Abstract

Working up from Prince Hal’s “redeeming time” soliloquy to some modern examples, this chapter addresses the problem of planned desistance from crime, especially insofar as planned desistance can actually contribute to the present persistence of criminal behavior. What I call the dramatization of desistance in Hal’s soliloquy encourages us to bring Shakespeare into dialog with the emerging field of “narrative criminology.” Theorists in this field attend to narratives of crime not as retrospective recitations of past criminal behavior but as constitutive events that can contribute to crime. Thus, this essay works from Shakespeare to a testable social scientific hypothesis for the dramatization of desistance: in both the private stories we tell ourselves and the public stories our cultures create, narratives imagining desistance from crime can become a juvenile delinquent’s justification for the persistence of criminal behavior. As I built and evaluated the notion of the dramatization of desistance for this chapter, I sought to bridge the gap between humanistic and scientific thinking by arranging a series of conversations with criminologists working in the field of narrative criminology. Shadd Murana, Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester, and Lois Presser, Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, were kind enough to share their expertise. Interviews with them are incorporated in my attempt to theorize the dramatization of desistance in the second half of this essay, but first comes the foundation for this theory in an account of Hal’s “redeeming time” soliloquy from the perspective of traditional literary studies. 

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