Memoir — St. Martin’s Press, 2001 · University of Michigan Press, 2004/2012
Shakespeare Behind Bars
The Power of Drama In A Women’s Prison is a deeply stirring account of one woman’s experience teaching drama to women in prison.Trounstine who spent ten years teaching at Framingham Women’s Prison in Massachusetts, focuses on six prisoners who, each in her own way, discover in the power of great drama a way to transcend the painful constraints of incarceration. Ultimately, the book gives voice to forgotten women, sheds a compassionate light on a dark world, and proves the redemptive power of art and education.
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About the Book
“I began to understand that female prisoners are not ‘damaged goods,’ and to recognize that most of these women had toughed it out in a society which favors others — by gender, class, or race. They are Desdemonas suffering because of jealous men, Lady Macbeths craving the power of their spouses, Portias disguised as men in order to get ahead, and Shylocks who, being betrayed, take the law into their own hands.”
In this gripping account, Trounstine focuses on six prisoners who, each in her own way, discovers in the power of great drama a way to transcend the painful constraints of her incarceration.
Meet the Women
Dolly
A 50-ish grandmother who brings her knitting to classes and starts a battered women’s group in prison
Bertie
A Jamaican beauty estranged from her homeland, torn with guilt, and shunned for her crime
Kit
A tough, wisecracking con who stirs up trouble whenever she can — until she’s threatened with losing her kids
Rose
An outsider in the prison community who lives with HIV and eventually gains acceptance through drama
Rhonda
A college-educated leader whose life falls apart when her father dies and who struggles in prison to reestablish her roots
Mamie
A nurse in the free world, now the prison gardener who makes cards with poetry and dried flowers and battles her own illness behind bars
Praise for Shakespeare Behind Bars
“Shakespeare Behind Bars is a wonderful story of aesthetic power and redemption, intensely moving in its details, heart-breaking in its narrative totality. I hope this stirring work is widely read.”
— Jonathan Kozol
“I read every word, crying as I went. Prisons are monuments to ignorance yet Congress has seemed to decide that the appropriate thing to do is keep the ignorant, ignorant. It’s frustrating in the extreme to understand what is so obvious to Jean Trounstine.”
— Jean Harris, President and Founder, The Children of Bedford Fund, author of Stranger in Two Worlds
“Trounstine has crucial things to say for theater itself — for the meaning of Shakespeare and how, in the stripped-down environment where mirrors are a luxury, theater and literature become a necessity — a daily bread which is not entertainment or a commodity, but a spiritual and social nourishment.”
— Paula Vogel, Pulitzer-winning playwright, Brown University
“Jean Trounstine has written a courageous and hauntingly powerful testimony of the lives of six women behind bars and their struggles for reclaiming their dignity as well as their humanity. An indispensable contribution to literature, human rights, and world justice.”
— Marjorie Agosin, Winner of the United Nations Leadership Award on Human Rights
“Teachers who think their students are tough might find inspiration in Trounstine’s 10-year stint teaching creative writing and theater in a high security Massachusetts state women’s prison… This affecting memoir should appeal to educators and general readers interested in the relationship between social change and artistic practice.”
— Publishers Weekly
“This book grabs the reader’s interest from the opening paragraph… Portrayed sensitively but without pathos or pity, these women will be indelibly etched in the reader’s mind, forever altering the way he or she sees or reads Shakespeare.”
— Library Journal, Susan L. Peters, University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston
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