Description:
Shakespeare Inside goes behind the scenes to reveal Shakespeare at work in the most decisive institutional context of our time - in prisons. Based upon the author's experience of watching prison yard rehearsals and performances, and interviewing inmates, program directors, and wardens, Shakespeare Inside is not an objective, dispassionate account of how Shakespeare is bastardized by repressive institutions but offers a record of fiercely personal experiences. We hear ex-offender Mike Smith detail how playing Desdemona was vital to his rehabilitation; we sit in the audience of women inmates as they respond to the all-male Shakespeare Behind Bars touring production of Julius Caesar; and we listen to a chorus of unnamed voices explain how rewriting Hamlet helps them to survive solitary confinement. Shakespeare Inside probes any assumptions we might have about Shakespeare's performative function and asks what - if anything - is the proper place of Shakespeare in today's society.
Brief description:
Amy Scott-Douglass is an
Assistant Professor in the English department at Marymount University, outside
of Washington, DC. Her scholarship on Shakespeare has appeared in Shakespeares
after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular
Culture, Shakespeare the Movie Part II, The Edinburgh Companion
to Shakespeare and the Arts, and Cambridge World Shakespeare
Encyclopedia.
Review Quotes: [Scott-Douglass] craft(s) a deeply personal, and engrossing account of the ways in which 'secured Shakespeare programs' confront many of the same issues that trouble Shakespeare scholars...
What makes these interviews lively to read, rather than a flat series of transcriptions is Amy's felt presence on the page. I take the liberty of citing her by first name precisely because she conveys a persona throughout the study that invites familiarity...
She manages to connect us even with those whose faces she cannot see in the most chilling isolated maximum-security cellblocks...
Shakespeare Inside offers a compelling story that resists saccharine platitudes without curtailing empathy.'
Scott L. Newstok, Rhodes College, USA,
Review in The Upstart Crow, Summer 2007.