SOURCE: “Shakespeare, Angelou, Cheney: The Administration of the Humanities in the Reagan-Bush Era,” in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 111–23.

In the following excerpt, Erikson explores Angelou's remarks on Shakespeare, and their implications, challenging how they were employed by Lynne Cheney, Ronald Reagan's director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in a report about the conflict in academia over determining the scope, nature, and value of the Western Literary Canon.

The emotional high point of Lynne V. Cheney's Humanities in America is her quotation of an extended passage from an address by Maya Angelou in which Angelou quotes Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 and asserts: “‘I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman.’”¹ In this heightened moment, Cheney links and fuses three voices—Shakespeare's, Angelou's, and her own—thus creating the conjunction to which my title refers. However, my purpose is to challenge the impression Cheney...