Working Through the Tangle: Language, Archives, and Practice

What’s Past Is Prologue

Because of its cultural insulation, the Gullah-Geechee language (also known as Sea Island Creole) may retain features of Early Modern English, echoing the rhythm and sound of Shakespeare’s tongue more closely than that of modern British speech.  Stretching from North Carolina to Florida, Gullah-Geechee names a language, a people, and a culture shaped by African continuity and coastal distance.

Now, the question has evolved beyond whether Gullah-Geechee sounds like Shakespeare. It’s what theatre and the public might gain when we stop treating Shakespeare as the only model of linguistic mastery. That question sits at the heart of my work at the Folger.

This project often sparks curiosity, then confusion…which I share. It’s as intricate as the languages it studies.

The journey began in conversation. In 2021, my friend and colleague, performance scholar Kaja Dunn, made an observation that quietly rewired how I listened. She noted that if Shakespeare once sounded Southern and if Gullah-Geechee has been evolving in the South since before this nation’s founding then maybe Gullah-Geechee speakers sound more like Shakespeare than anyone alive today. That idea stayed with me.

By 2023–24, while directing theatre, teaching, and developing a play about the “Gullah Statesman,” Captain Robert Smalls, in Charleston, Beaufort, and Hilton Head, that seed began to take root.

What I didn’t expect was how deeply the Lowcountry would recalibrate my ear. Spending time in communities where Gullah-Geechee was spoken daily, I came to understand it not as regional “color” but as a living, musical, and precise system. Not casual or colloquial, but heightened; dense, rhythmic, and expressive. Much like Shakespeare’s verse, Gullah-Geechee speech moves beyond the ordinary, creating a register that feels deeply human and interconnected.

I aim to elevate Gullah-Geechee as a heightened linguistic tradition and to question the hierarchies that position Shakespeare as the measure of “heightened” language while overlooking the rigor and brilliance within Black vernaculars.

Speak the Speech, I Pray You

Shakespeare’s legacy is supported by entire institutions. Actors are trained to scan his verse with precision; dialect coaches, annotated editions, and voice support all exist to preserve the Bard’s linguistic fingerprints. But when it comes to African American vernaculars, particularly Southern forms that include Gullah-Geechee, that rigor often vanishes. Often treated as dialect or stereotype, reduced to mimicry, nuance is ignored and distinctions blurred.

That is why this research matters: if we extend deep care to Shakespeare, we can and must do the same for Afro-Black diasporic languages.

The (Inter)Play’s the Thing

This first stage of my research focuses on the socio-political forces that brought Shakespeare’s English into contact with Gullah-Geechee.

Gullah-Geechee, shaped by more than forty African ethnic groups forced into proximity in the Carolina Lowcountry, arose through migration, retention, and resilience. Shakespeare’s English was canonized as a marker of national identity and cultural authority in Early Modern England.

In the Folger collections, I am tracing how Shakespeare’s language traveled across the Atlantic not just as art but as colonial cargo. 

I came across the 1663 “Charters of the Carolinas” through a 1954 Open Stacks book (the original can be seen at the State Archives of North Carolina). King Charles II granted the Province of Carolina to eight Lords Proprietors, many from Shakespeare’s own region in Southern England. Some of these names, like Ashley, Cooper, Monck, and Berkeley, remain etched in South Carolina’s geography. They belonged to elite, educated men shaped by Shakespeare’s world.

By 1711, we see Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, praising Shakespeare as a national treasure–proof that his language had become an ideological export as much as a literary one (see image for the 1999 edition held in the Open Stacks at the Folger).

