Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Between 1821 and 1960, it would have been vanishingly rare to see a Black woman onstage performing Shakespeare. In Dr. Joyce Green MacDonald’s chapter in the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, “Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance,” she digs deep into the history of American professional theater in the United States to find records of every Black woman who has been paid to perform or recite Shakespeare on stage in the United States. Barbara Bogaev talks with MacDonald about four performers who took to the stage in those 139 years: The African Grove Theatre’s “Miss Welsh,” Henrietta Vinton Davis, Adrienne McNeil Herndon, and Jane White. Dr. Joyce Green MacDonald is an Associate Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky and a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. In 2011, she participated in the Folger Institute conference “An Anglo-American History of the KJV.” MacDonald’s new book, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory i