Shakespeare and race

Explore Throughlines, a free resource offering teaching materials to help educators integrate discussions of race into Shakespeare and other premodern texts in college classrooms.

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.

Joyce Green MacDonald is the author of this excerpt from The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, a collection of essays edited by Patricia Akhimie.

David Sterling Brown writes about the images and ideas presented in his virtual-reality exhibition, which features art from the Folger collection.

Farah Karim-Cooper explores the way that race is represented by Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello, in this excerpt from her new book, 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.

White People in Shakespeare examines what part Shakespeare played in the construction of a “white people” and how his work has been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity.

Margo Hendricks joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about her research in pre-modern race studies and her romance and mystery novels.

Theater-maker and past Folger Fellow Debra Ann Byrd tells us about her solo show.

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.

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.

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.