00a0 When individuals who have never spoken in a public forum face their fears or a stutterer stubbornly pushes through to voice the complicated syntax of a Shakespeare speech, they prove brave and courageous and find a profound self-confidence.\u00a0 (17)<\/span><\/p>\n

In this piece for a prison newsletter, <\/em>Hal was addressing an inmate audience who attended the play, a penitential community<\/em> aware of the uncanny intensity with which the role of Leontes was invested by Cobb himself, the self-confessed and convicted murderer of a pregnant wife.\u00a0 For who could say that Hal\u2019s tears during the recognition scenes of the fifth act were not real?\u00a0 Or that the character\u2019s misogynistic hatred of Hermione was not a theatrical re-enactment of heinous crimes indeed?\u00a0 Or that Hal and his company of erstwhile reprobates weren\u2019t petitioning the state that imprisoned them by showing that they, too, the wretched of the capitalist enterprise, cannot share in one of the West\u2019s greatest artistic glories?\u00a0 Or that, as a Czech counterpart in the re-invention of Shakespeare put it in 1964, \u201c[W]e shall probably all agree that now, as ever, his humanizing touch is most needed both in the West and the East\u201d (St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd Whirligig<\/em> 175)?<\/span><\/p>\n

7. Conclusion<\/span><\/p>\n

That <\/span>SBB<\/em>\u2019s inmate actors perform Shakespeare at least in part because his plays have cultural capital reveals an ironic affiliation with a Marxist ideology that once valorized the social realism of Shakespearean scenes in which \u201cfeudal society was disintegrating amidst the clash of sharply opposed class interests\u201d (Pokorn\u00fd in St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd 217):<\/span><\/p>\n

Of all Western authors, Shakespeare was clearly the most attractive for the theaters, schools, and research institutes because he represented the highest artistic value approved by Marx and Engels themselves.\u00a0 Even the dyed-in-the-wool party apparatchiks did not dare to touch him, although the best informed among them knew that Stalin did not like Hamlet, the highly suspicious intellectual, and all of them found it personally offensive to hear that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.\u00a0 In spite of that, Shakespeare was tolerated, and books and journals about him were penetrating the Iron Curtain even when the political climate was \u201cbitter cold\u201d and we were \u201csick at heart.\u201d (St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd 215)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[D]id not dare to touch him<\/em>\u201d: this appraisal of Shakespeare by party apparatchiks should put us in mind of what was happening to Shakespeare in the West during its own years of \u201cdyed-in-the-wool\u201d valorization.\u00a0 Both of these historically contingent (and in this case, oddly complementary) hagiographies of Shakespeare appear to have resurfaced today in the confines of American prison theater, where inmate players are pushing the mimetic intensity of their theatricality to such accomplished levels that even prison guards and deputy wardens in the audience applaud the show\u2014because the show is Shakespeare.\u00a0 What the players are experiencing, however, is another reality, one which, to be sure, may be using Shakespeare as a petition for repentance and acceptance (and possible parole), but which encompasses for each player and for the ensemble as a whole something much greater and akin to catharsis<\/em>.\u00a0 The complete immersion of the player\u2019s self in a role he has felt called upon to enact appears to generate a truthfulness through doubleness<\/em>, which allows the inmate to acknowledge his crimes and win back the acceptance of his humanity.\u00a0 For Czech actors under Communism, one can only conjecture what a relief from the political doubleness of everyday life such a totally self-immersive art afforded, while audiences were delighting in a truly ironic telling of \u201cthe revolution of the times.\u201d\u00a0 The connections between this historical Czech chapter in Shakespeare performance and that which is now happening inside an American prison may in these ways be instructively asymmetrical, but they underscore that in both places and in both times the uses of Shakespeare are not only tolerated but have captured state approval for healing the sick at heart.15<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cTh\u2019 argument of Time.\u201d An example of inmate actors making the play their own: the company\u2019s choric rendition of the entrance of Time into The Winter\u2019s Tale at 4.1, where each inmate\u2019s shirt bears his prison number on one side and the years of his time on the other.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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There were sixteen actors, one for each year of Perdita\u2019s life in Bohemia: \u201cI, that please some, try all, both joy and terror \/ Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error.\u201d Photos courtesy of Matt Wallace.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Notes<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a01. Presumably this is the raison d\u2019etre<\/em> for the Continuum series, Shakespeare Now<\/em>!, which explores the margins in order to reinvigorate mainstream critical discourse.\u00a0 General editors Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie write that \u201cShakespeare Now<\/em>! represents a new form for new approaches.\u00a0 Whereas academic writing is far too often ascendant and detached, attesting all too clearly to years of specialist training, Shakespeare Now!<\/em> offers a series of intellectual adventure stories: animate with fresh and often exposed thinking, with ideas still heating in the mind\u201d (xiii).\u00a0 Amy Scott-Douglass\u2019s book on prison Shakespeare, Shakespeare Inside<\/em>, appeared as a volume in this series.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. What\u2019s clear, however, is that the history of amateur Shakespeare theater is long and stretches all the way back to the early seventeenth century.\u00a0 Dobson\u2019s book opens with an account of Captain William Keeling\u2019s Red Dragon mariners giving a performance of Hamlet<\/em> off the coast of Sierra Leone on September 5, 1607.\u00a0 To the extent that these seamen comprised an all-male, sequestered society, their theatricals might well be regarded as the first chapter in prison Shakespeare.\u00a0 Their story is also discussed at length in Taylor, 223-57.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. For the ways in which an all-male prison theater calls up the transvestism of the early modern companies, see Dobson\u2019s chapter, \u201cShakespeare in Exile: expatriate performance,\u201d in Shakespeare and Amateur Performance.<\/em>.\u00a0 Commenting on the Twelfth Night<\/em> theatricals of English prisoners of war (including the young Denholm Elliot) in Silesia, 1943, Dobson notes that \u201cAs in the Elizabethan age, too, these latter-day boy-players [the young Elliot as Viola] attracted some equally passionate anti-theatrical sentiment, both secular and religious\u201d (140).\u00a0 For an account of the way Measure for Measure<\/em> reproduces a crisis in repentance for early modern religious reformists, who no longer use priests as intercessory confessors and spiritual reformers, see Beckwith, \u201cRepairs of the Dark: Measure for Measure<\/em> and the End of Comedy,\u201d 59-81.\u00a0 Radical changes to customary modes of rehabilitating offenders led to a Protestant culture of public shame and humiliation replacing a prior system of personal repentance and renewal, for which the Roman church deployed a time-honored program of spiritual \u201cexercises\u201d and \u201cexculpating\u201d rituals.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. As Dobson writes, \u201cThe word \u2018investment\u2019 is crucial here: The long history of how Shakespeare has been performed by amateurs is a story of how successive groups of people have committed themselves to incorporating these plays into their own lives and their own immediate societies, and it makes visible a whole range of responses to the national drama which other reception histories have missed” (1-2).<\/span><\/p>\n

