Shakespeare & Beyond

The study of extant early modern plays is a painstaking business that moves along a fine line of conjectural and historicist study. With the advent of the Lost Plays Database in 2009, scattered primary and secondary materials have been brought…

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…

Caridad Svich. Photo by Jody Christopherson. Playwright and translator Caridad Svich writes about encountering A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a child growing up in a Cuban-American community in Florida: “In Shakespeare, before he was a writer on my syllabus in…

Is the July heat getting to you? Here are five items from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection that are just right for summertime. 1. A 1699 guide to swimming “In the seventeenth century, swimming was viewed not so much as…

Summer Shakespeare is back. Take a look at the plays that the Folger’s theater partners have onstage this July and August.

(left-right) Mr. Lewis Waller as Henry V (ca. 1910); Peter Crook as King Henry IV, Folger Theatre, 2019, C. Stanley Photography; Zach Appelman as Henry V, Folger Theatre, 2013. Photo by Scott Suchman; Edwin Booth as King Henry VIII. Shakespeare…

In a recent post on the Folger’s Collation blog, assistant curator Elizabeth DeBold shared a small set of photographs, newly added to the Folger collection, that document a 1933 Japanese production of Hamlet: These five photos provide a glimpse of…

What did Richard III and his disability represent to Shakespeare’s original audiences? And how has this Shakespeare villain shaped the field of early modern disability studies today? Katherine Schaap Williams takes a closer look at these questions in the below…

In Shakespeare’s Henriad – Richard II (1595), Henry IV Part I (1596), Henry IV Part II (1597), and Henry V (1599) – English Christian characters frequently employ negative Turkish tropes when criticizing each other’s corrupt political agendas. However, these tropes differ from…

(left-right) Joshua David Robinson, Matt Dallal, Zachary Fine, and Jack Schmitt in Love’s Labor’s Lost, Folger Theatre, 2019. Photo by Brittany Diliberto. You’d think I’d have a better answer to the question, “What’s your favorite Shakespeare play?” — but it’s…

Jakob Rüff. The expert midwife, 1637. Folger STC 21442 What was everyday life like for women throughout Tudor society? Elizabeth Norton, a historian of the queens of England and the Tudor period, shares stories on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast…

Looking for a good beach read? Something to bring on your long plane ride? Listen to these author interviews from the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited podcast to find a novel inspired by Shakespeare’s stories and his world. Naomi Miller on Mary…