The renovated Folger Shakespeare Library blackfaces Shakespeare

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.