Barbados was central too. In the 17th century, it was considered part of the “Carolina” vision. Barbadian planters brought enslaved Africans, British customs, and Shakespearean English to the Lowcountry, embedding both economic and cultural capital. Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) appeared in print just four years before records of the first African captives transported directly to Barbados. The legacy endures in sound. Shaped by overlapping colonial histories and African roots, the Bajan accent and Gullah-Geechee uncoincidentally share striking similarities…

The Folger’s collections tell the story of Charleston’s bond with Shakespeare that goes way beyond borrowed prestige; it’s woven into the city’s first stages and staging. In Eola Willis’s The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century (1924) I learned Charleston actually holds one of the most significant milestones in American theatre history: the first American production of Julius Caesar, staged on April 20, 1774.  While I’ve currently found no surviving imagery, this account is corroborated by the South Carolina Gazette, which records that the production was presented by the David Douglass American Company of Comedians.

Backin’ it up even further, during the spring of 1763 Charleston’s stages regularly mounted Romeo and Juliet and King Lear–proof that Shakespeare’s language reverberated in a colonial port city built on global trade, enslavement, and linguistic contact zones. This history shows Shakespeare’s words politicized in the Lowcountry before the nation’s founding.

That same entanglement surfaces in the archival record. A copy of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear: in six volumes, adorn’d with cuts, revis’d and corrected, with an account of the life and writings of the author by N. Rowe, Esq. once owned by Henry Somerset, the 2nd Duke of Beaufort, whose family holdings extended into the Carolina Lowcountry, attests to the playwright’s reach among the colonial elite. By 1812, his influence had expanded beyond books. Check this photo I took of another item in the Folger vault,
President James Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe authorizing the brig Shakespeare to enter the port of Savannah, Georgia, evidence that the Bard’s name had become embedded in the language of ships, trade, and empire.

When we consider this, Charleston becomes a microcosm of transatlantic influence. Yet, surrounding these same theatres, on plantations and in Sea Island communities, another form of heightened language was undergoing invention.

Into Something Rich and Strange

Colonial infrastructure created a violent linguistic collision, resulting not only in domination, but also INNOVATION. Like Shakespeare, Gullah has shaped America’s cultural and linguistic landscape. Words such as tote, goober, okra, yam, and even jitters trace back to Gullah roots, and spirituals like Kumbayaa and Roll, Jordan, Roll rise from the Sea Islands’ song traditions.

For a long time, scholars brushed Gullah off as messed-up English, something that happened when African speakers tried and failed to sound like white settlers. The idea was that it wasn’t a real language, just a rough imitation.

This understanding changed with Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890–1972). Trained as a linguist at Harvard and the University of Chicago, Turner spent years recording and studying the speech of Sea Island communities. His book  Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) proved that Gullah wasn’t broken English at all, but a full language with deep African roots.

He identified over 300 words and patterns that link directly to languages such as Mende, Vai, and Yoruba. Turner’s research gave Gullah the recognition it deserved as a complete Creole and left behind an archive of recordings and notes that scholars still rely on today.

My work not only diverges from the early misreadings but builds on Turner’s foundation by extending his linguistic insights into the realm of performance and heightened language. I understand Gullah-Geechee not as broken English or cultural damage, but as heightened invention. Gullah-Geechee absorbed Early Modern English, but it did so in continuum with African and Caribbean languages; layering in cadence, rhythm, and grammar into a system every bit as rigorous and expressive as Shakespeare’s verse. Unlike urban centers such as Charleston, where English shifted with fashion, print, and formal schooling, Gullah-Geechee on the Sea Islands evolved apart in “hush harbors” and “praise houses,” carrying older forms forward through secret song and speech.

O BRAVE NEW WORLD

First and foremost, this work further advocates for the linguistic legitimacy of Gullah-Geechee and supports the preservation efforts of the Gullah-Geechee people themselves. This language is not a relic. It’s a living system of memory, creativity, and identity. Honoring it means prioritizing its study and ensuring the communities who forged it define its future.

For me as a theatre practitioner, this advocacy also calls for building infrastructure. Equity in theatre cannot be symbolic; it must be embedded into the systems that uphold language on stage. That means training voice coaches to understand the structure and musicality of Southern Black speech. It means dramaturgs who treat the grammar of AAVE with the same rigor they bring to blank verse. It means producing annotated editions of August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Zora Neale Hurston¹ with the same depth we reserve for Shakespeare.