Margaret Atwood on Prison Reform: Shakespeare Makes Inmates More Empathetic
- 6 years ago
What happens when Shakespeare goes to prison? His works humanize prisoners and open them up to reform in a way that the prison system fails to, says author Margaret Atwood. Atwood's latest book is "Hag-Seed" (https://goo.gl/zCzbFj).
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Transcript - People are very conflicted about what prisons are for. Are they to punish people and make them have the most horrible awful life possible? Or are they to open up other chances for them or possibly a combo? Now we would all agree that some people really need to be in there because they are a danger to other people. If running around outside and quite frequently a danger to themselves it's also quite true that some of them probably don't belong in prisons at all, they belong in institutions that would do something about their mental challenges that they're having.
Prison systems in Hag-Seed, which is a revisit in Prospero's novel form of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, it's kind of inevitable that you would be writing about prisons because there are so many of them in the play. So revisiting the play involves writing about imprisonment, coercion of various kinds. And everybody in that play is in prison, constrained, unfree in some way for some part of the play except possibly Miranda who although she's on an island she can't get off of doesn't know anything better so doesn't feel that she's imprisoned. I might point out that on this island there's no butter. They toted up the things they had to eat and they were fairly limited so you can see why Prospero might want to get back to Malan his hometown simply to have something better to eat, but that's an aside. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/CiI8IH.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/margaret-atwood-on-shakespeare-and-the-prison-system
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Transcript - People are very conflicted about what prisons are for. Are they to punish people and make them have the most horrible awful life possible? Or are they to open up other chances for them or possibly a combo? Now we would all agree that some people really need to be in there because they are a danger to other people. If running around outside and quite frequently a danger to themselves it's also quite true that some of them probably don't belong in prisons at all, they belong in institutions that would do something about their mental challenges that they're having.
Prison systems in Hag-Seed, which is a revisit in Prospero's novel form of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, it's kind of inevitable that you would be writing about prisons because there are so many of them in the play. So revisiting the play involves writing about imprisonment, coercion of various kinds. And everybody in that play is in prison, constrained, unfree in some way for some part of the play except possibly Miranda who although she's on an island she can't get off of doesn't know anything better so doesn't feel that she's imprisoned. I might point out that on this island there's no butter. They toted up the things they had to eat and they were fairly limited so you can see why Prospero might want to get back to Malan his hometown simply to have something better to eat, but that's an aside. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/CiI8IH.