Off the shelf

Jonathan Croall writes about Frances de la Tour’s 1979 performance as Hamlet, the first woman to do so on the English stage since Sarah Bernhardt.

This excerpt from Ayanna Thompson’s book explores Peter Sellars’s “uniquely American take on William Shakespeare” and his 1980 production of King Lear.

Stephen Greenblatt discusses and reads short excerpts from his new book, “Tyrant,” which looks at how Shakespeare portrayed political leaders in his plays.

Read an excerpt from ‘Macbeth’, Norwegian detective crime novelist Jo Nesbø’s retelling of Shakespeare’s play, from the Hogarth Shakespeare series.

Read an excerpt from actor Paterson Joseph’s book about playing the role of Brutus in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s acclaimed 2012 production of Julius Caesar.

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.”