Macbeth Behind Bars

Abstract

Macbeth has a long history as the kind of morality fable that has served the age-old Horatian objectives for literature of pleasure and instruction. However, the play also has a stage history of inviting terrifying but highly sympathetic portraits of Macbeth, especially as actors (and the culture at large) became more and more interested in studying inner psychology. The interpretive tradition has sometimes found the tension between straight moral instruction and sympathy for evil difficult to reconcile. This difficulty clearly gets ratcheted up in unpredictable ways when actual inmates who are in prison for violent crimes, including murder, perform the play in prison. My critical review works through some of the issues that surfaced during a Shakespeare Behind Bars production of Macbeth at the Luther Luckett Correctional Institution in La Grange, Kentucky.