Therefore, in Year Nine of his exile—when Miranda was twelve—Mr. Duke took a job. It wasn’t a high-status job, but that suited Felix: he wanted to keep a low profile. Getting back into the world, re-engaging with people—he hoped it would ground him. He’d been going stir-crazy, he could see that now. Too much time alone with his grief eating away at him, too much time gnawing on his grievances. He felt as if he were waking up from a long and melancholy dream.
The job came his way via one of the local online papers. A teacher in the Literacy Through Literature high school level program at the nearby Fletcher County Correctional Institute had suffered a sudden illness—a fatal illness, as it turned out. A vacancy needed to be filled at short notice. It would be a temporary position. Some experience was required, although—Felix assumed— not much. Those interested… Felix was interested. Using Mr. Duke’s email account, he sent an initial note registering his willingness. Then he cobbled together a fraudulent résumé, forging decades-old letters of reference from several obscure schools in Saskatchewan, signed by principals who might be expected to have died or moved to Florida. He was ninety percent certain that these would never be checked: he’d be, after all, just a stopgap. In his covering letter he said he’d been retired for some years but felt the need to give back to the community, since he had been given so much in life himself.
He was summoned by email for an interview almost immediately, by which he divined that there weren’t any other applicants. So much the better: they were probably desperate, and he’d get the job by default. By this time he really wanted it, he’d talked himself into it. It had, perhaps, some potential.
He cleaned himself up—he’d been letting himself get ratty—and bought a new dark-green plebian-looking shirt at the Mark’s Work Wearhouse in Wilmot.
He even trimmed his beard. He’d grown it over the years; it was gray now,
almost white, and he had long white eyebrows to match. He hoped he looked sage.
The interview took place not at Fletcher Correctional itself but at a McDonald’s nearby. The woman interviewing him was forty-odd and making efforts: the streak of pink in her gray-blond hair, the shining earrings; the careful nails, a fashionable silver. Her name was Estelle, she offered. The first name was a positive signal, she wanted them to be friends. She didn’t work at Fletcher herself, she explained: she was a professor at Guelph University and supervised the Fletcher course from a distance. She also sat on various advisory committees, for the government. The Ministry of Justice. “My grandfather was a Senator,” she said. “It’s given me a certain access. I know the ropes, you could say, and I have to share with you that the Literacy Through Literature program has been more or less…well, my special baby. I’ve lobbied quite hard for it!”
Felix said that was admirable. Estelle said we all did what we could.
The teacher who’d died had been such a fine person, she said; he’d be missed by so many, it was so sudden, a shock. He’d really tried, up at Fletcher; he’d accomplished…well, he’d done his very best, under conditions that were…no one could go into it expecting too much.
Felix nodded and um-hummed at the right places, and looked sympathetic, and made eye contact. In return, Estelle’s smiles multiplied. All was as going as it should.
The preliminaries over, Estelle launched into the interview proper. She took a breath. “I believe I recognize you, Mr. Duke,” she said. “Despite the beard, which I must say looks very distinguished. You’re Felix Phillips, yes? The famous director? I’ve been attending that Festival since I was a kid, my grandfather used to take us; I have a big collection of the programs!”
So much for alter egos. “Indeed,” said Felix, “but I’m going under Mr. Duke for this job. I thought it would be less intimidating.”
“I see.” A smile, more tentative. A weaponless, elderly theatre director, intimidating? To the hardened Fletcher inmates? Really?
“If anyone on the hiring end knew who I was, they’d say I was way overqualified. Too professional for this position.” A bigger smile: Estelle found this more convincing. “So it can be our secret,” Felix said, lowering his voice, leaning across the table. “You can be my confidante.”
“Oh, what fun!” She liked it. “A confidante! It’s like a Restoration play! The City Heiress, or…”
“By Aphra Behn,” said Felix. “Except the confidantes are burglars.” He was impressed: it was an obscure play, not one he’d ever done.
