Shakespeare & Beyond

Every month, we share a snapshot of Shakespeare in performance across the country. What’s onstage in January? We visit our theater partners to find out.

Among the many treasures of the Folger is a lavish “Cosway binding” that includes five unique miniatures by a 20th-century British artist, “Miss C. B. Currie,” based on the images from the book itself. One of the oddest to modern…

Recent news about proteomics (the study of proteins) in the humanities has included a Folger Shakespeare Library project, irreverently called Project Dustbunny, that studies proteins in rare books to learn about those who once handled or read them.

Inspired by a real-life episode, Simon Mayo’s novel ‘Mad Blood Stirring’ tells the powerful story of a Shakespeare production by African American prisoners of war at Dartmoor prison in England, near the end of the War of 1812.

Happy New Year! We picked out four awful ideas for New Year’s resolutions from Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and added some hints for improvements.

Enjoy our five most popular #FolgerFinds posts on Instagram of items from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection, from a silhouette of a ‘Midsummer’ scene with Bottom and Titania to vintage photos of 19th-century actress Julia Marlowe.

Enjoy our most popular Shakespeare & Beyond blog posts from 2018, an eclectic range including a tasty 17th-century recipe, a quiz, a new play on Sarah Bernhardt and Hamlet, a female science fiction author from 1666, and a look at…

Revisit some of our most popular 2018 Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episodes, from Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway to a conversation with actor Derek Jacobi to the tyrants in Shakespeare’s plays.

Artist Paul Glenshaw describes drawing John Gregory’s bas-relief of Macbeth, the three witches, and their cauldron, with a focus on the vast cloud of smoke made from stone. “I realized as I drew it that the smoke was as much…

From rudeness to gross behavior, Ruth Goodman’s book “How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England” sheds some surprising light on what bad behavior really meant, including the reason that Shakespeare had Sampson threaten to “bite my thumb” at another character…

From the question “What are you?” (Countess Olivia) to “Tell my story” (Hamlet), Austin Tichenor looks at finding your identity and telling your story, through a decidedly Shakespearean lens.

Are there similarities between staging Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ and putting on the Shakespeare plays that are these companies’ bread and butter? We asked our theater partners.