To Hear Her Speak: Black women, Shakespeare, and early modern texts

Patricia Akhimie, curator of the Folger’s 2026 exhibition To Hear Her Speak, writes in the companion catalog “What do Black women and Shakespeare have to do with each other?” Quite a bit, it turns out. In her introduction for the catalog, excerpted below, she explores the four hundred years that the exhibition covers and affirms that for Black women: “Shakespeare has been and continues to be a site of significance, of creative effort and expression, of familial bonding and community building, of struggle and critique, of activism and good trouble.”

THE TOPIC OF THIS EXHIBITION MIGHT PROMPT AN OBVIOUS QUESTION: “ARE THERE ANY BLACK WOMEN IN SHAKESPEARE?” Before answering, we might also stop to wonder what we’re referring to when we talk about “Shakespeare”? Is it the plays and poems written by William Shakespeare, some of which survived only in the large First Folio printed in 1623, some of which appeared before that date in smaller editions called quartos, and some of which have been lost to time? We may think of these texts read silently or aloud, alone or in community, by readers young and old in homes, classrooms, theaters, and libraries, on beaches and park benches. Or we may think of those same works in performance onstage and, later, in film and television—in fact, thousands of performances over more than four centuries, in almost every language, around the world for audiences large and small, rapt, distracted, enraged, delighted, dismayed, giggling or guffawing, in tears, or indifferent. We may think too of the more amorphous “Shakespeare” that is an idea of greatness and canonicity or a sea of souvenir “out damn spot” erasers or a required class reading or a cultural institution or a brick-and-mortar place like the Folger Shakespeare Library: in other words, we may think of Shakespeare as both an industry and an aura. So when we talk about “Shakespeare” and ask, “Are there any Black women in Shakespeare?” before us unfolds a vast territory that spans continents and centuries.

Yes. There are Black women in Shakespeare. Perhaps more probingly and more provocatively, we might ask, “What do Black women and Shakespeare have to do with each other?” For those who care about Shakespeare out of love for the verse, for the stories and characters, or for the undeniably pervasive influence these have had on our world and way of thinking, it is important to affirm that Black women have been deeply intertwined with, if not central to, the story of Shakespeare (and the stories of Shakespeare) from the beginning. For those who care about the histories and experiences of Black women, the formation of the very identity—“Black woman”—and positionality in our societies past and present, it is important to affirm that Shakespeare has been and continues to be a site of significance, of creative effort and expression, of familial bonding and community building, of struggle and critique, of activism and good trouble.

Every corner of the early modern world that Shakespeare inhabited was inhabited by Black women, too. This is true both at the local level, in the streets and neighborhoods of early modern London under Elizabethan and later Jacobean rule, and at a global level. The early modern period was one of short- and long-distance travel and trade, transoceanic migration both voluntary and forced, cultural exchange and conflict, and settlement and colonization. In both these spheres, the local and the global, Black women lived, worked, traveled, gave birth, married, loved, mourned, created, and died and were buried, leaving lasting impressions of their presence and contributions on the world around them. This is the case with women like Isabell Peeter, who lived in Blue Anchor Alley just east of London and a short walk from the Red Bull theatre and who died in 1616, the same year as Shakespeare; and Anne Vause, another resident of St. Botolph, Aldgate, who was described in her burial record in 1618 as “a Black-more wife to Anthonie Vause Trompetter,” a middle-class musician’s spouse. And it is the case with Maria, a woman described in only a single manuscript as “a proper negro wench,” who was taken captive by Sir Francis Drake off the Pacific coast of Central America during the 1577–80 journey on which he circumnavigated the globe. Maria survived crossing the Pacific Ocean aboard Drake’s ship but endured unknown hardships, including likely sexual assault and rape, and became pregnant. Drake abandoned Maria and her unborn child to an unknown fate, “leaving them rice, seeds, and means of making a fire” on a small island near the Moluccas. And it is also the case with the millions of Black women whose names are not recorded but whose lives unfolded at the same time as Shakespeare’s—some within the same city and even the same neighborhood in which he lived and wrote and performed. This reality is not disputed and has been the subject of many histories. What is perhaps less well understood is the extent to which the very identity category, Black woman, was constructed as a result of this reality.