“Maybe I’ve always longed to be a burglar,” she laughed. “But seriously, this is quite an honor! I must have seen almost all of your plays, over at Makeshiweg, when you were there. I loved your Lear! It was so, it was so…”
“Visceral,” said Felix, quoting one of the more enthusiastic reviews.
“Yes,” said Estelle. “Visceral.” She paused. “But this position…I mean, you are of course way overqualified. You realize it’s only part-time—three months a year. You wouldn’t expect a commensurate—”
“No, no,” said Felix. “Standard pay. I’ve been retired for a while, I’m bound to be rusty.”
“Retired? Oh, you’re too young to retire,” she said, a reflex compliment.
“That would be a waste.”
“Too kind,” said Felix.
There was a pause. “You do understand that this is a prison,” she said at length. “You’ll be teaching, well, convicted criminals. The goal of the course is to improve their basic literacy skills so they can find a meaningful place in the community once they’re back in the world. Wouldn’t you be rather wasted on them?”
“It would be a challenge,” said Felix. “I’ve always liked challenges.”
“Let’s be frank,” said Estelle. “Some of these men have very short fuses. They act out. I wouldn’t want you to…” She clearly had a vision of Felix lying on the floor with a homemade shiv sticking out of his neck and a puddle of blood spreading around him.
“Dear lady,” said Felix, resorting to one of his posh-aristocrat stage accents, “in the early days of the theatre, actors were regarded as next door to criminals anyway. And I’ve known many actors—that’s what they do, they act out! Stage rage. There are ways of handling that. And, studying with me, they’ll be guaranteed to learn more self-control.”
Estelle was still wavering, but she said, “Well, if you’re willing to give it a try…”
“I’d need to do things in my own way,” said Felix, pushing his luck. “I’d want considerable latitude.” It was the beginning of the semester and the dead teacher had barely got started, so Felix himself would have room to create. “What do they usually read for this course?”
“Well, we’ve relied on The Catcher in the Rye,” said Estelle. “Quite a lot. And some stories by Stephen King, they like those. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Many of them identify with that, and it’s simple to read. Short sentences.”
“I see,” said Felix. Catcher in the bloody Rye, he thought. Pablum for prep school juveniles. It was a medium- to maximum-security facility; these were grown men, they’d lived lives that had driven them far beyond those parameters.
“I’ll be taking a somewhat different tack.”
“I hesitate to ask what tack,” said Estelle, cocking her head archly. Now that she’d accepted him for the job, she was relaxed enough to flirt. Watch your trousers, Felix, he admonished himself. She doesn’t have a wedding ring, so you’re fair game. Don’t start anything you can’t finish.
“Shakespeare,” said Felix. “That’s the tack.”
“Shakespeare?” Estelle, who’d been leaning forward, sat back in her chair.
Was she reconsidering? “But surely that’s far too…there are a lot of words… They’ll get discouraged; maybe you should choose things more at the level of… To be frank, some of them can barely read.”
“You think Shakespeare’s actors did a lot of reading?” said Felix. “They were journeymen, like”—he snatched an example from the air, possibly a bad one —“like bricklayers! They never read the whole play themselves; they only memorized their own lines, and their cues. Also they improvised a lot. The text wasn’t a sacred cow.”
“Well, yes, I know, but…” said Estelle. “But Shakespeare is such a classic.”
Too good for them, was what she meant. “He had no intention of being a classic!” Felix said, adding a tinge of indignation to his voice. “For him, the classics were, well, Virgil, and Herodotus, and…He was simply an actor- manager trying to keep afloat. It’s only due to luck that we have Shakespeare at all! Nothing was even published till he was gone! His old friends stuck the plays together out of scraps—bunch of clapped-out actors trying to remember what they’d said, after the guy was dead!” When in doubt, he told himself, just keep talking. It was an old trick for when you froze onstage: throw out a line, anything that sounded good, to give the prompter time to toss you the real one.
Estelle looked puzzled. “Well, yes, but what does that have to do with…”
“I believe in hands-on,” said Felix as authoritatively as he could.
