Research and discovery

Lopez looks at which early modern plays were considered better than others (and why) and how the works selected to represent the era might change.

In our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, now celebrating its 100th episode, you can hear so many surprising and often first-person stories by scholars, musicians, authors, actors, and others on all manner of Shakespearean topics.

Restoration Shakespeare was a complex theatrical experience that integrated song, music, dance, and acting; indeed, music and dance, alongside stage machines and movable scenes, were central to the success of Restoration theatre more generally.

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.

Victorian artists in England painted many portraits of Ophelia, including this one from 1889 by John William Waterhouse.

In Argentina, political turmoil and economic problems are key features in Shakespeare productions, as the country grapples with post-dictatorship culture.

Editing Shakespeare’s works is a complex process, explains Barbara Mowat, who with Paul Werstine edited the Folger Shakespeare Library editions.

Illustrated editions of the Complete Works would have been the first encounter with Shakespeare that many Victorian readers would have had.

The Roman distaste of powerful women, their misunderstanding of the Egyptian way of life, and Octavian’s political need to consolidate his rise to dictator created our image of Cleopatra today.

We are used to thinking of Elizabethan (and Jacobean) literature with Shakespeare at the center, but evidence suggests that, although Shakespeare was considered an important writer in the last decade of the queen’s reign, Thomas Nashe was one of the…

By the time the first battles of the American Revolution took place in 1775, Shakespeare had been imported from England on stage and page to the New World.

A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED, for short) is a large, searchable digital resource on the hundreds of commercial plays by the other authors of Shakespeare’s time—including dozens of newly edited play texts.