Q&A with author Elizabeth Charlebois

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Charlebois

Tracy Wamarema ‘28
wamarematwa@lakeforest.edu
Staff Writer

Elizabeth Charlebois is an author and English professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.  She co-authored Hip Hop Hamlet in collaboration with incarcerated performers at the Northeast Correctional Center in Bowling Green, Missouri. The play was a part of the Prison Performing Arts program.

A week after her talk, Bard Behind Bars at Lake Forest College in March 2025, I met with her over Zoom to discuss the project, its challenges, and the power of storytelling in unconventional spaces.

Q: What drew you to prison performing arts?

I first learned about prison performing arts from an episode of This American Life. It was an hour-long episode devoted exclusively to PPA’s (Prison Performing Arts) production of Hamlet in 2001 and it really got my attention. The incarcerated actors brought so much new perspective to a story that I thought I knew well. It made me realize I wanted to do something different with my degree.

I later met Agnes Wilcox, who ran PPA, at a Shakespeare Association meeting. She was part of a panel called Big House Shakespeare, which I missed because I was presenting in the next room on an obscure Renaissance dramatist named John Ford. During the Q&A, an applause broke out from the adjacent room, and I said, “I gotta go meet Agnes Wilcox or I’m never going to do this.” So, I left my session and by the time I got there, there was nobody else in the room but Agnes and her husband, Bob. I walked right up to her, and I said, “Hi, I’m Beth Charlebois. I’d like to spend my sabbatical with you.” 

I had never worked in prison. I had never been to prison. And I came in very open to what it was going to teach me about not just Shakespeare, but life: mass incarceration, the conditions of incarcerated people and the injustices that they suffer. A lot of this I only had a very abstract idea about. And it’s very different when students that you meet every week have these as part of their struggles. 

Q: Some scholars, as you mentioned in your talk Bard Behind Bars, have reservations about teaching Shakespeare in prisons. They say that it reinforces traditional authority. How would you respond to that critique?

I think they’re right. That Brent Blair person that I refer to in my talk was a professor at a conference that I went to. He was very frank about the ways that it reinforces traditional compliance to norms and perpetuates white supremacy. I come in there as a white professor wielding that kind of authority…that’s not necessarily helpful or liberating at all. It can be just another form of oppression, particularly when these prison programs are ways that the institution gets incarcerated people to behave. The reason why the prison really lets all this happen is not in the name of what’s good for the arts or good for humanity, but because it gives these individuals something that they’re committed to and so they don’t get in fights as much. They recognize that they have a group depending on them. People like Brent Blair think, “Well, they shouldn’t feel constrained.” But in some ways, I like that it cultivates a group ethos among incarcerated people, that it gives them something to care about that is not just driven by their own needs.

The power of their commitment to the group and to each other was astonishing. The actor that played Gertrude in Hip Hop Hamlet was a last-minute substitute. Playing Gertrude was a big deal because in this program, men didn’t play women. So, it took a lot of convincing to get one man to play Gertrude. He got thrown into solitary confinement the week before the show. We begged to have him released so he could continue, and they just said, “Too bad, so sad.” So, David X—he’s wearing a Dashiki instead of a dress because it was important to him that he not look too feminine— learned all of Gertrude’s lines in a weekend. 

And when the program was in trouble financially for a while, they wanted to have their wages garnished so that they could contribute to PPA. Incarcerated men make like $8 a month. I was like, no, no, no, you will not do that. Thank you for the thought but go buy some soap. 

That kind of commitment to the program is impressive. So, while I can see the negative implications of studying Shakespeare in particular, I don’t see this kind of compliance as a bad thing.

Q: How did you navigate the balance between academic authority and giving these men their own voice? 

It was hard. In the teaching of the play, I felt more comfortable exercising my authority just because I have so much more experience with the original language. The thing that was uncomfortable was enforcing this hip-hop medium on the actors. The decision to do hip hop was kind of an imposition and it was largely because– not largely, it was because I saw the Q brothers’ performance of Othello and it completely changed my world. They were so amazingly dynamic that they convinced a middle-aged white lady to think that she can write hip hop. They have some power, right? 

So, I brought Agnes Wilcox up to Chicago to meet them and they were wildly enthusiastic about coming down to do the workshops with us. But I got them on board, assuming that the incarcerated actors would be as excited as I was seeing that production. My enthusiasm outpaced my thoughtfulness about the implications of that decision.

Q: When it comes to hip hop, I would say there’s a fine line between appropriation and appreciation. How did you navigate that? 

I think because they were the creators. If I had given them a hip hop script that they had to perform, that would have been an imposition of a higher order than what I asked them to do, which was to write it with us. I’m not the author. The 28 men that worked on it with me and Agnes are the authors. They contributed all the material, then we put it in the stew and put it together. But that creativity really came from them. 

Q: Given how mainstream hip hop has now become, performing Hip Hop Hamlet in modern society, do you feel it had the impact you hoped for?

Hip hop has become mainstream because it’s been consumed by whites and created by whites to an increasing extent. It’s become so much more commercial. It’s not operating from a position of marginality anymore, so it’s got a different cultural position. 

Using hip hop was not as forceful a critique as I would have wanted the play to be. I think the to be or not to be speech is the thing I’m proudest of because I felt like that’s where there was some kind of critique of prison. A critique that called attention to injustice in ways that aligned with what I hoped were the more traditional associations with hip hop, as being a critique of the prison system and of economic and racial injustice. I think that the speech that they rewrote is the strongest element of that. 

Q: What impact did you hope that this project would have both present and lasting?

My primary objective is to give incarcerated men and women an experience that makes them feel powerful, creative, and free and makes them forget that they’re behind bars while they are doing it. In one of the poetry workshops that I taught at the women’s prison, a woman was literally in tears because she had been disciplined and was going to miss class. Let me just say that my regular students don’t cry when they miss class.

The lasting impact that I want this to have been, I want the script to be published. I’ve shopped it around to a lot of publishers that have rejected it and I’m ready to put it on open source so that it will be available. It has all of their names– I hold the copyright to it, but all of their individual names are listed as authors in the US Copyright Office, and it has a picture of them with a whole blurb about the project.  I want that to see the light of day. I want them to get the credit that they deserve. I want that to be their legacy because they worked so incredibly hard on it.

As Charlebois continues to advocate for the voices of incarcerated artists, Hip Hop Hamlet stands as a testament to the transformative power of art.