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

Publishers WeeklyIndiana State literature professor Bates details her remarkable work teaching Shakespeare to inmates, an experience that proved momentous for both teacher and students. Invoking lessons from previous volunteer work at prisons in her native Chicago, Bates transported Shakespeare into solitary-confinement lock-up (Secured Housing Unit, aka "supermax") at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, Indiana, and there met Larry Newton, her most engaged student and focus of this work. A convicted killer incarcerated since he was a juvenile—often in solitary confinement or on death row—Newton, despite his grade-school education, takes naturally to Shakespeare; starting with Richard II, he displays startling moments of empathy with the characters and latches on to many parallels of verisimilitude.