5. Augusto Boal\u2019s groundbreaking and influential Theatre of the Oppressed<\/em> is a widely acknowledged inspiration for many working in the prison creative arts movement.\u00a0 See for example, Buzz Alexander, Is William Martinez Not Our Brother<\/em>, 2010, p. 9, Jonathan Shailor, p. 181, and Jean Trounstine, p. 237 in Shailor\u2019s recent collection, Performing New Lives<\/em>, 2011.<\/span><\/p>\n

6. I owe these questions to an anonymous OVSC reviewer.<\/span><\/p>\n

7. See Greenblatt, Hamlet<\/em>, <\/em>34 and 253 ff. and \u201cThe Death of Hamnet.”<\/span><\/p>\n

8. See n.7<\/span><\/p>\n

9. See the conference website at http:\/\/www.shakespeare2011.net\/the-national-theatre-prague.php<\/span><\/a> (accessed 12 Oct. 2012).<\/span><\/p>\n

10. See http:\/\/www.shakespeare2011.net\/social-and-cultural-events-and-the-accompanying-programme.php<\/span><\/a> (accessed 12 Oct. 2012).<\/span><\/p>\n

11. Scott-Douglass notes that \u201c. . .many inmates<\/em> themselves consider Shakespeare to be a moralizing force, and not just any moralizing force, but the best and sometimes the only option after other methods, including religion and institutional surveillance, have failed.”\u00a0 See Scott-Douglass 5-6.<\/span><\/p>\n

12. See St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd Whirligig <\/em>217 for a Marxist reading of Romeo at 5.1.80-83.<\/span><\/p>\n

13. See St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd, \u201cShakespeare behind the Iron Curtain\u201d in Shakespeare and Eastern Europe<\/em> 133.<\/span><\/p>\n

