ABSTRACT
All citations of Shakespeare's plays are from Stephen Greenblatt, The Norton Shakespeare Based on the Oxford Edition. Black people are moving toward the Forms of Things Unknown, which is to say, toward Liberation. This chapter discusses rewriting what Guerrero-Strachan and Hidalgo call "official history". It deals with specific instances of uncredited phraseological poaching: Neither Richard Wright nor Henderson attributes the hijacked phrase to Shakespeare. Instead, they juxtapose their arguments with its original context and its potential evocation of "bardolatric reverence" and leave the reader to draw her or his own conclusions. What is most remarkable about Wright's appropriation of Shakespeare's phrase is that it takes on a life of its own within African-American literary criticism. Stephen Henderson helped cement the phrase as standard usage for critics of African-American literature by making it the title of his introduction to Understanding The New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music As Poetic References.
