Shakespeare's Birthday Lecture: "The Goodness of the Night: Editing Othello"

This article is about the annual Shakespeare Birthday lecture. View the full list of all Shakespeare Birthday Lectures to date here. For other articles about Shakespeare's Birthday, see Shakespeare's Birthday (disambiguation).

For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

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This lecture was given by Patricia Akhimie on April 27, 2024, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Dr. Patricia Akhimie, Director of the Folger Institute, explores the ways strategic editing choices, such as omission and correction, produce and perpetuate racial stereotypes in Shakespeare’s Othello. These editing practices have both obscured the lived experiences of readers and redoubled the effect of racist words, phrases, and ideas that identify others as different and lesser—in the text, on the stage, and in the world. By exposing the race-making effects of textual editing, Dr. Akhimie’s work empowers a more diverse set of readers and thinkers to engage with Othello.

Dr. Patricia Akhimie (she/her/hers) is Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She also serves as Director of the RaceB4Race Mentoring Network and is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.  She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Race: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race and co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World. Dr. Akhimie is currently working on a new edition of Othello for the Arden Shakespeare, fourth series, and a monograph about race, gender and editing early modern texts. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library and the Ford Foundation.