Abstract
Somewhere I had made a wrong turn, and I was no longer headed to Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky. Instead, I found myself lost in the middle of a Louisville ghetto, its unremarkable geography interrupted only by a Liquor Depot and a funeral home with a giant “Going out of business” sign. I remember thinking about the irony of the funeral home’s bankruptcy in a place that reeked of death. Marred by extreme poverty, obesity, truancy and, most of all, violent crime, this side of Louisville—the proverbial “wrong side”—was the childhood home of many of the prisoners I would interview later that day.
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Notes
See Rena Fraden’s Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Amy Scott-Douglass’s Shakespeare Inside: The Bard Behind Bars (London and New York: Continuum, 2007).
Ramona Wray, “The Morals of Macbeth and Peace as Process: Adapting Shakespeare in Northern Ireland’s Maximum Security Prison,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62.3 (Fall 2011): 343.
See Matt Kozusko, “Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, and the Politics of Reading Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Bulletin 28.2 (Summer 2010): 242.
See Curt Tofteland, “The Keeper of the Keys,” in Performing New Lives, ed. Jonathan Shailor (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011), 216.
Laura Bates, Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2013), 2.
Jonathan Shailor, “Introduction,” in Performing New Lives: Prison Theatre, ed. Shailor (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011), 19–20.
Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 210.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1977), 301, 297.
See Shakespeare, Richard II, in The Norton Shakespeare: Volume 1, The Early Plays, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
In their analysis of sexual dynamics in prison, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith observe that “[t]he historical illegality of gender trespassing and of queerness have taught many trans/queer folks that their lives will be intimately bound with the legal system” (8). Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011).
See Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath’: Speculating on the Boy Actor,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 64–83.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare: Volume 2, The Later Plays, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
For a careful analysis of racial politics and churning, see Faye Taxman, James M. Byrne, and April Pattavina, “Racial Disparity and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System: Exploring Consequences for Deterrence,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 16 (2005): 57–77.
See Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Appropriation in France (1833), trans. Francis Lieber (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 41.
Doran Larson, “Toward a Prison Poetics,” College Literature 37.3 (Summer 2010): 145.
See Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (New York: FSG/Noonday, 1972), 151.
See Giorgio Agamben’s Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 46.
See Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 226.
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 32.
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© 2014 Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin
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Lehmann, C. (2014). Double Jeopardy: Shakespeare and Prison Theater. In: Huang, A., Rivlin, E. (eds) Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375773_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375773_6
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