Shakespeare’s Globe is anti-racist and believes Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with our friends who strive for racial justice across the globe.

Shakespeare’s work has been put to sinister use in the past, co-opted by white nationalism. But Shakespeare is for all.

We have been and continue to be committed to racial justice. We sometimes fail, but we also learn, and we want to work against systemic racism.

Please visit Black Lives Matter for ways you can help.

‘His responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.’

— James Baldwin, Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare (1964)

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper leads our work on Shakespeare and Race and is raising awareness about racial injustice in education and theatre. Read and listen to her latest work in the articles below or explore further reading at these leading Shakespeare and Race institutions.

  The Sundial: A digital publication of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

  BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

  Race and Periodization: Opening Lectures from the RaceB4Race Symposium