Shakespeare & Beyond

American actress Charlotte Cushman was a 19th-century theatrical icon, known for playing traditionally male roles like Romeo and Hamlet. She was not the only actress of her time to play these parts, but her style was uniquely assertive and athletic.…

  Richard III, act 5 scene 3, in the tent, Richard asleep, ghosts of persons he had murdered. Painted by J. Opie, R.A. ; engraved by W. Sharp. Published 1794. Folger Shakespeare Library. Nightmares and ominous dreams are used to…

Tybalt (Rex Daugherty) duels Mercutio (Brad Koed), with Benvolio (Aaron Bliden) looking on. Romeo and Juliet, Folger Theatre, 2013. Casey Kaleba was the fight director. Photo by Teresa Wood. Is Romeo and Juliet a play about love? Well yes, but…

  Cyril Walter Hodges. The fire at the Globe, 1613 (illustration for: Shakespeare’s Theatre, 1964). Folger Shakespeare Library. While William Shakespeare never wrote what we might think of as a science-fiction play, he knew intuitively that the theatre — more…

Shakespeare and his contemporaries were fascinated with bees as metaphors for human behavior, especially when it came to politics and government.

At the heart of Keith Hamilton Cobb’s one-man play American Moor are explorations of blackness, racial dynamics in American theater, “ownership” of Shakespeare, and the subtext of Othello. He has performed the play across the United States, including an off-Broadway…

Get an up-close look at the title page of one of the Folger’s 82 First Folios and learn more about it by clicking through captions that zoom in on different parts of the page.

“To be or not to be” – do you know what comes after? This quiz challenges you to drag and drop the lines of Hamlet’s famous speech into the correct order.

Why was herpetophagy (eating reptiles and amphibians) linked with madness in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”? Unpack the cultural anxieties involved in early modern English encounters with unfamiliar dietary norms.

Check out performances, conversations, classes, and podcasts available online in June from Shakespeare theaters all across the country.

Photograph by Lizzie Caswall Smith of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library. During this global pandemic, when the whole world is quarantined to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Hamlet seems like a character perfectly suited to…

Conrad Gessner. Icones animalium quadrupedum. 1560. Folger Shakespeare Library. Owls were bad omens for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The general of the French forces, facing an English emissary in Henry VI, Part 1, calls him “Thou ominous and fearful owl…