As Kim F. Hall and others have adeptly demonstrated in their scholarship, the centrality of paleness, of whiteness, to early modern ideals of female beauty was constituted in early modern literature in opposition to the real and imagined presence of women with darker skin. Contemporary writings often articulated a belief that dark skin originated in a place beyond the borders of England and Europe, sometimes named as Africa or elided to Ethiopia—for Europeans, a nearly mythical place where dark-skinned people dwelled. These women were associated with not only dark skin and distant locales but also “blackness”—a highly evocative concept that emerged in relation to “whiteness” as a way of describing both regional or ethnic origins and also innate characteristics shared by all people with this bodily feature—that is to say, as a racial category. But “blackness” signified much more than color difference in early modern Europe; it incapsulated contradictory ideas about beauty, rank, morality, desirability, and humanity. For Shakespeare, as for many writers of the time, “blackness,” as embodied by women, was a mystery both compelling and repugnant, a new kind of muse. In his sonnet sequence (first published in 1609 as Shake-speares sonnets: Never before imprinted), he returns again and again to the idea of “blackness” in a wide-ranging set of thought experiments that simultaneously reflect and create ideas—often stereotypical ones—about “black” women.

Compare Sonnets 127 and 130, two sonnets that both woo and disparage an unnamed lover. Shakespeare here alternates between confirming as unlovely the bodily features of dark-skinned women and exalting them as the more desirable because they represent a beauty that is more unexpected and richer than any other.

Both poems skirt the edges of using Black as a racial term, instead playing with “black” as a descriptor for parts of the body, including hair and eyes and, ultimately, skin: lips, cheeks, breasts. This intimate appraisal of beauty and “blackness,” which are here intertwined, summons up the figure of the “black” woman as nameless, voiceless, without agency or will, and elicits a possessive sexual desire for her. To call this move problematic would be an understatement. Moreover, Shakespeare’s efforts participate in the creation of a racial stereotype—a “black” woman who is an eroticized, available, exploitable anti beauty or un-beloved—that was already well under way in the literature of the period. As a popular and influential poet and dramatist, Shakespeare’s participation helped this stereotype to proliferate and take deeper root in the English imaginary.

Eroticized “black” women, most often cast as both villainous and lascivious, populate the pages of poems, plays, romances, ballads, and other fictionalized works in the early modern period in both England and Europe. They also appear, often nude or with minimal clothing, as illustrations in works that purport to provide factual information about the world: maps and atlases, histories, costume books, and travel writing about the Mediterranean, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and the Pacific. In these texts, women with dark skin are frequently nameless and are made to serve as literal types, examples that illustrate the looks and customs of an entire ethnic, racial, or national group. The authors of such texts utilize words such as “black,” “Blackamoor,” “Negro,” “Moor,” or “Ethiope”—and endless variants of these terms and other more derogatory versions—to refer to dark-skinned women no matter where they are understood to be located, whether in or from regions as disparate as Madagascar, Tunisia, or Barbados. Thus when Romeo praises Juliet, saying, “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear,” Juliet’s beauty (here synonymous with whiteness) shines bright in juxtaposition to an imagined figure who is both hypervisible and utterly anonymous, without a name or even a clear place of origin since “Ethiope” was used indiscriminately in the period to refer to dark-skinned people in many contexts. As Juliet comes into clear view for Romeo and for us, this other person seems to disappear.

But while “black” women abound in early modern English literature, against this backdrop when and where do Black women emerge? When do we “hear her speak,” as Shakespeare tantalizing suggests he (or his narrator) loves to do, shortly before the tone shifts from derisive to reverential at the turn in the final lines of Sonnet 130? The peculiarity and pervasive racializing power of the dehumanizing characterizations of “black” women, which come to us through some of our most canonical literary works including Shakespeare, has not been widely understood or studied until quite recently. Over the past century or more, in a gesture that eerily mimics the misogynoir of the Sonnets themselves, several prominent white male scholars have attempted to identify the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a contemporary of Shakespeare, suggesting candidates such as the notorious Lucy Negro, the madam of a Clerkenwell brothel who may have met or known Shakespeare. But the first major pieces of scholarship to begin unpacking the intertwined work of race and gender in early modern literature began to appear only in the late 20th century. The 1980s and 1990s brought us such consequential work—much of it authored by some of the first Black women academics to enter the field of Shakespeare studies—as Kim F. Hall’s Things of Darkness, Margo Hendricks and Pat Parker’s Women “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, and Joyce Green MacDonald’s Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. These scholars and others traced the literary tropes of “blackness” and beauty, unraveled references to biblical and classical figures of African women, and combed through Shakespeare’s oeuvre to reveal the patterns and connotations embedded in his references to exoticized women. Building on this foundation, we began to see scholarship on the work of race and gender in histories of Black women’s performance in both England and America and in the colonial world from the 18th century onward, including theater makers like Rachel Baptiste, Edna Thomas, Diana Sands, Jane White, Josette Simon, and Adjoa Andoh. We have since witnessed studies of 20th- and 21st-century adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare by Black authors such as Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, and Lorraine Hansberry. And we’ve had the chance to sit with and exalt the pioneering work of 20th-century Black scholars, educators, and Shakespeareans—many of whom were self-made or self-taught, struggling to find a place or recognition within the traditional realm of academe: Anna Julia Cooper, Adrienne McNeill Herndon, Anne Cooke, and Frances DeBerry.

