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

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

Laura Bates

Sourcebooks (March 26 2013)

ISBN-10: 1402273142

ISBN-13: 978-1402273148

The teacher sat on an overturned milk crate in an empty corridor. One by one the murderers shuffled to the seminar on Shakespeare, a guard on each side, shackled, handcuffed, on a leash, then locked in their cells. Kneeling on the concrete floor, they peered out through the handcuff ports, apertures the size of a large mail slot. Thus bizarrely did English professor Laura Bates of Indiana State University take Shakespeare to inmates at a maximum security prison in Indiana.

Shakespeare Saved My Life is no Oprah tale of a missionary from academia transforming the lives of depraved criminals through a love of high art. Rather than sentimentality, the story has dignity and gravitas  because of a central character of extraordinary abilities and motivation. With very little education Larry Newton began the Shakespeare program not quite knowing who Shakespeare was. Convicted of murder at age seventeen, sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, categorized as extremely dangerous, locked up in “supermax” solitary confinement for over ten years, Newton immediately seized upon the  400-year-old texts with a frightening eagerness and a razor-sharp intelligence. At first he was all white-hot, if misdirected, intellectual excitement. Scrutinizing the witches’ scene in Macbeth, for example (Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the caldron boil and bake; / Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog), he strained to know whether Shakespeare could have intended a single creature comprised of all the individual animal parts and agonized over the culinary question of whether boiling and baking are possible simultaneously. Soon, however, he began to see pieces of his own life in the Shakespeare plays and was drawn into digging deeper. A microscopic reading of the prison soliloquy from Richard II turned up tiny phrases that to him signalled an understanding of solitary confinement so authentic it seemed preternatural, as if Shakespeare had himself lived what Newton had lived. And the mind of the murderer Macbeth he judged to be chillingly real, meeting the terrible touchstone of reality that he and his fellow murderers knew too well. Macbeth’s hallucination of the bloody dagger, he thought, was simply an externalization of his own experience as he had mentally rehearsed his crime, repeating it, obsessing over it, until the visualization grew more and more real, eclipsing everything else and drawing him almost hypnotically into the crime itself.

In a conventional classroom the deep issues of Shakespeare’s plays—ambition, honour, love, vengeance, violence, suicide—often appear as mere topics for discussion, themes for essays, intellectual toys. But for Newton they were living issues critical to the lives of convicts, fundamental ideas that set many of them on the path to prison. In Shakespeare he saw portrayals of the bravado of the streets, of neighbourhood turf wars, of fighting over women, and he asked the questions whose answers reach far beyond the plays. Why did Romeo attack and kill Tybalt? Would he have done it if not for his friends? Could Othello claim to be a victim because of Iago’s trickery, somehow less guilty of murdering his wife? Can the actions of other people ever relieve us from our own responsibility? What was honourable about Hamlet seeking vengeance for his father? What is honour, anyway?

Newton grappled with such questions so fearlessly and with such intense introspection that his own long-held views quickly came under scrutiny. “I was trying to figure out what motivated Macbeth,” he told Bates, “why his wife was able to make him do a deed that he said he didn’t want to do. As a consequence of that, I had to ask myself what was motivating me in my deeds.” And he discovered that Newton the  criminal was a mask. “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.” Relentless questioning, sharpened by the Shakespeare texts, continued to erode his old personality, until he reached a truly astonishing conclusion. “I like my life,” he says.

I like being alive, I like my life, but what makes me the happiest is that I just really feel like I can go anywhere and do anything ... I have control of my life. I can be anybody I want to be. I don’t have to be some fake guy that my buddies wanted me to be ... I make decisions now ’cause I want to. Just the liberty in it, the freedom in it, that’s what makes me the happiest.

Larry Newton is a character you will not soon forget.

With his own demons exorcised, Newton went on to collaborate with Dr. Bates. He became the leader of the Shakespeare program and wrote workbooks for all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays, tailored for inmates like himself but also used in some college classrooms. Hundreds of inmates enroled in the prison program. It was written up in academic journals and featured in countless media reports, including a documentary on Discovery Channel. Hollywood considered producing a feature film with Newton as the main character.

Then one day Newton was accused—falsely, he said—of illegally possessing a cellphone. He was removed from the program and transferred to another prison, where he was put into solitary confinement and subjected to constant, random searches that played havoc with his study routines. After a year of good behaviour, his solitary confinement ended, but for some unknown reason he was not allowed to return to the Shakespeare program. When the Indiana state legislature revoked funding for higher education in prison in 2010, he also lost his dream of getting a university education. Dr. Bates, however, plans to publish his writings as The Prisoner’s Guide to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.