Shakespeare

Artistic Research Fellow Jacklyn Brickman explores Shakespeare, patterns, and the invasive starling species using AI.

Thanks for the great guesses about the object shown in the September Crocodile Mystery! Dawn Kiilani Hoffmann got it right. The photo shows the bottom of the bronze Shakespeare sculpture at the foot of the stairs from the Reading Room.…

In a humorous post from 2017, web comic creator Mya Gosling mused about the absence of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays. Employing her signature stick-figure style, she presented a series of single-panel comics that put these absent maternal figures back in…

a guest post by John Stone Deanne Williams, who was a Folger fellow in 2003, tells the story of how her work on early modern girlhood took shape just after her daughter was born—she began thinking about histories of gender,…

a guest post by Missy Dunaway Greetings! I was the Folger Shakespeare Library’s artist-in-residence in November of 2021. I dedicated my Folger Institute Fellowship to a painting project entitled Birds of the Bard. This growing collection of paintings will catalog…

A guest post by Faith Acker I still remember the first rare book I handled in a library. It was Thomas Caldecott’s copy of the Shake-speares Sonnets. Neuer before imprinted (Thomas Thorpe, 1609) a beautiful quarto that Caldecott presented to…

A guest post by Charles Webb Friends, Romans, Countrymen: lend me your eyes For the past eight months I have split my time between working at the Folger Shakespeare Library and at Dumbarton Oaks as a Dumbarton Oaks Humanities Fellow.…

I first encountered this book three years ago, in 2015. Intrigued by its sparse catalog record, which at that point consisted of a cataloger-supplied title (“”), an estimated page count, and little more, I went down to the vault to…

A guest post by Sarah Lindenbaum “And what obscured in this fair volume lies / Find written in the margent of his eyes” (Romeo and Juliet, 1.3.87–88) Recently, two Shakespeare quartos held by the Folger Shakespeare Library were determined to…

As a couple of you guessed correctly last week, the June Crocodile Mystery is a proof for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery print of Lady Macbeth illustrating Macbeth, act 1, scene 5.See the Collation post “Proof prints, part one” for more on the meaning of “proof”…

As the common saying goes, only death and taxes are certain. However, consider the uncertainties that can accompany any tax season: missing W-2s, e-file services incompatible with your browser, shifting standards, mathematical errors… That’s enough about taxes! Let’s talk about…

As several philatelically-astute readers quickly identified, the portrait of Shakespeare shown in last week’s Crocodile mystery is from a stamp!     These one shilling stamps were issued annually for a number of years at the turn of the 20th…