Off the shelf

What’s it like to play the role of Lear onstage? In this excerpt from Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries, actor Antony Sher gives us a window into the rehearsal process for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of King…

Celebrate Black History Month with five books and one essay about race in early modern Europe and in Shakespeare’s plays.

“Fools and Mortals,” a new novel from New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, tells the story of the first production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Elizabethan England, from the perspective of William Shakespeare’s younger brother Richard.

This excerpt from “London’s Triumph” by Stephen Alford looks at the Elizabethan understanding of usury, seen through Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”

The tricks of this pop-up Shakespeare book, written by the Reduced Shakespeare Company and illustrated by Jennie Maizels, are a perfect way to express the theatricality of Shakespeare’s plays.

In “Dunbar,” a new novel by Edward St. Aubyn that retells the Shakespeare play “King Lear,” Henry Dunbar makes the mistake of handing over control of his global corporation to his eldest daughters, who bribe a doctor to declare him…

In this excerpt from “Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy,” Paul Cantor writes about the Romanization of Egypt and the Egyptization of Rome in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

When European explorers first began traveling into the interior of the African continent, they brought Shakespeare with them. This excerpt from Shakespeare in Swahililand, written by Edward Wilson-Lee, relates the expedition of Richard Francis Burton and his search for the…

Read an excerpt from “Rosalind: Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine” by Angela Thirlwell, in which she traces the performance history of “As You Like It” and interviews famous actresses who have played this role onstage.

This debut novel by M.L. Rio takes place at a fiercely competitive school where the acting students only perform Shakespeare.

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.

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…