A director who has facilitated Shakespeare programmes in prisons for fifteen years in conversation with a former prisoner who served eighteen years and who participated in four of those programmes. The authors explore the ways in which performative Shakespeare programmes fill a niche otherwise unoccupied in the prison system – a recreational programme that offers opportunities for collaboration, growth and the development of empathic and communication skills that are not constrained by a deficit-based and outcome-oriented pedagogy. The programme offers models of camaraderie and support that are not ‘in opposition to’ other groups, and promotes collaborative over individual achievement. The development of intrinsic motivation is a key component in functioning as a free citizen, but is actively discouraged by the correctional system. Prison Shakespeare programmes develop these skills in addition to offering a practical critique to the model of ‘toughness’ promoted by the prisoners’ own cultural milieu. The chapter speaks to the value of recreation for its own sake, and how it can be a vital component in both education and rehabilitation precisely because it does not set out to do either.

Chapter 6 examines the private memory of ex-servicemen who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia. It uses a source not meant to influence public opinion at all: scrapbooks. This chapter makes two arguments. First, it argues that scrapbooks were spaces of private memory and, to borrow from Pierre Nora, sites of memory. British and Dominion soldiers who had photographed the war and spent most of their service in the Middle East and Macedonia had to remember the war differently. Their campaigns bore little resemblance to the conflict on the Western Front. Ex-servicemen used scrapbooks as a way of actively constructing a past that was both recognisable and acceptable to them. Some ex-servicemen pictured the war as a relentless struggle against the Ottomans or Bulgarians, and the harsh climatic and environmental conditions of the Middle East and Macedonia. Others pictured the war as an exciting episode of travel. Others still pictured the war in chronological order, slotting their personal experience of the war into the narrative. While publicly, in memoirs, ex-servicemen made a number of claims that were meant to compete with the Western Front, privately, in scrapbooks, ex-servicemen focused almost entirely on travel, tourism, and camaraderie.