Shakespeare & Beyond

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.

See examples of creative and beautifully illustrated card games and board games in the Folger collection that use Shakespeare quotes and make references to his plays.

“Saint Patrick for Ireland,” published in 1640, picks up Patrick’s story as he prepares to return to Ireland as a missionary.

Born Ada Crehan in Limerick, Ireland, Ada Rehan arrived in Brooklyn with her family at age five. Her big break came in the late 1870s, when theater manager Augustin Daly hired her for his New York company.

Which Shakespeare plays are onstage this month? We check in with our theater partners Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Atlanta Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare in Detroit, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Gamut Theatre, The Old Globe, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Two brothers living in England in 1595 have had their playwriting careers upended by the arrival of a new guy from Stratford upon Avon, William Shakespeare. That’s the plot of Something Rotten, a new musical that opened on Broadway in…

If you search for the word “pelican” in Shakespeare’s plays, you come across three instances, in Hamlet, King Lear, and Richard II. All three refer to a symbolic meaning of the pelican that can feel remote to today’s reader or…

Lady Mary Wroth watched Shakespeare act in his own plays, heard her relative Sir Walter Raleigh talk about founding Virginia, and almost certainly met Pocahantas and ambassadors from Morocco. Wroth’s later prose fiction echoes elements of her own life, including…

This blog post spotlights five female artists whose interpretations of Shakespeare’s works are part of the Folger collection. We decided to highlight three sculptors and two book artists.

A poster in the Folger collections shows charming illustrations of Mardi Gras floats in New Orleans that represent 18 of Shakespeare’s plays.

Fake quotes have been in the news lately, from the Republican National Committee’s Abraham Lincoln flub to the bogus Winston Churchill quote about supporting funding for the arts during World War II. Such misattribution is familiar to Shakespeare enthusiasts. Every…