To explore this dynamic history and build on this scholarship, the Folger’s exhibition To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare (October 16, 2026–May 2, 2027) situates Shakespeare’s works, and especially his depictions of “black” women, within a much wider context. It 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 the ways in which Black women as writers, thinkers, and artists have utilized Shakespeare’s language, forms, stories, and characters for their own purposes and to diverse ends. In four main sections—Mapping the Presence of Black Women in the Early Modern World (1580–1620); Shakespeare, Sugar, and Slavery (1620–1820), Taking the Stage (1820–Present), and Black Thought (1820–Present)—the exhibition shares how these women, their histories, and their cultures are represented (and misrepresented) through the eyes of early modern European artists and writers. It also allows visitors to listen for and learn from the voices of Black women in a wide variety of forms of expression.

This catalog documents the vast array of objects —books, manuscripts, paintings, photographs, ephemera, costumes, and more—included in the exhibition, objects that date from the early modern period through the present. Expanding beyond the experience of the exhibition itself, the catalog also includes short essays by the researchers who contributed to the development of the project, highlighting some of the most visually engaging and culturally significant objects from each section. The catalog is organized into sections that correspond to the exhibition’s four main sections. Within each section, essays include either images of some of the signature objects from that section of exhibition, or illustrations of related images not featured in the exhibition, or both. At the close of each section, following the essays, descriptions of all and images of some of the objects in the section are included.

The catalog’s essays delve deeply into the historical moment of each highlighted object, revealing compelling stories about the lives, dreams, challenges, and triumphs of Black women who engaged with Shakespeare through their writing, performance, artwork, and scholarship. In addition to this introduction, a second introductory piece from interpretive planner and curatorial consultant Verónica Betancourt details the innovative and collaborative methodology employed in curating the exhibition.

The final group of essays in the catalog explores the challenges of researching Black women in the archives, and touches on several objects that are known to have existed but that were not in the exhibition because they were lost or never preserved. It is our hope that all those who engage with this exhibition will understand this reality and be called to participate in the ongoing collection, preservation, and sharing of materials whether these are oral histories, texts, images, or video documenting the story of Black women and Shakespeare.

In our present moment, just as in the past, Black women are deeply imbricated within Shakespeare as literature, as performance, and as industry. Here, at the Folger Theatre within the Folger Shakespeare Library, under the artistic direction of Karen Ann Daniels, theater makers wrestle with and remake the plays for modern audiences that are themselves diverse in a majority-Black city, Washington, DC, where Black women represent the largest demographic group overall. At the Folger Institute, a research center for early modern scholarship, under my own direction, the study of race and gender represents a central focus. In this place, a city steeped in the history of Black women’s literary and theatrical engagements with Shakespeare—from Henrietta Vinton Davis, the Howard Players, and Dunbar High School to the Washington Dramatic Club—and through the singular archives of the Folger Shakespeare Library and key partners, we are well equipped to tell the incredible story of Black women’s engagement with Shakespeare (and Shakespeare’s engagement with Black women) in ways that we believe will enliven and inspire. Most important, we ask, and we hope you will answer, how will you bring the lives and experiences of Black women to bear on the work of Shakespeare-making? Whether through poetry, fiction, playwriting, or editing; through book collecting and preservation; through dramaturgy, directing, or acting; through painting, sculpture, fabric arts, or bookmaking in whatever medium best suits your hands and your ambitions, what can Shakespeare do for you? How will you tell your story?

About the author

Patricia Akhimie curated the exhibit To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare. She is director of The Folger Institute in Washington, DC, and associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She serves on the executive board of RaceB4Race and is director of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World, whichhas been profiled as one of the books that “binds the field together” in Shakespeare Quarterly.