14. One crucial difference between Czech nationals and American inmates is that while Czechs historically used Shakespeare to preserve their cultural and ethnic identity, SBB<\/em> inmates today seek some sort of transformative, spiritually reformative experience through Shakespeare.<\/span><\/p>\n

15. SBB<\/em> at Luther Luckett Correctional Complex has been able to survive, financially and on its own rehabilitative merits, during a national crisis in prison reform, due to the vision of its Founding Artistic Director, Curt Tofteland.\u00a0 In an essay he wrote for a recent volume on prison theater, Tofteland shares with other interested reformers his strategy for enlightening prison authorities about the enduring importance of a prison Shakespeare program, as well as devising ways to make such programs <\/em>financially independent and invulnerable to political trends in state correctional ideology (See Tofteland 213-230) Czech Shakespeare under Communism was allowed to flourish for reasons discussed above.\u00a0 See also St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd (2000).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Works Cited<\/span><\/p>\n

Alexander, William. Is William Martinez Not our Brother?: Twenty\u00a0<\/em>Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project<\/em>. Ann Arbor: U of\u00a0Michigan P, 2010. Print. New Public Scholarship Series.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beckwith, Sarah.\u00a0 Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness<\/em>.\u00a0 Ithaca:\u00a0Cornell UP, 2011.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Boal, Augusto. Theater of the Oppressed<\/em>. New York: Urizen Books, 1979. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cobb, Hal. \u201cThe Pursuit of Truth.\u201d The Observer: A Quarterly\u00a0<\/em>Publication<\/em> Summer 2010: 17.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dobson, Michael.\u00a0 Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural\u00a0<\/em>History<\/em>.\u00a0 Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Greenblatt, Stephen.\u00a0 Hamlet in Purgatory<\/em>.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton UP,\u00a02002. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Greenblatt, Stephen.\u00a0 New York Review of Books<\/em> 21 Oct. 2004: 42-47.\u00a0Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hilsk\u045e, Martin, \u201cTranslation of Politics \/ Politics of Translation: Czech\u00a0Experience.” Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism<\/em>. Eds. Irena Makaryk and Joseph Price. Toronto: U of \u00a0 Toronto P, 2006. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kidnie, M.J.\u00a0 Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation<\/em>.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0Routledge, 2008. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Palfrey, Simon and Ewan Fernin. General Editors\u2019 Preface. Shakespeare\u00a0<\/em>Now! Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars<\/em>. London:\u00a0Continuum, 2007. Xiii-xv. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Scott-Douglass, Amy.\u00a0 Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars<\/em>.\u00a0London: Continuum, 2007. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shakespeare, William.\u00a0 Romeo and Juliet<\/em>.\u00a0 The Norton Shakespeare<\/em>.\u00a0 2nd\u00a0<\/sup>ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Norton, 2008. 905-72.\u00a0Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

—.\u00a0 The Winter’s Tale<\/em>. The Norton Shakespeare<\/em>.\u00a0 2nd <\/sup>ed. Ed. Stephen\u00a0Greenblatt.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Norton, 2008.\u00a0 2892-2961. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

St\u0159\u00edbrn\u00fd, Zden\u011bk.\u00a0 Shakespeare and Eastern Europe<\/em>.\u00a0 Oxford: Oxford\u00a0UP, 2000. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

—. The Whirligig of Time: Essays on Shakespeare and Czechoslovakia<\/em>.\u00a0Ed. Lois Potter. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Taylor, Gary.\u00a0 “Hamlet in Africa 1607.” Travel Knowledge: European\u00a0<\/em>Discoveries in the Early Modern Period.\u00a0 <\/em>Ed. Ivo Kamps and\u00a0Jyotsna Singh. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 223-57. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tofteland, Curt L. \u201cThe Keeper of the Keys.\u201d Performing New Lives:\u00a0<\/em>Prison Theater. <\/em>Ed. Jonathan Shailor. London: Jessica Kingsley\u00a0Publishers, 2011. 213-230. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yachnin, Paul Edward and Jessica Slights.\u00a0 Shakespeare and Character:\u00a0<\/em>Theory, History,<\/em> Performance, and Theatrical Persons<\/em>.\u00a0Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Niels Herold,\u00a0Oakland University \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 in collaboration with Mr. Matt Wallace, Artistic Director of\u00a0Shakespeare Behind Bars,\u00a0Inc. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":51,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-593","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1930,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/593\/revisions\/1930"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}