Shakespeare Saved My Life - Laura Bates - A Short Summary & Review

Shakespeare Saved My Life - Laura Bates - A Short Summary & Review

By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures

A Rite of Fancy Book Recommendation and Review

Dr. Laura Bates teaches Shakespeare in the SHU.

A short summary:

Shakespeare Saved My Life by Laura Bates recounts the author’s experience teaching Shakespeare to incarcerated men in a high-security prison (SHU).

Through classroom encounters with men serving long or indefinite sentences, Bates demonstrates how Shakespeare’s language, complex, demanding, and emotionally precise, creates a space for moral reckoning, self-examination, and genuine dialogue. The plays become tools not only for literary analysis, but for grappling with guilt, responsibility, power, mercy, and identity.

The book also foregrounds the voices of incarcerated students, particularly Larry Newton, whose insight and engagement reveal how deeply literature can reach when taken seriously.

My favorite quote from the book:

"When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego."

-Larry Newton, Shakespeare Saved My Life

Questions to ponder while reading:

Has the Bard ever spoken to you?

Should prisoners with life sentences be educated?

My review:

This is an insightful and quietly powerful book about what literature can do when treated as more than mere entertainment.

Bates never romanticizes incarceration or overstates Shakespeare’s impact. Instead, she shows how difficult texts demand humility, patience, and honesty, qualities that matter profoundly in environments shaped by control and isolation. Shakespeare’s plays offer no easy absolution, but they do offer language for truth.

The inclusion of student reflections is especially striking. I found myself wishing I could read Larry Newton’s book; his voice lingers, challenging assumptions about who gets to interpret great literature.

Above all, Shakespeare Saved My Life is inspiring. It left me wanting to return to Shakespeare myself—not just to reread familiar passages, but to engage them more attentively. And yes, it rekindled my determination to finally finish the Collected Works.

*The Shakespeare I have read:

Measure For Measure

Hamlet

All's Well That Ends Well

Love's Labour Lost

Julius Caesar

Macbeth

Antony and Cleopatra

As You Like It

Comedy of Errors

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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

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