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?
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. 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.
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 Hansberry’s living room (based on a 1959 Vogue photo spread of the writer in her New York City apartment), visitors can sit on the couch and watch a television set screening clips of Hansberry and other Black women discussing Shakespeare, or browse through the “library” of that same living room set, where there are shelves of books that serve as a mini-archive of writing related to Shakespeare and Black women’s artistic and intellectual endeavors. To Hear Her Speak also invites visitors to become participants through other immersive aspects such as writing activities throughout, its exhibit-themed playlist (hitting shuffle will play tracks from Aretha Franklin, Lauryn Hill, Billie Holliday, SZA and more), and its audioguide narrated by Bridgerton star, Shakespearean actor and exhibition chair Adjoa Andoh. The exhibition was designed to be a three-dimensional, multi-sensory experience that can appeal to all ages and its full-color exhibit catalog, created by the To Hear Her Speak research team, was intentionally made for both print and digital consumption for wide accessibility.
To Hear Her Speak also builds on new research showing that Black women were very much a presence in Shakespeare’s world while also illustrating how they were represented (and misrepresented) by storytellers of the era, across different mediums. Part of Akhimie’s aim was to challenge that erasure. Along with her research team, Akhimie quickly discovered that artefacts and records of Black women’s engagement with Shakespeare disappeared around the 18th and 19th centuries.
This time period is arguably one of the most crucial for the exhibition’s narrative, as the 18th and 19th centuries are when the transatlantic slave trade is concurrent with Shakespeare’s rise as an international figure representative of British culture and culture at large. Through objects sourced from within the Folger’s collection and beyond, Akhimie and her research team managed to “tell a story about Shakespeare, sugar, and slavery”, filling the silences of history with materials such as a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio purchased by a slave-owning British family, a record of the enslaved people forced to work on that family’s sugar plantation, a pair of sugar tongs and a tea caddy both emblazoned with Shakespeare’s bust, and a copybook created by Phillis Wheatley, the formerly enslaved first Black American poet. To Hear Her Speak rallies the works of some of the most influential Black female luminaries in history in addition to Wheatley, Hansberry and Angelou, like Toni Morrison’s handwritten notes on her Shakespearea
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