Booking and details
Dates Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 4:30pm
Venue Great Hall
Tickets Free; no ticket required
Hamlet on the Atlantic. Mute characters in drama from antiquity to the age of Shakespeare. A mysterious early-modern pirate known as Black Caesar.
Interested? Join us for the next Folger Salon.
About Folger Salon
Learn about research happening at the Folger in real time! Each month, Folger Institute scholar and artist fellows will share their most exciting finds and thought-provoking challenges, followed by casual open conversation. Arrive early to purchase food and drink from the Folger’s new café, Quill & Crumb.
This is a free event. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Speakers
Gbenga Adesina
2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow
Hamlet on the Atlantic: A Performance by a Chorus of Ghosts, Immigrants, and Refugees
John Colley
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
Muteness and Mute Characters from Antiquity to the Age of Shakespeare
My project explores how conventions surrounding mute characters developed from ancient drama up to the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In doing so, it theorizes a concept of ‘muteness’ which is distinct from more general ideas or instances of silence in Renaissance drama. Muteness, I argue, is a hitherto overlooked aspect of classical dramatic form that playwrights appropriated, imitated, and adapted in early modernity.
Tamara Walker
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
Black Caesar: The Many Lives, Deaths and Myths of an Enslaved Pirate Lost to History
My project attempts to uncover the story of a mysterious early-modern pirate known as Black Caesar. I am also interested in how our fascination with this figure has led to the spreading and consumption of misinformation.
About Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is a center for early modern research at the Folger Shakespeare Library that brings public audiences together with researchers to explore the cultures and legacies of the early modern world. Learn more.
See what our fellows are researching
“A smale remembrance”: Elizabethan Posy Rings
A closer look at 17th century engraved rings in the Folger’s collection
North Africa Through the Eyes of England
A look at some of the colonial sources that informed the understanding that 17th century English people had of North Africa.
What of Shakespeare?
Findings from a 1945 survey asking patrons of a library about their experiences reading, watching, and performing Shakespeare.
“I have lately been promoted to the ‘big douche’”
Through her correspondence, Delia Salter Bacon reveals what it was like to undergo a 19th century “water-cure”
Performing Race in the London Lord Mayors’ Show, 1660-1708
Fellow Jamie Gemmell explores how race was performed in the annual London Lord Mayor’s Show