Shakespeare & Beyond
Up Close: A 'Seven Ages of Man' painting
Take a closer look at a 19th-century oil painting in the Folger collection that depicts all seven ages of man from Jaques’s speech in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
Order It: Sonnet 98
It’s springtime, and Sonnet 98 is a wonderful seasonal selection from Shakespeare. Take this quiz to see if you can put the sonnet’s 14 lines into their correct order.
Excerpt: 'Shakespeare and Lost Plays' by David McInnis
When it comes to the theatrical landscape of Shakespeare’s London, there are the plays whose names we are familiar with — plays like Hamlet and Henry V — and then there are the plays that were being performed around the…
Translating Shakespeare’s plays into Persian
Iranian professor and Shakespeare scholar Ali Salami has used the Folger Shakespeare’s freely available digital texts to translate almost all of the works of Shakespeare into Persian. Read a Q&A with Salami about his translation work.
“Racist Humor and Shakespearean Comedy” – An excerpt from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race
Patricia Akhimie writes about racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies in this excerpt from her essay in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race.
Up Close: The voodoo Macbeth that generated jobs for Black Americans during the Great Depression
A spectacular 1936 Federal Theatre Project production of “Macbeth” in New York City employed hundreds of black actors and theater technicians. It was financed by the Federal Theatre Project, a controversial part of the federal government’s New Deal programs to…
Excerpt — ‘Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy’ by Paula Marantz Cohen
“Its sense of empathy for the gendered position—and the pains and difficulties that accompany it on both sides—is at the heart of its comic warmth,” writes Paula Marantz Cohen about Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in this excerpt from her…
Order It: Sonnet 116
Sonnet 116 is one of Shakespeare’s most famous love sonnets. Take our quiz to see if you can put the lines of the sonnet in the correct order.
Up Close: Three scenes from Hamlet
Can you identify what’s happening in each of these three scenes from Hamlet? The drawings by British illustrator John Jellicoe are part of the Folger collection.
Quiz: Which Shakespeare character doesn’t belong?
Take this quiz to see if you can identify the odd one out in each set of characters for a specific Shakespeare play.
Top 5 Folger Finds of 2020
Revisit the bright spots of 2020 by taking a look at some of our most popular #FolgerFinds posts on Instagram from the past year. Highlights from the Folger collection include a beautiful book binding, a striking costume design, and a…
Top 5 Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episodes of 2020
Our top Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episodes from 2020 explore Shakespeare’s sources, his sonnets, and the solace we take in his work. Happy listening!