What A New Folger Exhibition Reveals About Black Women And Shakespeare

[upbeat music] So it took you two years to curate this.

You've got nearly 100 objects on display.

I understand it's the Folger's largest temporary exhibition since opening its galleries in 2024.

Is that right?

That's right.

This is a landmark exhibition for us.

What kind of research and collaboration and work did it take to put all of this together?

Uh, quite a bit.

Uh, and if you were here at the Folger right now, you could feel the excitement.

There is not a person in the building who hasn't been intimately involved in bringing this exhibition to fruition.

But the work really started in earnest, uh, a little over two years ago, when I pulled together a team of researchers, many of them Shakespeareans like myself, uh, who have been researching the history of not only Shakespeare, but also of Blackness, of Black women's history, uh, histories of gender, uh, in their work for many years.

And so I basically was, it was like an assemble the Avengers e- moment.

Like, now is the moment where it's, it's time to tell this story.

And it was, for this group of researchers, it was less about doing new research for this exhibition, 'cause they've been doing this for a long time, and rather saying, "What are the objects that you have encountered in your many years in your career of doing this research? What are the objects that you've encountered that we really need to bring together here to tell this story?" And then we thought about finding other materials that would help us tell the stories of women who we knew were integral to this, the, this history of Black women in Shakespeare, um, but for whom objects were not readily available or identified.

And then we did some really fun digging in lots of archives, including the Schomburg Library in New York.

Uh, the Library of Congress was an amazing resource.

So this exhibit is both, it's, we get a chance to display objects from the Folger's really wide-ranging collection.

It's the largest collection of Shakespeare material in the world.

But it's also a chance to bring those materials into conversation with key loans from other major repositories, so Royal Shakespeare Company, all over the world, to bring together this story.

Do you have some favorite items that are on display?

I definitely do.

It's a, it's very hard to pick a favorite, and it changes from day to day, but I definitely have some favorites.

Uh, if you were coming to see this exhibit, I would not want you to miss Phillis Wheatley's copy book.

It is a beautiful, tiny volume written in the handwriting of Phillis Wheatley, who we know as the first Black American to publish a book of poems.

But before she did that, as a teenager, she was keeping notes in her own l- little blank notebook of poems and plays that were meaningful to her, things that she felt were important to her own journey as a creator.