‘Shakespeare was a Black woman’: the playwright’s under-recognized connection to Black culture
A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly deliv…