Recovers a previously hidden theater and performance history of Black women engaging with Shakespeare as actors, playwrights, costume designers, and directors.
This catalog documents and expands on the Folger Institute’s 2026 exhibition To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare, curated by Dr. Patricia Akhimie, the Director of the Folger Institute and an internationally recognized scholar in the field of premodern critical race studies. To Hear Her Speak explores the presence of Black women in the early modern world, the histories of Black women in Shakespearean performance both on and off stage, and how Black women as writers, thinkers, and artists have utilized Shakespeare’s language, forms, stories, and characters for their own purposes and to diverse ends. Akhimie shares how these women, their histories, and their cultures are represented (and misrepresented) through the eyes of early modern European artists and writers, and allows readers to listen for and learn from the voices of Black women in a wide variety of forms of expression.
384 pages | 150 halftones | 9 x 12 | © 2026
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies
Art: Art--General Studies
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
Table of Contents
Introductions
1. Ethiopes and Pearls, Black Women in Shakespeare, Patricia Akhimie
2. Against Elision: Joining Expertise to Turn from Object to Visitor, Verónica E. Betancourt
Part I. Mapping the Presence of Black Women in the Early Modern World
3. Black Women in Early Modern London: The Agas Map, Rebecca Adusei
4. It’s a Small World: Costume Books, Caroline Duroselle Melish
5. Mapping Margins: Early Modern Atlases and Black Women’s Bodies, Maria Maza
6. Flexing/New Realm: Figuring Black Women in Early Modern Europe, Verónica E. Betancourt
Part II. Shakespeare, Sugar, Slavery: 1620-1820
7. The Fitzherbert First Folio and Turner’s Hall Plantation, Patricia Akhimie and Patricia Lott
8. Phyllis Wheatley’s Copybook, Patricia Lott and Patricia Akhimie
9. Sugar and Abolition, Tricia Matthew
10. The Politics of Paleness, Ashley Buchanan
Part III. Taking the Stage
11. Jet, Ebony, and Tan: Black Performance and the Black Press, Atesede Makonnen
12. Queen’s Breakthrough: Diana Sands as Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, Shanelle E. Kim
13. From Good Times to Macbeth: Esther Rolle Across American Stage and Screen, Cen Liu
14. The Afrofuturist Costumes of Melissa Simon Hartman, Patricia Lott and Patricia Akhimie
15. Unsung Black Women of the Federal Theatre and the “Voodoo” Macbeth, Anna Kutter
16. I Never Liked Shakespeare: Black Girlhood and Archival Silence, Shanelle E. Kim
Part IV. Black Thought
*17. Ida B and Lady M, Atesede Makonnen
18. Anna Julia Cooper, Dunbar High School, and Shakespeare as Racial Uplift, Anna Kutter
19. Winner, Winner: Frances DeBerry Takes the Stage, Shanelle E. Kim
20. “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”: Maya Angelou’s Sonnet 29, Kim F. Hall
21. Embracing the Stars: Lorraine Hansberry on Shakespeare, Tapiwa Gambara
Part V. Epilogue: Lost Things
22. 1622: The Blacke Lady and Early Modern Black Ladies, a lost play, Brandi K. Adams
23. 1821: The African Company’s Richard III, a lost playbill, Joyce Green MacDonald
24.1911: Henrietta Vinton Davis’s Book of Recitations, a lost textbook, Kim F. Hall
25. 1953: Toni Morrison and the Howard Players in Richard III, a lost broadcast, Dalton Greene
26. 1989: MC Lyte and Lauren Hill in Club XII, a lost hip hop musical, Cen Liu