Chapter 14 - Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance

Summary

African American actresses apparently appeared in Shakespeare productions for New York’s African Company in 1821. But after the suppression of the company and for the rest of the century the only other records that seem to survive of black actresses’ public Shakespearean performances describe recitals of speeches from the plays. Despite the recognized talent of two later black Shakespearean elocutionists, Henrietta Vinton Davis and Adrienne McLean Herndon, neither ever appeared in a full Shakespeare production – a prohibition pointing to the belief that black women were manifestly incapable of embodying Shakespearean meanings. Such representational policing operated within the period’s violently reactionary anti-blackness, and both actresses fashioned responses to it, with Davis eventually leaving the stage altogether for pan-African political organizing with Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. Herndon, however, began a tradition of Shakespeare productions at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), soliciting new audiences and authorizing black women as Shakespeareans.