“Hands on what?” said Estelle, truly alarmed now. “You have to respect their
personal space, you’re not allowed to…”
“We’ll be performing,” said Felix. “That’s what I mean. We’ll be enacting the plays. That’s the only way you can really get inside the parts. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll fulfill the official criteria, whatever they are. They’ll do assignments and write essays and all of that. I’ll mark those. I suppose that’s what’s required.”
Estelle smiled. “You’re very idealistic,” she said. “Essays? I really…”
“Pieces of prose,” said Felix. “About whichever play we’re doing.”
“You really think so?” said Estelle. “You could get them to do that?”
“Give me three weeks,” said Felix. “If it’s not working out by then, I’ll do The Catcher in the Rye. Promise.”
“All right, agreed,” said Estelle. “Good luck with it.”
—
The first few weeks were a little rough, granted. Felix and Shakespeare had needed to work their way uphill over some fairly thorny ground, and Felix discovered that he was less prepared for the conditions inside than he’d thought he would be. He’d had to assert his authority, draw a few lines in the sand. At one point he’d threatened to walk out. There’d been some quitters, but those who’d stayed had been serious, and in the event the Fletcher Correctional Shakespeare class was a hit. In its own modest way, it was cutting edge; it was also, you could say—and Felix did say it to his students, explaining the term carefully—avant-garde. It was cool. After the first season, guys lined up for it.
Astonishingly, their reading and writing scores went up, on average, by fifteen percent. How was the enigmatic Mr. Duke getting these results? Heads were shaken in wonder, fraud was suspected. But no, objective testing backed him up.
The effect was real.
Estelle was given much credit, out in the wide world where academics gathered and conferences were held and theories were proposed and ministries approved budgets, but Felix didn’t begrudge her that. He was too busy. He was back in the theatre, but in a new way, a way he’d never anticipated in his earlier life. If anyone had told him then that he’d be doing Shakespeare with a pack of cons inside the slammer he’d have said they were hallucinating.
—
He’d been at it now for three years. He’d chosen the plays carefully. He’d begun
with Julius Caesar, continued with Richard III, and followed that with Macbeth.
Power struggles, treacheries, crimes: these subjects were immediately grasped by his students, since in their own ways they were experts in them.
They had their informed opinions about how the characters could have conducted their affairs better. So dumb to let Mark Antony speak at Caesar’s funeral, because it gave him an opening, and then look what! Richard went too far, he shouldn’t have assassinated just about everyone, it meant nobody helped him out with his battle when the time came. You want to be the kingpin, you need allies: no-brainer! As for Macbeth, he shouldn’t have trusted those witches because it made him overconfident and that was a big No. A guy needed to keep an eye on his weak points, rule number one, because anything that can go wrong will go wrong. We know that, right? Nods all round.
Felix wisely assigned those opinions as writing topics.
He avoided the romantic comedies: too frivolous for this bunch and not a good idea to get into questions of sex, which could lead to uproar. And Hamlet and Lear were off the table too, for another reason: they were too depressing.
There were enough attempted suicides at Fletcher as it was, and some of them had succeeded. The three plays he’d done so far were acceptable, because although each one ended with a clutch of deaths, each also provided a new beginning in the shape of whoever it was who won. Bad behavior and even stupid behavior were punished and virtue was rewarded, more or less. With Shakespeare it was always more or less, as he took pains to point out.
His teaching method was the same for each play. First, everyone read the text in advance, a text shortened by him. He also provided a summary of the plot and a set of notes, and a crib sheet for the archaic words. Those who couldn’t make it through at that point would usually drop out.
Then, once he could meet with the class, he would outline the keynotes: what was the play about? There were always at least three keynotes, sometimes more, because, as he told them, Shakespeare was tricky. He had a lot of layers. He liked to hide things behind curtains, until—presto!—he’d surprise you.
