In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, I could sense that the hard news sections of the media must have gotten the word that the George Floyd racial reckoning, having unleashed a historic murder wave, was not playing as well with voters as Democrat strategists had assumed it would, so it was time to memory-hole that obsession of American elites.
The soft news sections in the back of the book, however, didn’t seem to get the memo. Plus the well-endowed cultural institutions they cover tend to be slower moving than political campaigns and the like. Hence, deep into 2024, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC is now proudly trumpeting how they’ve blackfaced Shakespeare:
From the New York Times news section:
The Folger Library Wants to Reintroduce You to Shakespeare
After an $80 million expansion, the Folger Shakespeare Library is reopening with a more welcoming approach — and all 82 of its First Folios on view.
By Jennifer Schuessler
Jennifer Schuessler has reported frequently on Shakespeare, including following a First Folio to South Dakota.
June 21, 2024
… The building needed “a different handshake,” said Witmore (who is retiring at the end of this month after 13 years at the helm). Previously, visitors entered by climbing the steps to the marble facade, inscribed with soaring quotes from Ben Jonson and other long-dead writers.
Seriously, the problem with the original Folger Shakespeare Library as a tourist attraction is that it’s ho-hum compared to its grandiose neighbors: the Capitol, the Supreme Court building, and the Library of Congress. It was built in 1932 after Mr. Folger’s fortune took a hit in the stock market crash of 1929. Plus, the architects already had the modernist anti-decoration virus that became all-conquering after 1945. Wikipedia reports: “Trowbridge and Cret shared a similar vision for the design of the Library—a neoclassical building that stripped the facade of any decorative elements.”
So, they wound up with what looks like a really tasteful above-ground bunker with a barely noticeable staircase:
What I’d do is commission artists to decorate this rather boring building with streamlined 1932 Art Deco designs. The public loves Art Deco, and the less gaudy, more sci-fi-looking 1930s versions of architectural decoration are particularly appealing.
And I’d dig out the front yard and make it a sunken garden that you descend into before climbing the new broad grand staircase to the front door. Tourists love marble steps where they can feel justified in sitting down and resting their weary feet in an august setting, especially if the staircase is flanked by giant bronze lions or the like.
Instead, the Folger spent a fortune making this side delivery door the new grand entrance:
Now that’s what I call a Welcoming Entrance (if I were a deliveryman looking to drop off a load of bottled water). If I were a tourist wanting to see the grand sights of the national’s capital, however …
Now, they follow the descending garden path ringed with a poem by Rita Dove, which exhorts visitors to “clear your calendars, pocket your notes.”
Rita Dove’s poetry just blows away Shakespeare’s stuff.
Granted, Shakespeare’s most awesome lines (“quintessence of dust” or “a tale told by an idiot”) tend to be too bleak for an upbeat welcome. But, still, Rita Dove?
Inside, the first wall panel reads, in big letters, “Shakespeare?” And then below: “He was then and there and he is here and now. Discoveries await!”
Behind it, in a small anteroom, visitors catch a glimpse of part of an intricate black mirror by the African American artist Fred Wilson, who represented the United States at the 2003 Venice Biennale.
Opposite it, first seen reflected in its surface, is George Gower’s famous 1579 portrait of Elizabeth I, in milky white lead makeup.
Hung nearby are archival materials relating to Ira Aldridge, most likely the first Black actor to play “Othello,” in 1825. Before that, the role was played by white actors in blackface.
The question of whom Shakespeare “belongs” to is also addressed pointedly in the main exhibit, which pivots quickly from a brief sketch of Shakespeare’s biography to the British colonization of North America, which began in the very years Shakespeare was writing.
On these shores, Shakespeare became canonized as “one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought,” as Emily Folger put it. But that “we” did not necessarily include everyone. “For far too long,” one panel notes, “Shakespeare was seen as both the property of white culture and evidence of its supremacy.”
The Folger itself is part of that history. In 1938, the library’s director, Joseph Quincy Adams, denied a request by Benjamin Brawley, a professor at Howard University, for tickets to the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture. While Black scholars could use the reading room, Adams decided that their mingling with white attendees at an “intimate social function” would be “distasteful to a majority of our guests.”
