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 in the New World, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her chapter “Actresses of Color and Shakespearean Performance: The Question of Reception” appears in the new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, published by Cambridge University Press.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 1, 2022. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, ““Between You and the Women the Play May Please,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript of every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Nick Stevens and Caleb Songer at Downtown Recording in Louisville, Kentucky.