One of Shakespeare’s theaters stood just across a covered bridge from a prison. John Milton lived in that same prison’s churchyard in the early 1640s. The prison was Bridewell, London’s first “house of correction,” and it loomed over both writers in a way literary history has mostly overlooked.
In Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England, Matthew Ritger, an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing, returns to Bridewell’s court records to write the first book-length literary history of these institutions. More than 250 years before the modern penitentiary, houses of correction pioneered forced labor and individualized sentences, promising reform and the “hope of amendment” for every inmate. They also produced the problems we still argue about: corruption, recidivism, and the abuse of power.
Ritger gives those court books the close reading usually reserved for literature, and finds the same humanist culture that shaped the era’s schools and theaters at work inside the prison. In this Q&A, he discusses how a literary scholar ended up in a 16th-century prison archive, what the records revealed that he didn’t expect, and why this history has only grown more pressing in an age of mass incarceration.
What piqued your interest in Bridewell in the first place?
During my coursework for my PhD, I took a class in the history department about the United States in the 20th century, to get outside my field. We did a unit on mass incarceration. I thought I knew how carceral systems shape our economy, politics, and culture, and vice versa. But I hadn’t thought about prison archives as historical sources.
I quickly became interested in Bridewell, the original “house of correction,” because it stood out as a paradox for historicist literary scholars. On the one hand, Bridewell’s records are some of the best-preserved. On the other hand, few people set to hard labor at Bridewell could read or write, so their experiences were rarely recorded in their own words, let alone in the kind of poetry or prose you’d find on a traditional English department syllabus.
What did the Bridewell records show you that you weren’t expecting?
I’m continuously surprised by the details in these records. There’s a chapter in the book about a printer named Richard Grafton, one of the founders of Bridewell. You can essentially follow his footsteps around the prison from day to day, because the scribe kept such careful attendance records for the governors sitting on Bridewell’s bench.
Many cases are brought by Grafton himself. Some include his testimony. This means you can read the books Grafton was printing, such as the first English edition of Aristotle’s Ethics, but then you can also see the decisions he was really making about how to punish or “correct” people at Bridewell: what kind of tasks they should be set to, when they should be released.
Some of the results are not so surprising. Grafton was disproportionately cruel to women, for example. But there are also many surprises. There’s a case where Grafton testifies against one of his own officers, and another where one of the prison’s matrons was accused of corruption. The records don’t bother to hide those stories, which might seem strange.
Shakespeare and Milton don’t usually appear in a history of prisons. What does their writing reveal that court records can’t?
Bridewell’s scandals and hypocrisies became famous, so the prison became a common target for poets and satirists and playwrights. In those kinds of writings, you often see how Bridewell became a lightning rod for bigger debates about the abuse of power. You find a wider spectrum of what could be thought or imagined but maybe not claimed outright.
Humanist education trained writers like Shakespeare and Milton to make political arguments into dialogues, to make arguments on both sides of every question. That’s part of how Measure for Measure or Samson Agonistes capture so many sides and provoke so much discussion still today. Those conventions were also ironically useful for getting controversial material past the censors, whether the Master of the Revels or the Stationers’ Register.
Remember that traveling theater companies were classed as “vagrants” at this time, which meant that Shakespeare was really always threatened by the house of correction. And remember that Bridewell itself stood just across a covered bridge from Shakespeare’s indoor theater at Blackfriars. Milton lived in Bridewell’s churchyard in the early 1640s. This prison was literally looming over both of them.
You write that this history has “only become more pressing in an age of mass incarceration.” How does your book inform today’s prison-reform debates?
That’s a big one! My book is primarily about questioning the alignment between humanist education and the prison-reform movements of its day, more than 400 years ago. But that question is still a live one.
Nowadays, we know that prison education programs improve conditions and reduce recidivism. Prison education can be an important part of decarceration, a way to shrink the number of people impacted. But we also need to be careful, because if you look to the past, that’s not always how it turns out. There has been more than one period, going back not just to the 1970s or the 1790s, but even the 1600s, when educational goals have been co-opted to build more prisons, or to make existing ones seem more justifiable.
Houses of correction started out that way. In the book I also discuss early workhouses in the 1650s, where students were taught to read and write for two hours each day and used for labor the rest of the day. The reformers behind the project write a memo about how they can’t call these institutions houses of correction or bridewells, because people are outraged by those institutions already. So they try to come up with a new name. William Petty suggests “literary workhouses.”
How does the archival work behind this book carry over into your teaching at Dartmouth?
Not a day goes by that classroom discussion doesn’t change my mind about something in Shakespeare or Utopia or Paradise Lost. Some of the most important collaborations for me happen at Rauner Library. Although the archives for this book are pretty removed from Hanover, I’m often in Rauner with students, using similar methods and asking similar questions about our own special collections. What gets kept, what gets paid attention to? What is left out? What stories do these records want to tell, and what stories do they make possible to bring to light?
Students in my courses have collaborated on two exhibitions, one to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and another to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association. Archival projects like these help us remember our own position in history. And they remind us that history isn’t linear. Things move forward and backward, not always in the ways you might expect.
What are you working on next?
Right now I’m really excited for a new class I’m working on for fall term, co-taught with my friend Rob Grant in the theater department. It’s called Shakespeare for Page and Stage. It’s a hands-on workshop. We’re going to retrace each step of how Shakespeare’s texts have been transmitted, edited, cut, and adapted, but we’ll also be performing, staging our own scenes. Since I’m so involved with the historical and textual side of things, I learn an incredible amount from working with an actor and director.
I also have new research projects underway. I have an article on Hamlet coming out. But I’m also working on prisons again. This time it’s debtors’ prisons. In the 17th century, imprisonment for debt was the most loathed, most abused, and most widely resisted kind of incarceration. Groups such as the Levellers demanded the abolition of debtors’ prisons during the English Civil Wars. That’s many centuries before most people tend to think about the beginning of anything like a movement for prison abolition.