Inside Shakespeare's plays

What makes “The Winter’s Tale” so compelling? Folger Director Michael Witmore shares spoiler-free insights about this Shakespeare play in three short videos.

What does Shakespeare tell us of love? The plays provide us with a wealth of wooing and wedding, and many examples of what not to do.

When Hamlet first encounters his father’s ghost, the Danish prince’s reactions reflect Shakespeare’s understanding of the theological differences between early modern Catholics and Protestants regarding the spiritual realm, says David Scott Kastan.

“Measure for Measure” is technically a comedy, which means it ends with a marriage. So why does Isabella respond to the Duke’s proposal with silence?

“The Merry Wives of Windsor” was written around 1597, and is often considered to be Shakespeare’s most English play.

If you search for the word “pelican” in Shakespeare’s plays, you come across three instances, in Hamlet, King Lear, and Richard II. All three refer to a symbolic meaning of the pelican that can feel remote to today’s reader or…

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.

Perhaps if Caesar had paid attention to the Soothsayer and to his wife Calpurnia’s premonitions, he might not have been killed—but that would be re-writing history.