This essay explores the intersection of religion and literature in sermons and lectures during the British Romantic period. The essay traces the advance of elocutionary advice in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and demonstrates how interest in orality proliferated the printing of both sermons and lectures on religious themes. In addition to noted figures such as S. T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Edward Irving, women’s voices emerged during the time, as women in dissenting religious circles set the stage for the first public lectures by women in Britain.

African American actresses apparently appeared in Shakespeare productions for New York’s African Company in 1821. But after the suppression of the company and for the rest of the century the only other records that seem to survive of black actresses’ public Shakespearean performances describe recitals of speeches from the plays. Despite the recognized talent of two later black Shakespearean elocutionists, Henrietta Vinton Davis and Adrienne McLean Herndon, neither ever appeared in a full Shakespeare production – a prohibition pointing to the belief that black women were manifestly incapable of embodying Shakespearean meanings. Such representational policing operated within the period’s violently reactionary anti-blackness, and both actresses fashioned responses to it, with Davis eventually leaving the stage altogether for pan-African political organizing with Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. Herndon, however, began a tradition of Shakespeare productions at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), soliciting new audiences and authorizing black women as Shakespeareans.