Shakespeare & Beyond

“All the world’s a stage,” says Jacques in a famous speech from As You Like It about life and the passage of time. Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines that follow.

Shakespeare is woven into the culture of the British Caribbean, with a special emphasis on Caliban and The Tempest–but does he reflect the colonial past, influence anti-colonial authors, or both? Scholars Giselle Rampaul and Barrymore A. Bogues traced his complex…

Take this quiz to see if you can tell which characters in the plays used foreign words and phrases, including the famous three-word Latin question, “Et tu, Brutè?”

When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke in the 1990s, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. The First Folio became an endless source of inspiration for “journeys of…

“If music be the food of love, play on.” Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines of the opening speech of Twelfth Night, with its memorable reference to a bank of violets.

“My kingdom for a horse!” A titanic villain in Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard III departs the stage and this life at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Mark the battle’s anniversary with these posts and podcast episodes.

Mona Awad’s new, darkly funny novel All’s Well tells the story of a theater professor who is convinced that staging All’s Well That Ends Well will remedy all of her woes. Along the way, she meets three strange benefactors with…

Shakespeare and Forgetting by Peter Holland considers how Shakespeare explores the concept of forgetting and how forgetting functions in performance. The excerpt below focuses on the character of Sir John Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays. Why do…

When you picture what’s in the Folger collection, many people imagine books and manuscripts from the early modern period — and we do have a lot of those! But the Folger also collects a variety of Shakespeare-related objects, including this…

Can you identify which Shakespeare plays inspired these novels? Quiz: Which Shakespeare Plays Inspired These Novels? Given the title, author, and a brief note about the novel’s plot, see if you can identify the Shakespeare play it’s inspired by. Exit,…

With the Folger’s four-year Before ‘Farm to Table’ project drawing to a close, we’re revisiting three of the most popular early modern recipes adapted by the project team and shared on the Shakespeare & Beyond blog. Before ‘Farm to Table’:…

Casket, carved in an Elizabethan style 1866.Imagine buying a book and having the queen of England give you a special case in which to store it! That’s what happened after wealthy heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts purchased a Shakespeare First Folio in…