Black artists and scholars on Shakespeare

In celebration of Black History Month, we’re sharing some of our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast interviews and blog post Q&As with acclaimed Black artists, poets, scholars, and educators about Shakespeare through history up to the present.

Artists on Shakespeare

Rita Dove on Shakespeare and her poem of welcome for the Folger
US Poet Laureate Rita Dove (1993–95) shares the inspiration behind the poem she wrote welcoming visitors to the Folger, reflecting on how writing for marble is different from writing for the page, and remembers the moment she discovered Shakespeare.

Akala and Hip-Hop Shakespeare
“Is it Shakespeare, or is it hip-hop?” British poet, rapper, and educator Akala connects audiences with the relevance of Shakespeare’s poetry by reciting a passage and then challenges his audience with this question. Even acclaimed Shakespeare actors like Ian McKellen can’t always tell.

Fred Wilson’s Reflection of Past and Present
Artist Fred Wilson has made several pieces that engage with Othello, many of them made from the same evocative black Murano glass, including an installation for the Folger. He reflects on his fascination with Shakespeare’s tragedy and 19th-century Black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge.

Scholars on Shakespeare and history

Ian Smith on Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race
Scholar Ian Smith explores how Shakespeare’s plays engage with questions of race and early modern encounters between Africans and Europeans and how we can develop our “racial literacy” in plays like Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.

Race and Blackness in Elizabethan England
When did the concept of race develop? Scholar Ambereen Dadabhoy takes us back to Shakespeare’s London—a more diverse city than you might imagine—to look at Othello and George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar.

Black Americans and Shakespeare
Black American engagement with Shakespeare goes back a long way—maybe even farther than you’d imagine. With scholars Kim Hall, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, Bernth Lindfors, Francesca Royster, and Shane White, we explore two periods: the 1820s, when freedom first came to the enslaved African Americans of New York, and from the 1950s to today.

The African Company and Black Shakespeare in 1820s New York
Scholar Joyce Green MacDonald writes about the African Company’s pioneering Shakespeare productions, racial tensions in 1820s New York, and the tactics used to harass and suppress Black theater makers in this essay excerpt from The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race.

Shakespeare in the Caribbean
Scholars Giselle Rampaul and Barrymore A. Bogues share how Shakespeare and his plays are woven deeply into the culture of the Caribbean, both white and black. Even after centuries of British colonial rule came to an end, Shakespeare endured.

Othello Was My Grandfather: Shakespeare in the African Diaspora
Scholar Kim F. Hall discusses Afrodiasporic appropriations of Othello for the 2016 Shakespeare Lecture series at the Folger. Her groundbreaking book, Things of Darkness, used a black feminist approach to interpret Renaissance literature and helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare in Black and White
Scholars Marvin MacAllister and Ayanna Thompson talk about Black Americans and Shakespeare in the period between the end of the Civil War and the 1950s: from Reconstruction, through the period of Jim Crow segregation; and into the Civil Rights Era.

Black scholars on Shakespeare’s plays and race

Othello and Blackface
Scholars Ian Smith and Ayanna Thompson talk about Elizabethan modes of blackface—which included covering a performer’s body with dyed cloth to simulate blackness—and how Smith’s insight changes how we understand Othello.

Shakespeare’s Language and Race
Dr. Patricia Akhimie and Dr. Carol Mejia LaPerle explore the ways that Shakespeare’s language—think descriptors like “fair,” “sooty,” and “alabaster”—constructs and enshrines systems of race and racism.

Black Lives Matter in Titus Andronicus
What does it mean to read a play like Titus Andronicus with questions of race in mind? Scholar David Sterling Brown, who has written extensively about that play, discusses the ways that such a reading reveals an entire dimension of racial imagery and racial violence.

Margo Hendricks on Race and Romance
Author and scholar Margo Hendricks, a pioneer of early and pre-modern critical race studies, talks about her book, Race and Romance: Coloring the Past, which combines her scholarship with her experience writing more than a dozen romance and mystery novels under the pen name Elysabeth Grace.