Shakespeare & Beyond

It’s been 60 years since Duke Ellington recorded Such Sweet Thunder, a jazz suite based on Shakespeare’s plays. Eleven songs are linked to Shakespearean characters like Othello and Lady Macbeth, and the final number is a tribute to Shakespeare himself.

To commemorate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 2014, Shakespeare’s Globe in London sent a group of actors on a two-year tour to perform Hamlet all around the world. Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe’s artistic director who directed this traveling…

A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED, for short) is a large, searchable digital resource on the hundreds of commercial plays by the other authors of Shakespeare’s time—including dozens of newly edited play texts.

In honor of Earth Day, here’s a prominent early modern treatise against air pollution in London from the Folger collection: “Fumifugium,” published in 1661.

What does Shakespeare say about ecology and its politically engaged cousin environmentalism? Neither term appears in his work—unsurprising since they hadn’t been coined yet.

Every month, we share a snapshot of Shakespeare in performance around America. See what’s on this April.

Known for his complex imaginary contraptions, W. Heath Robinson also produced exquisite illustrations for editions of Shakespeare’s works.

Francine Segan, a food historian with a taste for the Renaissance, adapts a 1610 handwritten recipe for rose cakes from a recipe book that’s part of the Folger collection.

Henry Altemus’ magnificently miniature copy of “The Children’s Shakespeare” by Edith Nesbit is the Folger’s smallest Shakespeare edition. The title page’s portrait of Shakespeare is only six millimeters long. Like the book’s text, it is not discernible to the naked…

Shakespeare characters love talking about their ducats, which were commonly used coins in Shakespeare’s day. Can you match the money quote to the play it comes from?

While Shakespeare musicals borrowed plots, characters, and situations from England’s best-known poet, they remained essentially “American.”

This 1934 Shakespeare atlas from the Folger collection contains 19 hand-drawn maps of places (both real and imaginary) from scenes in Shakespeare plays.