Shakespeare & Beyond

The end of the year brings feasts, celebrations, and family. Our reading list of Folger Book Club picks offers a wide range of ways to reflect on the ties that bind us.

Explore what’s playing at our Shakespeare Theater Partners around the country this November.

It may not surprise you to hear that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s teenaged play but that might have surprised earlier readers who considered the play adolescent for other reasons.

Though Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, he looms large over English history. In a new biography, historian and journalist Dan Jones examines Henry’s life anew.

Washington National Opera’s Artistic Director Francesca Zambello interviews director, Brenna Corner, about Verdi’s opera inspired by Macbeth.

Acclaimed Shakespearean actor Harriet Walter reimagines what the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet might have said after Juliet’s death in an excerpt from She Speaks!.

Enjoy a video from the Esther Inglis special exhibition, showing how early modrern calligrapher, artist, and writer Inglis’s self-portraits helped tell her story.

Carla Della Gatta explores how bilingual staging methods help evoke Puerto Rican culture for the Capulet women in Folger Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet.

With Halloween approaching, Austin Tichenor takes a look at Stephen King and a theme he shares with Shakespeare: the often tragic fate of younger characters.

John Douglas Thompson, who is playing the title role in Othello in the Royal Shakespeare Company production, shares his insights about the character and the play.

Selected by director Raymond O. Caldwell and the Folger staff, with evocative descriptions by Caldwell, rare objects resonate with the themes of Romeo and Juliet.

Read our round-up of October performances from Shakespeare theaters across the country.