Shakespeare & Beyond

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.

A detailed but absurd decor chat with Lady Macbeth is one of Susan Harlan’s many hilarious design interviews with literary figures in her new book “Decorating a Room of One’s Own.”

Tracy Young, who had previously directed “The Winter’s Tale,” writes about the challenges of translating “The Winter’s Tale” for the Play on! project.

Enjoy a discussion led by Washington Post journalist Robert Costa, moderator of Washington Week, with Georgianna Ziegler, curator of Churchill’s Shakespeare, and Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives Centre, exploring Shakespeare’s influences on Winston Churchill.