Prospero's Books

Shakespeare behind Bars

Last month, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I showed Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller's film Shakespeare behind Bars, a 93-minute documentary on a production of The Tempest by inmates in Kentucky's Luther Luckett prison. Four observations:

• A prison, by definition, is a "closed system," increasing in entropy unless it can draw energy from outside. The introduction of The Tempest into the lives of the cast brings such energy, allowing for growth.
• The production process shown in the film is a remarkable example of how living systems grow and evolve by moving from organization through disorganization to reorganization. (The very word tempest suggests the necessary slip into chaos, and "chaos theory" can be said to have been born in Lorenz's study of complex weather systems.)
• With so little to distract them, the cast members--during several months of production--study and "live" their roles at a depth I've never seen before, in students or in actors. Shakespeare's fractal complexity constantly repays this effort.
• As the cast members perform a play that centers on forgiveness and redemption, they collectively and individually struggle with those issues in their own lives.

Shakespeare behind Bars is one of the best half-dozen Shakespeare films I've ever seen. I recommend it highly.

Alas, poor Yorick

Perhaps the most recognizable image from all of Shakespeare's plays is that of Hamlet contemplating a skull--the skull of Yorick, the court jester.

Why Yorick? While rereading Hamlet for my current "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, I've come to understand one possible reason. The court of Claudius, the elder Hamlet's murderer and usurper, is a court without a jester--a court without anyone who can (to quote an old Quaker phrase) "speak truth to power."

One of the ways that Claudius's Denmark is corrupt is that information flow--essential to the continued existence of any system--has been distorted or blocked. (I count at least seven instances in the play of an attempt to gather information through deceit.)

I'll bet that after Yorick's death, the elder Hamlet's court continued to include jesters. But Claudius's court does not--until young Hamlet comes home. Hamlet's "Mousetrap" play can be seen as a replacement for the jests of a court fool. When this play-within-a-play restores some information flow, showing Claudius as he really is, Claudius panics and stops the show.

Something is rotten in the state--the system--of Denmark. Hamlet tries to restore that system to health by opening communication channels again. But he's too late, and the system collapses. Systems are often defined by contrasting them with mere heaps. The heap of bodies at the end of Act V provides a perfect illustration of the difference.

The course of true love . . .

This week my students and I are reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and talking about systems. I gave my students a copy of Barry Commoner's "four laws of ecology," from his pioneering 1971 book The Closing Circle:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Everything must go somewhere.
3. Nature knows best.
4. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Shakespeare understood all these.The four plots of Dream are intricately intertwined, and what happens at one level of the play affects the other levels. Everything is connected to everything else.

One of the most familiar lines of the play--and arguably the line that best summarizes the whole work--is Lysander's, in the very first scene:

The course of true love never did run smooth.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.