Off the shelf

Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe may not be as famous as his contemporary William Shakespeare, but his death at age 29 was far more dramatic — an argument over a bill that led to a stabbing, with the killer successfully pleading…

Charles Cattermole. A scene from The Merchant of Venice. 19th century. Folger ART Box C368.5 no.1 (size S) Italy is the setting most associated with Shakespeare’s comedies, providing layers of dramatic potential that Kent Cartwright explores in an excerpt from…

Picking up where Shakespeare’s King Lear ends, a new novel imagines the life of Lear’s wife, who in this telling has been banished for 15 years when she receives word of her family members’ deaths. Learwife by J.R. Thorp gives…

Eating and drinking were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare’s plays, reframes questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama.…

Lena Cowen Orlin, the Folger Institute’s former Executive Director, illuminates key parts of Shakespeare’s life in her new book, from his father and his wedding to his home, will, and memorial bust; the replica of the bust shown here is…

As we enter the year’s spookiest month, explore a trio of contemporary novels that involve early modern witchcraft. Much has changed since the deadly witch hunts of Shakespeare’s era, and the contrasting approaches of these books are a good way…

What is the English history play? “A dramatic study of civil conflict in England,” writes David Bevington in this excerpt from the newly published Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War. “Above all, its purpose is to explore the causes, the…

When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke in the 1990s, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. The First Folio became an endless source of inspiration for “journeys of…

Mona Awad’s new, darkly funny novel All’s Well tells the story of a theater professor who is convinced that staging All’s Well That Ends Well will remedy all of her woes. Along the way, she meets three strange benefactors with…

Shakespeare and Forgetting by Peter Holland considers how Shakespeare explores the concept of forgetting and how forgetting functions in performance. The excerpt below focuses on the character of Sir John Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays. Why do…

Caridad Svich. Photo by Jody Christopherson. Playwright and translator Caridad Svich writes about encountering A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a child growing up in a Cuban-American community in Florida: “In Shakespeare, before he was a writer on my syllabus in…

What did Richard III and his disability represent to Shakespeare’s original audiences? And how has this Shakespeare villain shaped the field of early modern disability studies today? Katherine Schaap Williams takes a closer look at these questions in the below…