Shakespeare and race

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.

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.

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.

Note from Folger Education: Now more than ever we need to ask the big questions, confront the issues that both unite and divide us. Today we share an essay written for the CrossTalk: DC Reflects on Identity and Difference project…

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…

African American engagement with Shakespeare goes back a long way—maybe even farther than you’d imagine. And like so much else surrounding American race relations, African American performance of Shakespeare is inextricably linked to the experiences of…

We talk with scholars Marvin MacAllister and Ayanna Thompson 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.