- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
In this quotation, Erica Armstrong Dunbar contextualizes the conflicting emotions that Ona Judge’s mother, Betty, must have felt upon her daughter’s birth. While bringing a new child into the world was no doubt a source of joy, the fact that every child born to an enslaved woman was born enslaved themselves likely made that joy bittersweet at the least. As Dunbar describes the cruelty of “the business of slavery”—an institution which sought to erase the stories and indeed the humanity of every Black man, woman, and child caught in its web—she shows how dehumanizing and brutal life under slavery truly…