Brawley came anyway. “He single-handedly integrated the social functions of the Folger,” Witmore said.
(Witmore’s successor as director, Farah Karim-Cooper, is the former director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe in London and the author of “The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race.”
Professor Karim-Cooper’s career has benefited hugely from the giant push to promote black women to top jobs. The Folger’s press release announcing her hiring boasted:
Her most recent book, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (2023) was voted a top book of 2023 by Time Magazine, NPR, and The New Yorker. She is a field leader in examining Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of race and social justice. In 2018 she founded and curated the Globe’s Shakespeare and Race Festival and conceived and curated the Antiracist Shakespeare Webinar series from 2021-2024. She is an executive board member for RaceB4Race, a consortium of scholars and institutions working on issues of race in premodern literature, history, and culture. In the UK, she founded the first ever Early Modern Scholars of Colour network.
Technically, though, she isn’t black. (She’s from Pakistan.) Back to the NYT:
The galleries, which showcase items from across the collection, are ringed with testimonials by a diverse array of scholars and artists who have drawn inspiration from Shakespeare and the Folger’s collections, including Mya Gosling, described as the creator of “the world’s foremost (and perhaps only) stick-figure Shakespeare webcomic.”
She goes by the name Mya Lixian Gosling, so you can tell she’s not 100% one of these hateful white people, like, say, Shakespeare was.
A few comments on this one:
***I find it helpful to think about culture as the surface of a pond. When a big disruptive rock like BLM is dropped into it, the ripples take a long time to get to the pond's periphery. I was talking to Mrs C about this, in the context of ESG in business. I had read an article in the UK Telegraph suggesting that ESG had peaked in the UK about three years ago (hmmm; perhaps not a coincidence, that), and that companies are now trying to ditch their ESG commitments as fast as they can. She countered that here in the Hong Kong corporate world, ESG is peaking right now. So there's a ripple from a US/UK 'rock-drop' out to international big business circles. And then there's another, wider ripple out to smaller companies. And then there's another ripple out to university business courses and textbooks, which will have chirpy 'ESG is super!' examples abounding for the next decade at least.
***It's painful to witness the tortured dynamic going on at museums like this in this post, in which one of the core treasures of Western civ is still the main product, but stakeholders are just oozing desperation to 'contextualize', i.e. undermine the quality and importance of, such masterpieces. Here they're doing this undermining literally, i.e. by sending visitors through the underground servants' entrance if they want to catch a glimpse of the Bard.
***My interest was piqued by that line about the NYT reporter following a Shakespeare folio to South Dakota. That immediately struck me as a 'gorillas in the mist' coastal anthropological expedition to observe shit-kicking flyoveristas try to make sense of artefacts from some unimaginably advanced alien civilization. So I googled it. Sure enough:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/theater/shakespeare-the-book-tour.html
The article's first two paragraphs do not disappoint:
"Visitors to this town [i.e. Vermillion, SD] of about 11,000 on a bluff near the Missouri River have long been surprised to learn that it’s home to a set of rare Stradivari stringed instruments, which are housed in a museum here along with the world’s oldest playable harpsichord, the oldest surviving cello and some 15,000 other historic instruments."
"But this month, visitors to the National Music Museum on the University of South Dakota campus have also found themselves face to face with another seemingly misplaced cultural treasure: a Shakespeare First Folio."
If only those South Dakotans could evolve opposable thumbs, they'd likely show some interest in the world's oldest playable harpsichord! And what could be more misplaced than a great work of literature on the godforsaken windswept backwater great plains!
Farah Karim-Cooper, the new Shakespeare Folger (Washington D.C.) director, is:
- a 1995 graduate of California State--Fullerton (BA, English);
- a 1996 MA graduate of the University of London, Royal Holloway College (that was...fast); and
- a 2003 PhD graduate of same. All three degrees majoring in English. PhD dissertation: "Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama."
She says she met her husband, Mr. Cooper, during her MA studies in London. By the time she graduated with her MA, she says, they were engaged.
In Aug. 2023, Farah Karim-Cooper published a book titled "The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race." Late May 2024: Shakespeare Folger made official their intention to hire her as new director.