People are very conflicted about what prisons
are for.
Are they to punish people and make them have
the most horrible awful life possible?
Or are they to open up other chances for them
or possibly a combo?
Now we would all agree that some people really
need to be in there because they are a danger
to other people.
If running around outside and quite frequently
a danger to themselves it's also quite true
that some of them probably don't belong in
prisons at all, they belong in institutions
that would do something about their mental
challenges that they're having.
Prison systems in Hag-Seed, which is a revisit
in Prospero's novel form of Shakespeare's
play The Tempest, it's kind of inevitable
that you would be writing about prisons because
there are so many of them in the play.
So revisiting the play involves writing about
imprisonment, coercion of various kinds.
And everybody in that play is in prison, constrained,
unfree in some way for some part of the play
except possibly Miranda who although she's
on an island she can't get off of doesn't
know anything better so doesn't feel that
she's imprisoned.
I might point out that on this island there's
no butter.
They toted up the things they had to eat and
they were fairly limited so you can see why
Prospero might want to get back to Malan his
hometown simply to have something better to
eat, but that's an aside.
So I did look at prisons and I was involved
earlier in a protest in Canada against the
closing of prison farms where people had been
learning to interact with and care for beings
other than themselves, namely animals, which
can be very therapeutic.
Over the years prisons have gone through many
forms.
Were they to put your political enemies in
so you could ransom them later?
Were they to put criminals in in order to
punish them?
Were they debtor's prisons where you oddly
put people in who couldn't pay their debts
thus making it impossible for them to pay
the debts?
Their relatives would usually have to bail
them out if they had any relatives.
Then in the 19th century, a very reforming
age, we got the idea that prisons should be
improving, that people should be improved
by them that they should learn skills that
would be useful to them later on instead of
prisons that got called penitentiaries and
then some of them got called reformatories
so you're going to reform people.
And in 19th century prison systems in North
America, which I read a bit quite a lot to
write my novel Alias Grace, which concerns
a famous real life murder case, they talk
illiterate people to read and write so that
they could read the Bible.
So they were very instructional in that way.
Where we are now is we don't know.
And it doesn't make sense to talk about the
prison system.
So which prison where?
How does it see itself?
What is it being used for?
And who is sent there?
I was at Bard College a little while ago and
they do run a college degree system in an
adjacent prison.
And you can get your degree and in fact a
couple of people graduated at that time because
I was there for graduation.
And as for teaching Shakespeare in prisons,
that has gone on more than you might think.
There's a very good book called Shakespeare
Saved My Life, which is about a female college
professor who went into a maximum security
all male prison and taught Shakespeare.
She had to sit in isle to do it.
And the people learning were in these little
cubicles, but she said that she got better
papers from them than she got from her college
students because those people had been there
and done that.
They had assassinated Duncan.
Those were the kinds of crimes they were in
for.
So they were able to speak from personal experience
about Shakespeare's accuracy in portraying
the emotions, you know how you feel.
Is this a dagger that I see before me?
Apparently you do except these days it's a
gun.
So that kind of thing.
There is a book by an Italian man who did
teach The Tempest in a prison.
Found it transformative for the people in
it.
They actually put it on.
And when he came out he wrote this book about
it and is now currently building out the program
of putting on Shakespeare in prisons.
It has been done.
And if it hadn't been done I wouldn't have
been able to write in the book the way I did
because I didn't want it to be completely
implausible, you know, something in it that
would never happened.
It has happened and it does happen.
And from what I hear about it it should happen
more because a lot of the people who are in
prison are in there because they have not
had the advantage of an educational system,
they have not been able to learn usable skills
and skills that they can actually get a job
with and therefore they have drifted, not
all of them but a lot of them they get absorbed
into these other ways of making money.
The other thing that literacy and literature
do, particularly what we call literary fiction
or plays like Shakespeare's, you learn empathy
because you learn what it is like to be another
person.
You learn what it was like to feel the emotions
of another person.
And if you've been in a very constricted sort
of life in which your main idea has been just
to keep yourself alive and keep going you
often just don't think of what you're doing
to other people and how they might feel.
