Shakespeare Saved My Life

by Laura Bates

  He didn’t have to explain; it had been my greatest worry during the past weeks. The letter ended with the following words:

  The answer is no, I will never kill again.

  CHAPTER 76

  Footprint in the World

  While serving out an additional year in segregation, Larry completed his ultimate accomplishment, our final workbook: The Prisoner’s Guide to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. In his introduction, Larry paints a powerful portrait of the conditions in which his work was undertaken:

  Studying Shakespeare is inherently difficult. Studying Shakespeare in prison’s supermax dungeons is just absurd! Imagine sitting at a metal desk in the middle of a sanitarium and opening up a Shakespeare book for the very first time. It is a bizarre contrast to hear the language of a tormented convict, as you are reading the English of old. Now just imagine the people all around you are at war with each other and with themselves, the sound of bodily waste hitting the range is constant, and the stench of that raw sewage is so strong that masking agents only complement the discomfort, water from the toilets is flooding the range at your feet, and everyone is screaming out of torment or fear or anger or sheer insanity. While you sit in the middle of this storm and try to figure out how Macbeth drove himself crazy.

  These are just the physical distractions competing for your attention. Mind you, the answers are all around you, if you can discipline your mind to break away from the insanity of the sanitarium and go into the insanity of the play. And transitions are the heart of our Shakespearean efforts! It is, after all, the bottom line. Fact is, you do not need me to tell you that the plays are excellent stories; they have been so for four hundred years. You do not need me to tell you how “deep” Shakespeare is; he has frustrated the greatest minds on the planet. What I can tell you is that ANY serious reader of Shakespeare is going to experience an evolution!

  It is an absolute magic, and the magic has little to do with what Shakespeare has to say. You can memorize every cool quote and be as clueless as you were before reading. So it is not Shakespeare’s offering that invokes this evolution. The secret, the magic, is YOU! Shakespeare has created an environment that allows for genuine development. The Shakespearean efforts are not to replace your pre-existing ideas with the ideas of some facilitator. The efforts are not to see you become the cookie-cutter copy of what some other person thinks you “should” be.

  Shakespeare is simply an environment that allows us to evolve without the influence of everyone else telling us what we should evolve into. Shakespeare offers a freedom from those prisons! Your mind will begin shaking the residue of other people’s ideas and begin developing understandings that are genuinely yours! That is the goal of these Shakespearean efforts. You have nothing to lose but the parts of you that do not belong anyhow.

  The introduction ends with the characteristic .

  Following this opening essay, each of the thirty-eight plays is given its own introduction of approximately one thousand words, just enough to clarify the plot, themes, and major characters. More importantly, these introductions help to put the new reader at ease, written in Larry’s signature down-to-earth style, often making incongruous contemporary cultural connections.

  For example:

  Comparing King Lear to The Waltons:

  Those of us who remember The Waltons remember tuning in each week to witness a family struggling with some issue. The show was fulfilling because at its conclusion we witnessed compromise and understanding. The show ran parallel to our own convictions that no issue had the power to threaten our family bond. We all eagerly anticipated the show’s conclusion, which was the family wishing each other a good night. The same conclusion each week, and yet we did not change the channel until we heard the “good night.” King Lear will remind you of The Waltons a great deal, in that there is a family. But all comparisons end there!

  Comparing Titus Andronicus to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood:

  I’ve heard it argued that television has become too violent. After reading this play, I would argue that the level of violence in our modern entertainment industry is about as comparable to this play as the children’s show Mister Roger’s Neighborhood is to Mortal Kombat. I would not in any way argue for justification, but only that the level of violence has not increased, but rather it is relatively mild when compared to this four hundred-year-old play. How does one even summarize the gruesome behavior? Let’s just say that Titus is a Roman general, who is in every respect a hero of Rome. He is so popular that the public wants him to fill the seat of the recently vacant emperor. He declines and gives his vote to one Saturninus. Titus has just returned from war with the Goths and has brought as a Roman conquest the queen of the Goths and her sons. To make a long story short, the new emperor Saturninus takes Tamora, Queen of the Goths, as his new wife. She gives a brand new meaning to “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”!

  Comparing The Taming of the Shrew to The Honeymooners:

  “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” Well, not quite. It is more like, “To the moon, Alice!” In this case, however, ole Ralph Kramden is not making hollow threats. He is attempting to “tame” a shrew of a lady by way of starvation, sleep deprivation, and bursts of sheer lunacy! Our Ralph Kramden is actually Petruchio, who is by all accounts on the hunt for some money, when he is approached with an opportunity to get a substantial amount of just that by a group of guys who are attempting to court the beautiful daughter of Baptista. Her name is Bianca, and she has an elder sister named Katherina, aka “Kate”—the bitter shrew of this story.

