What connects William Shakespeare with Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and generations of Black women whose stories rarely appear in theater history? A new exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., brings those connections into the spotlight.
To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare explores how Black women have interpreted, challenged and transformed Shakespeare’s work across approximately 450 years. Curated by Dr. Patricia Akhimie, director of the Folger Institute, the exhibition brings together nearly 100 objects, including photographs, books, diaries, playbills and costumes. Together, they reveal a history that reaches far beyond the stage.
Familiar names—including Phillis Wheatley, Lorraine Hansberry and Esther Rolle—appear alongside lesser-known figures. The exhibition also examines Black women’s presence in early modern Europe and how writers and artists represented, and sometimes misrepresented, them.
Among the highlights are Toni Morrison’s handwritten notes for her play Desdemona, a playbill from Maya Angelou’s production of Macbeth at Wake Forest University, and Royal Shakespeare Company costumes designed by Melissa Simon-Hartman.
The exhibition also confronts a more troubling connection: a Shakespeare First Folio once owned by the slaveholding Fitzherbert family. Displayed with a reproduction of a plantation record listing enslaved people, the volume invites visitors to consider whose lives supported the wealth behind prestigious collections.
Taking its name from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, To Hear Her Speak celebrates Black women as creators who have made his words their own—and used them to ask new questions about identity, power and belonging.
The exhibition runs October 16, 2026, through May 2, 2027. Admission is free, with a recommended $15 donation.
