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On Yearning: Reading Itinerant Shakespeare

Abstract / Excerpt

For years the best black Shakespeare performers in America were itinerant “readers” or elocutionists. Denied access to white-dominated theatrical venues and refusing the minstrel stage, they traveled the country, usually alone, reciting key speeches and scenes from Shakespeare's works in school auditoriums, church halls and the occasional rented venue. Little is known about their audience's experiences of Shakespeare (which was often performed with other authors like Paul Laurence Dunbar). This essay experiments with using the author's personal history to interpret an anecdote from actor Richard Berry Harrison's unpublished memoir in which he recounts Frederick Douglass performing scenes from Shakespeare's Othello.

About the Author

Kim F. Hall

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On Yearning: Reading Itinerant Shakespeare

Kim F. Hall

Journal of American Studies

Cambridge University Press

Shakespeare, Black Shakespeare Performers, Othello, Frederick Douglass

Article

7 pages

Link for BC/CU ID Holders

www.proquest.com

Link for Non-BC/CU ID Holders

On Yearning: Reading Itinerant Shakespeare | Journal of American Studies | Cambridge Core

On Yearning: Reading Itinerant Shakespeare - Volume 54 Issue 1

www.cambridge.org

On Yearning: Reading Itinerant Shakespeare | Journal of American Studies | Cambridge Core

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Citation “I assign this to my First-Year Writing students paired with a short one-page handout about the use of ‘I’ in academic writing. Hall models for students what it looks like to fuse personal experience and rigorous analytic work, not only helping students challenge the notion that academic writing can never use first person, but also showing us how the ‘I’ often generatively unlocks felt tensions in texts. Students especially notice the verbs that Kim pairs with ‘I’: ‘I am entranced’ (p. 98), ‘I'm a little lost,’ (p. 99), ‘what I really want to know,’ ‘I am stymied,’ ‘I go back to,’ ‘I can't flesh out,’ ‘I offer’ (p. 100). Hall's ‘I’s show how the best scholarship is always right on the edge of knowing and not knowing, and maybe something like longing.” - Cecelia Lie-Spahn, English & First Year Writing