Shakespeare’s narrative poems
How did early modern England perceive race? Patricia Akhimie, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, and contributing writers Dennis Britton and Kirsten Mendoza examine race, gender, and power in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Throughlines, with Ayanna Thompson and Ruben Espinosa
Explore Throughlines, a free resource offering teaching materials to help educators integrate discussions of race into Shakespeare and other premodern texts in college classrooms.
The Brief Life and Big Impact of the Federal Theatre Project, with James Shapiro
James Shapiro explores the cultural and political impact of the New Deal theater program in The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War.
Farah Karim-Cooper on The Great White Bard
Can we love Shakespeare and be antiracist? Farah Karim-Cooper’s new book explores the language of race and difference in plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest.
Margo Hendricks on Shakespeare, Race, and Romance
Margo Hendricks joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about her research in pre-modern race studies and her romance and mystery novels.
Debra Ann Byrd on Becoming Othello
Theater-maker and past Folger Fellow Debra Ann Byrd tells us about her solo show.
Ian Smith on Black Shakespeare
Ian Smith returns to Shakespeare Unlimited and talks with Barbara Bogaev about how we can develop our “racial literacy” and read race in plays like Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.
Black Women Shakespeareans, 1821 – 1960, with Joyce Green MacDonald
Joyce Green MacDonald shares the history of four Black women Shakespeareans who took to the American stage from 1821 – 1960: The African Grove Theatre’s “Miss Welsh,” Henrietta Vinton Davis, Adrienne McNeil Herndon, and Jane White.
Shakespeare's Language and Race, with Patricia Akhimie and Carol Mejia LaPerle
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.
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 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.
Shakespeare in the Caribbean
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 35 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. There’s a long tradition in the…