A new exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library unearths some history about William Shakespeare that you probably didn’t learn in your high school literature class.
“To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare” is a sprawling collection of more than 100 objects — costumes, playbills, photographs, diaries and more — exploring Black women’s engagement with Shakespeare’s work over more than four centuries.
“[This exhibition] is both what you didn’t know about the 16th century, and also what you didn’t know about Maya Angelou, and about Toni Morrison, Ida B. Wells, Phillis Wheatley and Rosa Parks,” says Folger Institute Director Patricia Akhimie, who curated the exhibition.
“To Hear Her Speak” also explores how Black women were represented, and often misrepresented, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, when their stories were largely told through the perspectives of Europeans.
One of Akhimie’s favorite features is a series of photographs by Kennedi Carter called “Flexing: New Realm.” The photos show 21st-century Black women dressed in the garments of Elizabethan royalty, wearing elaborate white ruffs, pearls and gold brocade. Akhimie says the series is Carter’s response to a proclamation issued under Queen Elizabeth I calling for Black people to be expelled from England. Displayed alongside the historical texts, the portraits offer a striking contrast — Black women depicted as royalty in a society that sought to exclude them.
“It’s at once a record of the presence of Black women in the early modern world that Shakespeare inhabited, and it’s also a record of all of the ways that Black women are not given the chance to tell their own stories,” Akhimie says.
The title of the exhibit underscores this mission. The name is taken from a line in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 that describes his mistress, who, Akhimie points out, is speculated to have been a Black woman.
“What I think is really interesting about the poem is that it switches at a certain point from talking about this person and how they appear, or imagining how they appear, to imagining what it would be like to hear that person speak,” she says. “To me, that’s a really incredible description of the exhibition as a whole.”
The collection connects the dots between several major historical figures and Shakespeare’s work in unexpected ways, including through poet Phillis Wheatley’s copybook, one of the exhibition’s highlights. The small notebook, which Wheatley kept as a teenager, contains passages from poems and plays that she found notable — including Shakespeare’s work. The copybook is displayed alongside a Shakespeare First Folio opened to the same passage.
“We’re going to have the really incredible experience of seeing Phillis Wheatley’s writing in her own hand, passages from Shakespeare, right alongside one of the Folger’s 82 First Folios,” Akhimie says.
Then there’s the remarkable story of Frances DeBerry, a self-taught Shakespearean expert who won $16,000 on the quiz show “The $64,000 Question” in 1956, when she was 73. She used her winnings to publish a book about Shakespeare’s comedies: “All the World’s a Stage for Shakespeare’s Comedies: A Modern Interpretation of the Bard’s Humor.” The book, published in 1958, features a photograph of DeBerry accepting her game-show winnings on the cover.
“There are these incredible stories of everyday people whose engagement with Shakespeare was important for them, but also important for everyone,” Akhimie says.
To assemble the exhibition, Akhimie leaned on two decades of research into Shakespeare, along with a team of scholars she jokingly calls “the Avengers.” Together, they searched the Folger’s collection and repositories at other institutions, including Emory University’s Rose Library, where Wheatley’s copybook originated.
The exhibition also features an audio guide voiced by “Bridgerton” actress Adjoa Andoh, a music playlist curated by Akhimie and a companion catalogue featuring essays from scholars exploring Black women’s connections to Shakespeare’s legacy.
One example: When Angelou was teaching at Wake Forest University in the 1980s, she held Shakespeare classes in her home and directed students in a production of “Macbeth.” Researchers were able to locate a program from that production with her director’s notes and a yearbook documenting the performance.
“I just had never thought about the fact that this woman’s connection to the plays was so deep that she considered it fundamental to the curriculum that she provided to her students,” Akhimie says. “She had the same kinds of thoughts and ideas about what we should do with Shakespeare that any number of famous Shakespearean directors have had.”
For Akhimie, the exhibition is an opportunity to highlight women whose contributions have been overlooked and introduce audiences to a richer understanding of Shakespeare’s influence.
“If there’s a story that you want to tell,” she says, “Shakespeare can probably help you tell that story.”
To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare Through May 2, Folger Shakespeare Library. folger.edu.
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