“As you from crimes would pardoned be”: Prison Shakespeare and the Practices of Empowerment

Abstract

My research investigates the growing community of prison arts programs in which people who are currently incarcerated work with outside practitioners to study and perform Shakespeare. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the popularity of performing Shakespeare in prison, and as this trend continues to change the landscape of prison arts programming across the country, I analyze specific practices that professional artists, practitioners, and participants have used to decolonize the study of Shakespeare and to foster a more empowering and inclusive engagement with his plays. Throughout this dissertation, I use four primary case studies based on extensive field work research to analyze how Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted to speak to incarcerated people’s experiences of oppression as severely marginalized subjects in twenty-first century America. As an intersectional feminist, I analyze these case studies specifically in relation to the forms of oppression created by the imperialist white- supremacist capitalist patriarchy that operates in the United States and that has played a pivotal role in producing the epidemic of mass incarceration. This project proceeds from the belief that a recognition of these multiple and overlapping systematic inequalities is not only relevant, but vital, to analyzing the myriad of potential resonances of Shakespeare in U.S. prisons. In addition to foregrounding the oppressive power dynamics that operate in U.S. prisons, this dissertation is unique in that it also attends closely to oppressive power dynamics within the plays themselves. While advocates have written persuasively about the specific potential that Shakespeare’s plays hold for empowering prison theater participants and audiences, I emphasize the role that professional artists, practitioners, and participants have played in developing practices that illuminate and remedy the shortcomings of Shakespeare’s plays as instruments of social justice. This dissertation is therefore a nuanced examination of 1) how the circumstances of prison performance render newly visible the oppressive power dynamics and damaging social currents that surface in the study and performance of Shakespeare’s plays and 2) the artistic or pedagogical practices used to address, subvert, or overturn these power dynamics and social currents. Ultimately, Shakespeare serves the project of empowerment because of the canonical, elite status of the texts and as a name brand accepted by the gatekeepers of correctional institutions, but a vital step in the pursuit of empowerment in Prison Shakespeare programs is the use of subversive practices which harness the cultural power of these canonical texts while making them more inclusive of the interests of incarcerated communities.