Shakespeare & Beyond

Transparencies, popular in the late 1700s, use back-lighting to reveal a secret image. See one from the Folger collection that reveals Shakespeare’s ghost in Westminster Abbey.

Illustrated editions of the Complete Works would have been the first encounter with Shakespeare that many Victorian readers would have had.

The Roman distaste of powerful women, their misunderstanding of the Egyptian way of life, and Octavian’s political need to consolidate his rise to dictator created our image of Cleopatra today.

The tricks of this pop-up Shakespeare book, written by the Reduced Shakespeare Company and illustrated by Jennie Maizels, are a perfect way to express the theatricality of Shakespeare’s plays.

Every month, we share a snapshot of Shakespeare in performance around America. What plays are onstage this month? We check in with our theater partners.

We’ve got eight great ideas for Shakespeare-themed Halloween costumes, from Cleopatra and Richard III to Falstaff and Snug the Lion.

“Measure for Measure” is technically a comedy, which means it ends with a marriage. So why does Isabella respond to the Duke’s proposal with silence?

In “Dunbar,” a new novel by Edward St. Aubyn that retells the Shakespeare play “King Lear,” Henry Dunbar makes the mistake of handing over control of his global corporation to his eldest daughters, who bribe a doctor to declare him…

“The Merry Wives of Windsor” was written around 1597, and is often considered to be Shakespeare’s most English play.

We are used to thinking of Elizabethan (and Jacobean) literature with Shakespeare at the center, but evidence suggests that, although Shakespeare was considered an important writer in the last decade of the queen’s reign, Thomas Nashe was one of the…

In this excerpt from “Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy,” Paul Cantor writes about the Romanization of Egypt and the Egyptization of Rome in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

When European explorers first began traveling into the interior of the African continent, they brought Shakespeare with them. This excerpt from Shakespeare in Swahililand, written by Edward Wilson-Lee, relates the expedition of Richard Francis Burton and his search for the…