This untimely review is a tribute to an unapologetic “BlacKKKShakespearean”—a Black woman—who dared to highlight in her early scholarship the significant problems of the field, and academia at large, and the crucial need for course-correcting with respect to racial dynamics, especially regarding racism, white supremacy/privilege, (anti)blackness and white invisibility.[i]

By assessing the field’s structure, and its racist structures, and by identifying the dire need for restructuring race conversations, particularly through the deployment of Black feminist methodologies, this BlacKKKShakespearean—a Black woman—altered the conversations (pre)modern scholars could have about race and early modern England. Through her eyes, many have learned to see scholarship, and the world, from a different perspective, a perspective that understands, rather than resists, how influential the personal and experiential are on the development of critical methodologies. By revisiting her words and reading through her eyes now, we can look back and see how she envisioned a strategy for the future that has since been a model for much needed critical action and activism from other scholars.

In 1995, this BlacKKKShakespearean issued a fierce scholarly call through the publication of her carefully crafted groundbreaking study, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. When published, this impressive and inspiring first book served as a prophetic program of action, or “blueprint of a methodology” as she humbly calls it, because it provided, as we see retrospectively, guidance for where premodern critical race studies (PCRS)[ii] needed to go and, more importantly, because it painstakingly showed readers how the field could possibly get there (261).[iii] With its Black feminist agenda and conscientiously constructed anti-racist framework, Things of Darkness appeared at a critical juncture for the field: when PCRS needed a scholarly visionary to outline a clear plan that could ensure the field’s longevity and show the importance of building on the earliest of key race studies such as Eldred Jones’ Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (1965) and The Elizabethan Image of Africa (1971); and Anthony Gerard Barthelemy’s Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (1987).[iv] Since the publication of Things of Darkness, several key PCRS studies have materialized; and they have relied directly and indirectly on the blueprint.[v]

30 years after Jones’ first book hit the stage, enter: Kim F. Hall, a BlacKKKShakespearean—a Black woman.

Unlike the helpful, timely late twentieth-century reviews of Hall’s text written by Margo Hendricks[vi] and others, my review only aims to acknowledge reasons why Things of Darkness, an extension of Hall’s genius, must be celebrated today—in its silver anniversary year—and why it will still need to be celebrated and cited as we move toward its golden anniversary year in 2045—and beyond. Any scholar, or student, who thinks, writes or teaches about race, gender, politics, colonialism, feminism, globalism, economics, material culture, slavery, identity, family, sexuality, power, intersectionality, courtship, beauty, poetry, drama, travel literature, skin, animals, art, people, women writers, Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser and Jonson, to name a few topics (and there are more), should know well Things of Darkness, if not just for its theoretical range and robust source material.

This is a tribute to a “BlacKKKShakespearean”—a Black woman who taught us how to read.

“Sketch[ing] out links,” as she writes, Hall builds her cogent arguments, subtly calling attention to the blueprint that is Things of Darkness (66). In the Introduction, she takes her position on the contemporary deployment of scare quotes around the term race, opting to “hold onto the idea of race in the early modern period” so her chapters, arranged by but not strictly focused on genre, effectively illuminate trends pertaining to the different tropes she critiques throughout such as blackness and disorder (6). Chapter 1 engages travel narratives, especially those concerning Africa, and connects Hall’s discussion of race to gender as she reveals how deeply ingrained the language of dark and light is in naturalizing the white English identity. The second chapter examines economics in relationship to lyric poetry and England’s nationalist project: Hall asserts that through the lyric English women were exalted in ways that reaffirmed the centrality of whiteness, a rhetorical move that aided the patriarchal project of global white dominance. Chapter 3, nicely situated in the heart of the book, “bridge[s] the black/white polarity” exemplified respectively in chapters 1-2 and chapters 4-5 (10). Here, Hall draws on Jacobean plays that reflect xenophobic anxieties and English struggles with socio-cultural and racial identity. The fourth chapter turns our attention to how tropes of blackness serve as tools to create white beauty and tools to unearth white women writers’ “investment in the language of racial difference” as it pertains to travel (178). Rounding out the book’s focus on fairness, the fifth chapter—replete with startlingly beautiful images of early modern jewels, portraits and even an engraving—attends to visual culture’s impact, specifically the objectification, commodification and subjugation of Black people in association with “superior” white people, and sometimes even animals. Things of Darkness ends with a bracing epilogue where Hall reads the profession for its discriminatory defensiveness against pedagogical, political and historical race conversations.[vii] Make no mistake: The library is open, and Hall’s fingerprints are on the door handles.[viii] Below, I offer a critical forensic assessment of where we can spot Hall’s (im)prints.

This is a tribute to a “BlacKKKShakespearean”—a Black woman whose work endured in the face of resistance from non-Black scholars who bask in “the luxury of not thinking about race.”[ix]

Among the book-length studies in the broader field, Things of Darkness is undoubtedly canonical. And if you don’t know, now you know, reader.[x] Thus, Things of Darkness now needs to be treated as canonical, regularly lauded as one of those field-changing books that gets as much citational attention—if not more—than the “great” books published decades ago by the still often-cited white scholars, especially men, whose popularity precludes the mentioning of their names here. To put this differently: If you read post-1995 scholarship that positions itself in any way as touching on early modern race work and you see Hall’s study is not seriously engaged or, worse, that Hall is relegated to a footnote, in other words placed in the margins where she becomes a number and not a name (think deeply about misogynoir and general anti-blackness, here), then you should be suspicious. Side-eye should ensue.

