Shakespeare in the Age
of Mass Incarceration
Edited by Liz Fox & Gina Hausknecht
Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration brings together theater artists, currently and formerly incarcerated actors, and college-in-prison educators and students for a timely consideration of how Shakespeare shows up in prison. Contributors describe powerful encounters in classrooms and rehearsal rooms as they explore the complexity of “prison Shakespeare” within a racially charged system of over-incarceration and grapple with the challenges of liberatory practices in carceral spaces.
Instructors in college-in-prison programs across the country recount students’ profound awe with Shakespeare and their sometimes trenchant critiques, and consider how their own teaching has grown and changed as they learn from their incarcerated students. Theater artists, including founders of and participants in influential Shakespeare prison programs, illustrate evolving practices in the field. Directors of programs for returning citizens address the formidable obstacles people face as they come out of prison.
Accessible and highly teachable, the essays in this collection offer useful perspectives for students of Shakespeare, prison arts and education programs, and social justice initiatives. Those interested in starting or contributing to Shakespeare programs or courses in prisons will find a wealth of practical information. Those who read or watch Shakespeare with interest, skepticism, or delight will discover points of connection with incarcerated people who do the same.
Cosmopolitan Desire & Profitable Performance in The Dutch Courtesan
The Dutch Courtesan offers a reflection on the uses of seduction and desire in commercial culture. The eponymous courtesan, Franceschina, circulates among a variety of foreign clientele, performing suggestively on her lute; the native conman, Cocledemoy, accumulates wealth through a range of foreign disguises, tricking the gullible with his costumes. Their cosmopolitan appeal to a diverse set of consumers illustrates the dangers of excessive desire as the fashion for foreign commodities intensified in the period. This essay argues that the play itself is also a commodity that capitalizes on the similar fascinations of London audiences. Franceschina and Cocledemoy’s explicitly theatrical performances both display and satirize the ways in which salesmanship—seduction and trickery—preys on consumer interests to fuel commerce in the global marketplace.
Awarded honorable mention for best interpretive essay published in Early Theatre volumes 22 and 23.
Renaissance Disenfranchisement
My book project pursues how early modern England stretched its colonizing powers by extracting economic contributions from marginalized populations. I investigate modes of disenfranchisement that contributed to and resulted from penal labor of vagrants, prostitutes, and mad men. Toggling between studies of then and now, each chapter is organized as a diptych that places Renaissance disenfranchisement in dialogue with our most urgent contemporary concerns about exploitative labor practices and globalized economic networks.
By analyzing the systemic disenfranchisements of marginalized populations in the Renaissance and today, this project complicates historical thinking about our present by excavating the English roots of America’s penal system. Throughout, I examine how politicians, judges, merchants, and explorers, as well as playwrights and poets, conceive of the relationships between a nation’s most disenfranchised populations and its global aspirations in both the seventeenth century and our own.