Kennedi Carter, Meech, 2020. Archival pigment print. On display as part of To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare. Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY View image in fullscreen Kennedi Carter, Meech, 2020. Archival pigment print. On display as part of To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare. Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY Exhibitions ‘Shakespeare was a Black woman’: the playwright’s under-recognized connection to Black culture A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories
Prefer the Guardian on Google “William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare ’s The Merchant of Venice in front of her entire community at church. Though she never got the chance to perform that rendition, Angelou acknowledged her desire to deliver that rendition as part of a lifelong kinship with Shakespeare, a connection she continued to seek out throughout her life whenever she needed heartening or solace. In her eyes, Shakespeare wrote his emotionally desolate Sonnet 29 “for” her; how else could he have so aptly described the harsh realities of the Black feminine condition?
“Of course he wrote it for me,” Angelou declared. “Of course, he was a Black woman. I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a Black woman.”
Angelou would likely be proud to know that many other Black women – including Dr Patricia Akhimie, the director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC – do understand. The Bard may not have been a Black woman in the literal sense, but his resonance and centuries-long rapport with Black culture is one area of study that Akhimie has spent her career examining.
View image in fullscreen Installation view of To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare. Photograph: Tim Tiebout. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library In the Folger’s newest exhibition To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare , curated by Akhimie, more than 400 years of Black women’s engagement with Shakespeare is collectively explored for the first time, illuminating the ways in which Black women have claimed and reimagined the works of Shakespeare through scholarship and craft. “It’s a performance [and theater] history but it’s also an intellectual history about Black women as writers and artists pulling from Shakespeare to do new and amazing things,” said Akhimie, speaking in a warm conversation in early October.
The history of Black women’s connection to Shakespeare is long, but not necessarily storied – To Hear Her Speak reveals just how far back that history goes and under how many layers it’s hidden. There’s likely no better place to begin such an investigation than at the Folger, home of the world’s largest Shakespeare collection.
The exhibit, which is the product of more than two years of research, is both immersive and interactive. It contains nearly 100 items including photographs, playbills, books, diaries, illustrations and costumes; there are video displays of notable Black actresses throughout history performing Shakespeare; and within a set replica of playwright Lorraine Hansb…