His next move was important to his method: he’d limit the curse words permitted in the class. The students were allowed to choose a list of swear words, but only from the play itself. They liked that feature; also it ensured that they read the text very thoroughly. Then he’d set up a competition: points off for using the wrong swear words. You could only say “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon” if the play was Macbeth. Transgressors lost points. At
the end there was a valuable reward consisting of cigarettes, which Felix smuggled in. That aspect was very popular.
Next in the curriculum came an in-depth study of the main characters, explored in class one by one. What made them tick? What did they want? Why did they do what they did? Hot debates would take place, alternate versions would be proposed. Was Macbeth a psycho, or what? Was Lady Macbeth always bonkers, or did she go that way out of guilt? Was Richard III a stone-cold killer by nature, or was he a product of his times and his totally depraved extended family, where you had to kill or be killed?
Very interesting, Felix would say. Good point. The thing about Shakespeare, he would add, is that there’s never just one answer.
Next he would cast the play, assigning a backup team for each main character: prompters, understudies, costume designers. The teams could rewrite the character’s parts in their own words to make them more contemporary, but they couldn’t change the plot. That was the rule.
Their last assignment, the one they completed once the play had been performed, was the creation of an afterlife for their character, supposing that character was still alive. If not, then a piece about how the other characters viewed the dead person once he or she was underground and the play was over.
Having tweaked the text, they’d rehearse, work on the soundtrack, and finalize the props and costumes, which Felix would gather together for them outside and trundle into Fletcher. There were limits, of course: nothing sharp, nothing explosive, nothing you could smoke or inject. Potato guns were not allowed.
Nor, he discovered, was fake blood: it might be mistaken for real blood, went the official reasoning, and act as an incitement.
Then they’d perform the play, scene by scene. They couldn’t present it to a live audience: administration was leery of gathering the whole prison population in one place for fear of riots, and anyway there was no auditorium that was big enough. So they’d video each scene and then edit it digitally, allowing Felix to check off “acquired marketable skill” on the numerous forms where checking- off was required. Also, making a video meant that no actor need be embarrassed in case he fluffed a line: they could do retakes.
When the video was finished, complete with special effects and music, it was shown to everyone in Fletcher on the closed-circuit TVs in the cells. Felix— sitting in the Warden’s office during the screening, along with the Warden and several higher-ups—was heartened by the cheers and applause and the
comments he could hear coming from the cells over the surveillance intercom.
The prisoners loved the fight scenes. Why not? Everyone loved the fight scenes: that’s why Shakespeare put them in.
The performances were a little rough, maybe, but they were heartfelt. Felix wished he could have squeezed half that much emotion out of his professionals, back in the day. The limelight shone briefly and in an obscure corner, but it shone.
—
After the screening there would be a cast party, as in the real theatre—Felix insisted on that—with potato chips and ginger ale, and Felix would distribute the cigarettes, and there would be high-fives and fist bumps, and they might watch the last part of the video again, where the credits rolled. Everyone in the class— even the bit parts, even the understudies—got to see his stage name in lights.
And, without prompting, they did what real actors did: they propped up one another’s egos. “Hey Brutus—brutal!” “You aced it, Ritchie boy!” “Give us an eye of newt!” Grins, nods of thanks, shy smiles.
Watching the many faces watching their own faces as they pretended to be someone else—Felix found that strangely moving. For once in their lives, they loved themselves.
—
The course was offered from January to March, and during those months Felix ran on high octane. But in the summer and fall when he was back in his hovel full-time, he reverted to despondency. After a stellar career like his, what a descent—doing Shakespeare in the clink with a bunch of thieves, drug dealers, embezzlers, man-slaughterers, fraudsters, and con men. Was that how he would end his days, petering out in a backwater?
“Felix, Felix,” he would say to himself. “Who are you fooling?” “It’s a means to an end,” he would reply. “There’s a goal in sight. And at least it’s theatre.”
“What goal?” he would respond.
Surely there was one. An unopened box, hidden somewhere under a rock, marked V for Vengeance. He didn’t see clearly where he was going, but he had to trust that he was going somewhere.
