Shakespeare & Beyond

Shakespeare is a familiar sight in the theater and on the movie screen, but he’s permeated many other areas of American life. Advertisers have picked up on the ubiquity of Shakespeare for more than two centuries.

Ira Aldridge as Aaron in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Since their revival by David Garrick in the early eighteenth century, Shakespeare and his plays have always generated a certain aura of celebrity, sometimes referred to as “Bardolatry.” Following in the footsteps…

Which Shakespeare plays are onstage this month? We check in with our theater partners Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Atlanta Shakespeare Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

We look at three instances of love letters in Shakespeare’s plays: Orlando’s love poems to Rosalind in As You Like It, Hamlet’s passionate missive to Ophelia in Hamlet, and Proteus’s romantic letter to Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Paul Robeson was the first modern African American to perform Shakespeare—to perform Othello, and he talks in his letters and in his essays about bringing his experiences as a student in a white arena, his experiences with racism, to the…

Can you match up these Shakespearean lovers? Take the quiz and challenge your friends.

A 1957 Taming of the Shrew with beautiful lithographs. Song lyrics from 1769 extolling the goblet carved from a mulberry tree supposedly planted by Shakespeare. These and other recent additions to the Folger Shakespeare Library collection will be up for…

Whether you’re giving a valentine to a sweetheart or a friend, why not say it with Shakespeare? We have a new set of beautifully illustrated Shakespeare valentines for you, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Robert Edmond Jones. Costume design for Paul Robeson as “Othello”. Ink and gouache drawing with fabric swatches attached, 1943. Folger Shakespeare Library. To commemorate Black History Month in February, we’re sharing a playlist of Shakespeare Unlimited episodes about the African…

Dig deeper into one of the biggest Shakespeare stories of 2016: the discovery of previously unknown depictions of Shakespeare’s coat of arms. Folger Curator of Manuscripts Heather Wolfe and Folger Director Michael Witmore elaborate on the significance of those discoveries…

Promptbooks help stage managers and actors keep their, er, act straight. Explore these ‘As You Like It’ promptbooks from the Folger collection.

In this excerpt from the Shakespeare Anniversary Lecture Series at the Folger, Yale professor Joseph Roach argues that “the theater occasionally makes real history itself, materializing it for audiences by its own expressive means, especially so during an age of…