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
Third Time’s a Charm: W. Blount Reads Sidney’s Arcadia
An examination of marginalia in the Folger’s 1593 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia
Painting the birds of Shakespeare
Folger Artist Fellow Missy Dunaway shares what she’s learning while working on The Birds of Shakespeare, her project to paint the 65 birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works.
Working Through the Tangle: Language, Archives, and Practice
What does the language of Shakespeare have in common with the Gullah-Geechee language?
Miscellaneous Race
Looking at enslaved Black workers and the 1588 Spanish Armada’s afterlives in a 17th-century English miscellany
Artist Elise Ansel Reimagines Macbeth
Ansel shares how her questions as an artist fellow about Fuseli’s take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth inspired her to create two abstract, large-scale oil paintings but this time from a woman’s perspective that celebrates the play’s sisterhood.