  And my personal favorite, comparing The Winter’s Tale to Frosty the Snowman:

  Do you remember the story of Frosty the Snowman? If you can recall, this jolly old fellow was slowly melting away as winter drew to a close. Remember? Well, that has nothing to do with this story. No, this is a nice little comedy about a man who goes insane from jealousy and kills his wife and kid. A real knee-slapper! Of course, there is nothing funny about the story, and “comedy” should not lead you to anticipate a chuckle. Today, “comedy” is pigeonholed to mean only one thing: humor. It was not always so. In Shakespeare’s time, “comedy” had the diversity to make you laugh or make you cry.

  From cartoon characters, he moves on to German philosophers, as he points out that:

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no dream at all. This is a story about love, but a story that strips down some of the legendary ornamentation of love. Love from a distance looks like a blinding light, a single entity. This play filters that light and exposes love for what it really is: a passion! Nietzsche says, “All passions have a time when they are fate only, when with the weight of their folly they drag their victim down, and they have a later very much later period when they wed with spirit.” How can love drag you down? Well, it’s not love’s doing. You have a primal instinct to eat, but if that impulse stood alone, void of judgment and responsible approaches, you are vulnerable to eating poisoned berries. Love alone has the same lacking of intentions. Love has no ambition—it just is. How we apply or understand these basic impulses will determine whether we poison ourselves or live long healthy lives.

  It is the culmination of our ten years’ work, and it is a remarkable “footprint” for Larry to leave the world.

  CHAPTER 77

  Mother’s Day

  Time for my own confession—and my revelation. Just once, several years earlier, Larry had tried his best to get me to break my “no personal questions” rule. I had told him that I would not be at the prison the following week, that I was taking a week off.

  “Must be something important,” he surmised.

  As I shrugged, he continued sleuthing.

  “You’re going out of town probably.”

  No response, which he took as a yes.

  “Well, tell me this: are you leaving on a weekday or a weekend?”

  I laughed. Such determination had to be rewarded.

  “Family reunion,” I said. It was like telling a kid
that I was going to Disneyland. Actually, Larry reacted as if he were going to Disneyland.

  “Family reunion!” he slapped the table with his palm. “Oh, man, that’s awesome! I love family reunions!”

  Have you ever felt that kind of reaction to the idea of rescheduling a chunk of your life to drive hundreds of miles to stay in a “kid-friendly” water park? Well, like so many other aspects of life, Larry had me seriously reconsidering what our annual family reunions meant to me. And more…

  I knew better than to give any information about my family to any prisoner, even Larry. I never told him where my sister lived, or how old my grandkids were, for example. All I told him was that our reunion involved the monumental task of assembling “our nineteen kids and grandkids.”

  “Oh, man, that’s awesome!” he repeated. Then he looked at me thoughtfully and asked, “Do you think you’re a good mother?”

  No response. It was, after all, a personal question.

  He answered it himself: “I think you are.”

  “No personal questions” was not the reason that I had not answered his question. What he didn’t know was that I had nineteen step-kids and grandkids. That he was my only “child”—the only human being for whose life I could claim any kind of responsibility.

  Or maybe he did somehow know because, from the Westville supermax, he sent me a Mother’s Day card.

  CHAPTER 78

  Five Steps

  One, two, three, four, five.” I counted it out silently, with Larry’s words ringing in my head, and the image of him pacing in his cell.

  “Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” I continued, long after he would’ve hit a concrete wall.

  “Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.” The sand was warm under my bare feet and soft, until I stumbled on a hard stone and recalled Larry’s cold concrete floor.

  “Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.” The waves lapped rhythmically against the shore, a soothing accompaniment to my walk. Somewhere a dog barked and kids squealed, still more soothing than the tormented cries of the criminally insane.

  “Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five.” The afternoon summer sky was a blend of bright blues dappled with shifting cloud patterns that resembled first a bird and then a butterfly, while Larry envisioned his own images in the unchanging gray of his concrete ceiling.

  “Twenty- six, twenty- seven, twenty- eight, twenty- nine, thirty.” The faintly fishy smell of the lake water, a healthier scent than the overflowing toilets on the range.

  “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five.” Burgers sizzled on a nearby grill, while officers shoved food through the slots in the steel cell doors.

  “Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.” I took a sip of cold beer, wondering when Larry last tasted a beer, and suddenly even a Bud Light tasted pretty good.

  “Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, forty-five.” The little beachfront harbor was full of colorful sailboats, motorboats, pontoon boats—real boats, not the fantasy boats that sailed in Larry’s cell.

  “Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine…fifty.” In less than one minute, I had walked a distance ten times the size of Larry’s world. I stopped in front of a pontoon boat moored at the dock.

  After spending more than ten years in supermax segregation, Larry finally has broken out of his prison. Not the prison of concrete and steel, but the prison of self-destructive ways of thinking: “the only prison that matters.”

  Spending ten years in supermax myself taught me to recognize that Larry was right: despite having the liberty that he will never have, we all put ourselves into “so many prisons.”

  So now, to break out of one of my own, I took my husband’s hand and climbed aboard.

