Jus Primae Noctus,is an epic stage adaptation of my award-winning book of poems The Trembling Tiber, a black poet’s musing on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar referenced in the book section of this website.
“Once in a generation a voice pierces through the injustices, inequities and horrors of the age in
which it flowers into speech, and in that flowering precision and pain take on a deeply instructive
form of beauty. Hall’s poetry both cuts and displays, it is an anatomical dissection of a lived and still
living history of oppression. What is hidden is laid open. Plausible deniabilities are proved
preposterous. Excuses are no longer excused. Hall is a master wordsmith whose every phrase is the
craft of a seer. There is a profound and boding kinetic reflexivity to his style which makes even the
smallest and most trembling of his words thunder from the page and into the heart. Read or listen:
let these poems find you, delve you to the root, uproot your preconceptions, and allow yourself to be changed by them.” Chris Laoutaris, PhD, The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford Upon Avon, England
Poems from the book were selected and arranged to create Jus Primae Noctus’s linear dramatic story line. It is a story told of black and marginalized people by a black and marginalized person for the betterment of humanity. The setting is a hybrid of modern-day America and Julius Caesar’s Rome. The poems are the protagonist given voice and action by the characters/actors.
