As we kick off a long weekend in the United States, we offer an extraordinary story of two murderers who found redemption through Shakespeare while behind bars.

“The only way that you change behavior is to change thinking,” says Curt Tofteland, the former director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, who helped the men stage the Bard’s plays in prison. “So, what you begin to introduce is a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at the world, a different way of seeing each of themselves in the world.”

Stephen Humphries tells the full story of just how much Shakespeare transformed the inmates’ outlook – and their lives.