  Hey, you know what?

  What if this was Paris? They have them outside tables and stuff.

  And we was having coffee. And you had to go over there and grab you a donut or something. When you was going over there, would you grab your purse? Like, are you always aware that I’m a prisoner? You know what I mean? And I don’t mean anything funny by that; I’m not going personal or anything. When I see pictures of myself, I think I look like a hardened criminal. I really do. So I just wonder, what do people think about me? What kind of person do they think I am? Because so many bad things are related to me. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid that reality. Okay, I’m here in my life now, but I still carry the weight of all this other stuff. So because that’s true, I always wonder: How do you see me?

  Do you see me as this guy carrying all these chains?

  Or do you just see the chains?

  (Photo credit: Jon Mac Media)

  Afterword

  Larry spent more than a year in the Westville supermax, completing a mandatory behavior-modification program that he had already completed at the SHU, in order to earn the right to return to population again. He was never charged with any disciplinary infractions to justify his segregation, and his conduct reports there were unanimously positive, so he was eventually returned to general population at Wabash. However, he was not permitted to return to the Shakespeare program. Nor was he able to return to his college career because, while he was in segregation, the Indiana state legislature revoked funding for higher education in prison; college classes are no longer offered in Indiana prisons.

  With Larry’s departure, I suspended the Shakespeare program at Wabash but helped to start offshoots of the program in other Indiana prisons, as well as in the long-term disciplinary segregation unit of the federal penitentiary: the federal “SHU.”

  While Larry’s example inspires new programs across the state and across the nation, I am compiling his writings on all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays into The Prisoner’s Guide to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

  That is, after all, his “footprint in the world.”

  Reading Group Guide

  1. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently debating the constitutionality of capital punishment and life without parole for juvenile offenders. What is your opinion? Do you think that Larry, who came to prison at seventeen, should spend the rest of his life behind bars?

  2. What kinds of conditions are appropriate for violent offenders? Do you agree that long-term solitary confinement is, as judged by Human Rights Watch, inhumane? What about solitary confinement for juveniles, as Larry experienced starting at the age of ten, described in Chapter 15 (“Supermax Kid”)?

  3. Is rehabilitation possible? What evidence can prove a prisoner’s rehabilitation? Do you think Larry is rehabilitated?

  4. Research has shown that higher education results in lowered recidivism and is, therefore, a cost-efficient use of tax dollars: it is cheaper to educate than to incarcerate. But are prisoners deserving of higher education? Should their education be funded by tax dollars or by the prisoners themselves…or some other way? Should all prisoners have this opportunity, including lifers?

  5. A teacher’s ultimate accomplishment is when his or her student becomes a teacher, passing on the lessons learned. What lessons did Larry learn from Dr. Bates? Do you think he was a good teacher in prison—and do you believe he would be a good teacher in society if given the chance?

  6. Would most husbands be as supportive of their wife’s prison work as Allan was? Why or why not? Would you support such work done by your own spouse?

  7. In what ways was Dr. Bates’s work with prisoners grounded in her parents’ experiences as war refugees and immigrants? Do you think, as she does, that they would have approved of her work? Why or why not? Was she right to keep it a secret from them?

  8. Both Larry and Dr. Bates accepted a number of challenges in their work. What are some of these challenges—and how did they face them?

  9. “This prison doesn’t matter,” says Larry, referring to the prison of concrete and steel. Breaking out of habitual patterns of self-destructive thinking can be more damaging and more difficult to break out o
f. How did Larry break those chains, with the help of Shakespeare?

  10. Larry feels that we create our own personal prisons, and the author has identified a few of hers throughout the book. Do you feel that they both successfully overcame their own prisons?

  11. Every one of the prisoners in the Shakespeare group said he wanted to make a positive contribution to society despite his transgressions. What kinds of contributions are prisoners uniquely able to provide?

  12. Macbeth said that he dared not to look on it (his murder) again, but Larry did. The book states that getting convicted killers to look on their crime (i.e., to examine the reasons for the offense) is a key to keeping them from killing again. Why do you think that is so important?

  13. Acknowledging responsibility for his crime—as Larry has done—is considered to be an essential ingredient for demonstrating rehabilitation. Why do you think that is so?

  14. Look at the following three chapters and consider how you would have reacted.

  Chapter 6—Newton’s In

  Chapter 25—The Shower (Me)

  Chapter 26—All Hands on Deck

  15. Think about the Shakespeare plays you have read (or read a new one), and consider the ways in which you can find personal relevance in the four-hundred-year-old text. Do one, or more, of the characters have any traits you have? Does he or she face a challenge you have faced? Are there relationships among two or more of the characters that are similar in some ways to your own relationships?

  16. What are your own personal prisons—and how can you overcome them?

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to literary agent Sandra Choron for the invitation to write this book, and to Shana Drehs and Deirdre Burgess for their expert editorial guidance.