On the first floor at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library (SCUA), the Shakespeare Unbound exhibit asks: what happens when Shakespeare appears in fragments or as momentary flashes in history? Putting the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Phillis Wheatley, William Shakespeare, and others into conversation, this exhibit explores stories of Shakespeare unbound and rebound, scattered and gathered together in new assemblages.
Before Shakespeare arrived as literature into America, Shakespeare’s English was informing trans-Atlantic ideas of settler colonialism, gender relations, and forms of poetic expression. Initially, Shakespeare-in-print was imported from England but New England was able to claim him for their own with the first North American publication of Hamlet, printed in 1794. Women’s publications in print increased exponentially over the 17th century when we witness a great burgeoning in the volume of poetry published by women. At the same time, the traditions of poetry, made widely popular in part by Shakespeare’s works, became increasingly within reach for American women poets of the 17th and 18th centuries and reflected their own experiences. Poet Phillis Wheatley, at age 20, was educated in British as well as Greek and Roman classical literature. Though enslaved, while living in Boston she became the first American person of African descent to be published in 1773.
The age of Shakespeare was fundamentally shaped by historically unprecedented movements of people across Europe and around the world. Colonization and imperialism fueled the European marketplace and systematically oppressed and disenfranchised native peoples. Slavery forced the mass movement of millions of Africans and native peoples in the New World. All the while, poetry and plays hinted at both the zeal and ramifications of such movements. Post-colonial reexaminations of The Tempest foreground the darker side of the Renaissance through fresh perspectives onto the magician Prospero, his tyrannical reign over the enchanted island, and his enslavement of the “monster" Caliban. African American poets have long expressed their collective trauma over enslavement and disenfranchisement. From the voice of Phillis Wheatley in the 1770s to works written during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, poetry has been a forceful medium of resistance.
Writer, sociologist, activist and co-founder of the NAACP, international spokesperson for peace and the rights of oppressed minorities, W.E.B. Du Bois articulated the strivings of African Americans and developed a trenchant analysis of the “problem of the color line” in the twentieth century. Noted for his monumentally prolific and melodious prose, he also wrote plays and poetry. Considering Hamlet among his favorite works, Du Bois was inspired by his classical education in the ancient Greeks and Romans plus authors from the Renaissance and Enlightenment. His own fictional works, such as Star of Ethiopia, emphasize the proud, ancestral homeland of Africa and promises of political and creative liberation for African Americans once America reaches beyond the “color line”.
Featuring witchcraft, prophecy, and murder, Macbeth has been staged and depicted many ways. Abraham Lincoln once wrote to his favorite actor, James H. Hackett, “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.” In this case, you’ll discover both a haunting moment in the play linked to the assassination of Lincoln and images of Orson Welles’ Macbeth, featuring an all-Black cast in Harlem. Reimagined in a Haitian setting, this revolutionary 1936 production came to be known as “Voodoo Macbeth.”
“Speak of me as I am,” Othello appeals at the end of a tragedy featuring his heroic efforts to embrace the possibility of interracial love. A proud Moorish general in love with a white woman, Othello slowly succumbs to doubt when stirred on by the evil Iago, who pours racist ideas into his mind. Black actors in America have long been cast in the role, from Ira Aldridge, whose performance was linked to Abolition, to Paul Robeson, who linked the play to matters of Civil Rights. Also, white actors have been cast stereotypically as “oriental” or “tawny” in color, downplaying black presence in Shakespeare, while others have played the role in blackface into the twentieth century. African American actors and playwrights are at the forefront of confronting the racism of this play and exploring possibilities for the black actor’s resistance to the histories of racism that link Othello’s story to our contemporary moment.