Are monsters born or are they made? How are they to be understood? Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as well as Shakespeare Behind Bars, present us with compelling and complex views of civilization and its discontents.

Prisoners live in an completely different world, entirely cast off from the rest of “humanity.” But when the camera takes us behind the bars, it presents a picture of prison life. It makes life in prison, as a monster, seem not so bad, seem not so different from our own lives. They hang out and shoot the breeze. They go about their chores. They overcome racism and struggle to come out of the closet. They get together and do Shakespeare, just like we do in class! Oh my gawd! Surely they can’t really be all that bad, you say to yourself, watching Caliban’s actor crip-walk as Triniculo raps some dialogue in style.

If the monsters can enjoy Shakespeare as much as we can, this humanizes them, as they become more like us. It also criminalizes us, making us more like them.

And despite the fact that the criminals are cast-off monsters, they started out just like us. They rejected that which was human through a specific historical act. Antonio and Sebastian almost did just this when they had the opportunity to kill Gonzalo in his sleep. Convicts know this dark side of the soul can lurk within any of us. On that basis, they feel guilt and experience redemption. It makes it possible for the camera to have anything to show us at all.

This point seems to be underlined in Measure for Measure. No one’s born a criminal; under the right circumstances, any of us can become one. “How would you be/ If He, which is the top of judgement, should/ But judge you as you are,” pleads Isabella to Angelo. And the incognito duke performs a sort of Shakespeare Behind Bars in order to understand the truth of his own city.

Caliban is a completely different breed of beast.

Caliban did not originate with this common understanding of the brotherhood of Western Civilization.

He starts out as snarling monster, chafing himself against the bars of the cage of servitude in which Prospero has imprisoned him. “You taught me language; and my prof’t on is, I know how to curse.”

Caliban originates with what the poststructuralists call “radical alterity,” a fancy way of saying that no matter what he says, we really have no idea what he’s thinking. He shows an obsessive attention to the “natural” features of his environment; the animals, the landscape, and the flora. We don’t really know what to make of this. We know what the landscape and the flora and the fauna are, but Western thought’s system of values doesn’t care about these things as much as Caliban does and hardly knows what to make of them, except to eat and drink until it finds a way off the island.

And yet, there’s more to Caliban than that. He dreams:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

It’s beautiful. The recognition of beauty connects the monster to what we believe is essentially human, a belief that guides the hope that performing Shakespeare can reform convicts. And although at first Caliban’s prose seems to come out of left field, his tone also suggests that there is also something unknowable and sublime about ourselves. There is a monster within all of us.

How do the monsters understand us? The fairies of Midsummer Night’s Dream are basically frolicky people with magic powers and magic potions. There’s no other way to show them. Yet, they seem to be pretty sure they’ve got us pegged. “What fools these mortals be,” observes Oberon.

Is there necessarily a human inside every monster as well? Shakespeare wants us to think so of Caliban. And there is no escaping this: no matter how hard he tries, the Bard cannot pen a single word from Caliban’s mouth or imagine a single thought in Caliban’s head without employing human language and looking at him from a human point of view. This is the trap the postmodernists call “ethnocentrism!” Anais Nin once said “We see things not as they are, but as we are.” No matter how monstrous, we can only see the monsters in relation to ourselves, our language, our culture; thus absorbed by language, even differences can become likenesses.

Humanism, therefore, demonstrates the belief that nothing human is really alien to us simply by brushing that which is really alien to us. The camera can show us what the prisoners are doing and what they are saying, even capturing difficult and complex confessions. But it can’t show us why they got there: a historical event, involving victims that, in many cases, are no longer alive to speak on their own behalf. Although we watch Caliban’s character performed, we only catch him in glimpses. He is just words; we cannot see into his head or into his soul. Even the moment when we feel closest to him is a moment marked by a tone of profound mystery.