This is a tribute to a “BlacKKKShakespearean”—a Black woman who strategized.

Like Hall, who suggests that her study underlines a reading strategy inextricably linked to her Black womanhood, I want to propose a reading strategy for Things of Darkness­, an approach that will be useful for those who are either new to or already familiar with the book: Start with the provocative epilogue titled “On ‘Race’, Black Feminism, and White Supremacy” and then engage the study from the beginning so you end with an epilogue rereading. Beginning with the end allows one to see where Hall is taking the book, and it allows one to see, after one then goes to the beginning and reads the Introduction and subsequent chapters, where Hall’s work has helped take the field given that in the Epilogue she: challenges the race-neutrality and universality of Shakespeare’s oeuvre; attends to how Black feminists, and Black scholarship in general, get rendered invisible; champions the need for anti-racist programs in scholarly work; echoes Black feminists who cite “the need to interrogate whiteness as a social construct” (15);[xi] encourages readers to be activists and advocates for equity;[xii] reinforces how the black/white binary perpetuates racism in our modern world; criticizes tactfully virtue-signaling scholars, as well as those who appropriate, erase[xiii] and co-opt early modern race work—egregious practices still perpetuated today by scholars veteran and new, white and non-Black;[xiv] considers the importance of productive race conversations in the classroom and in pedagogy scholarship, especially as it pertains to the needs of Black students; and calls for “new anthologies” in the field that attend to race (267).[xv]

This is a tribute to a “BlacKKKShakespearean”—a Black woman who made professional, and personal, sacrifices to answer her own call.

Twenty-one years after Hall published Things of Darkness she co-edited, along with Peter Erickson, a Shakespeare Quarterly special issue on race. Twenty-one years later and there was Hall, still in the fight to stabilize both the legitimacy and permanency of PCRS. In the powerful introduction of that special issue, Hall and Erickson cite 2025 as the next “landmark by which to measure subsequent progress toward establishing the field of early modern race studies with a stronger foundation through a wide spectrum of social issues, a broader scholarly framework, a larger academic audience, and deeper public engagement.”[xvi] In the context of Hall’s 1995 “blueprint of a methodology” discourse, however, I want to respectfully push back on her and Erickson’s desire to establish a stronger foundation because the sturdiness of the plan Hall outlined in Things of Darkness is undeniable (perhaps Hall was too modest to proclaim how essential her work has been for getting the field’s foundation in formation).[xvii] Instead, in my opinion, PCRS scholars simply need to continue building, keeping the critical as a key component of the work and generating publicly engaged scholarship with the cohesion and clarity that Hall’s Things of Darkness models so we can also use 2025, what will be 30 years since the publication of Things of Darkness, as a benchmark to measure the success of Hall’s continued influence on the field. Many, from secondary school students to senior scholars, are indebted to her.[xviii]

This is a tribute to a “BlacKKKShakespearean”—a Black (fore)woman who continues to lead the field.

Today—and tomorrow—do not read Things of Darkness, for it is too foundational of a text for a mere reading. It is not a newspaper or an issue of Vogue magazine, although it does include over two dozen beautiful illustrations. Rather, Things of Darkness must be studied, embraced and internalized because it is that rich of a contribution to PCRS and early modern English studies—and beyond. With the decades-old foundation of PCRS firmly situated in the soil, I urge you to follow the #ShakeRace conversation that continues to develop in print and online.[xix] And while you are at it, do study and #CiteBlackWomen, for there is much more constructing to be done, and it must be done correctly and unselfishly, as this established field continues to look forward and move in new, non-traditional directions. Hall said as much when she delivered her brilliantly bold plenary talk on archival blackness, in her uniquely passionate “personal voice,” at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in 2019—nearly 25 years after she enhanced the field with her still-relevant Things of Darkness.[xx]

This is a tribute to a “BlacKKKShakespearean”—a Black woman, a Black scholar: Kim F. Hall.

In a world where being a Black woman or girl, a Black person, is a literal and figurative death sentence, we must acknowledge how much Hall—her life and her work—matter. And we must acknowledge what it would have meant for the field to exist without Hall, without her pioneering scholarship situating itself in the world when it did:

For how do we construct,

and how do we build to last,

to withstand the shakes and quakes of race(ism),

without the aid of a concrete blueprint?[xxi]

In the Things of Darkness acknowledgements section, Hall thanks John Michael Archer for reading her work; I, too, thank him for continuing to be a generous scholar and for commenting on a draft of this untimely review. I am also incredibly grateful to Kyle Grady for his feedback and smart PCRS perspective. And I thank the editors of The Hare for inviting me to write something of my choosing and for giving me the latitude to be critically creative and say what I needed to say.