Shakespeare & Beyond

Some of the most engrossing illustrations of Shakespeare’s rarely performed tragedy come from Wyndham Lewis, an early 20th-century artist who, like Timon, was a misanthrope.

The pages of this 1930 edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet look insect-eaten or worse, but they’re actually made out of sheets of cork, not paper.

Read this Q&A with Tracy Chevalier about her new novel New Boy, which retells the story of Shakespeare’s Othello and is the latest book in the Hogarth Shakespeare series.

This month, we check in with our theater partners at Seattle Shakespeare Company, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Folger Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, and Atlanta Shakespeare Company.

In the whole history of Shakespeare in American life, perhaps the most shocking single fact is that 22 or more people once died as a result of a riot in New York over the correct theatrical interpretation of Macbeth.

What did people think about childhood and parenting in early modern England? Did parents express fondness for their children? How did they discipline them?

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.