Shakespeare Documented

Early versions of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 show its immense popularity and point to Falstaff’s origins as the real-life figure Sir John Oldcastle.

Forty-five years ago on Shakespeare’s birthday, the Folger announced that Laetitia Yeandle, then curator of manuscripts, had “rediscovered” a long-lost diary entry marking the first recorded purchase of Shakespeare’s first publication, Venus and Adonis.

Ninety documents relating to Shakespeare’s life, including six from the Folger collection, have been added to the UNESCO International Memory of the World register.

Folger Curator of Manuscripts Heather Wolfe dropped a bombshell in The New York Times this past week: Newly discovered depictions of Shakespeare’s coat of arms from the seventeenth century provide documentary evidence that while the heralds made the grant of arms to his…

Fifty of the most important manuscripts and printed works related to Shakespeare’s life and career are on display in the Folger exhibition Shakespeare, Life of an Icon, curated by Heather Wolfe. Some of these documents mark important milestones for Shakespeare…

Shakespeare, Life of an Icon, the first of four special exhibitions at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2016, offers a fresh and intimate perspective on William Shakespeare as the London playwright, bestselling poet, and man from Stratford. This once-in-a-lifetime assemblage shares…

The diary of physician and vicar John Ward contains the only known account of Shakespeare’s death. On March 6, 1662/63 he writes, “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died…