Shakespeare in the world

Austin Tichenor writes about how the lack of biographical details about Shakespeare’s life leaves his audience always wanting more.

Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Can we capture the perfumes of the past to savor in the present? This blog post looks at two 21st-century perfumes that try to market their scents by evoking early…

Austin Tichenor writes about theater’s limitations as a historical record, given its dramatic needs and narrative imperatives.

  Cyril Walter Hodges. The fire at the Globe, 1613 (illustration for: Shakespeare’s Theatre, 1964). Folger Shakespeare Library. While William Shakespeare never wrote what we might think of as a science-fiction play, he knew intuitively that the theatre — more…

A sonnet packs a lot of meaning into a tiny space. Here are fourteen ways (one for each line) of approaching Shakespeare’s most well-known poems.

Speed reading Launce’s letter : / J. Gilbert ; W. Thomas, sc. 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library. ART File S528t7 no.10 (size XS)All right, enough. We’ve all heard how super-productive William Shakespeare was when the plague shut down his theaters:…

Need some quality poetry to help you through these difficult times? Sir Patrick Stewart has been reading a Shakespeare sonnet a day on Twitter.

Since we’ve just completed the annual Hollywood marathon called “Awards Season” — several self-congratulatory months filled with the Independent Spirit Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, various guild awards from around the world, the British Film & Television Academy Awards (the…

The cast of The Merry Wives of Windsor with a 1970s twist at Folger Theatre. The Brady Bunch-inspired scenic design is by Tony Cisek. (Cameron Whitman Photography) Shakespeare’s influence can be found in many aspects of American culture, from film…

It’s that time of year, when a certain subset of us wonder, somewhat longingly and not for the first time—what’s the closest thing we have to a Shakespeare Christmas play?

We asked five artistic directors from Shakespeare companies around the United States: How did making Shakespeare change between 2010 and 2020? Plus, we recap a wild decade for Shakespeare lovers.

As the author of books that retell Star Wars in the style of Shakespeare, I am often asked, “If you were stranded on a desert island and you could only take the complete works of Shakespeare or the Star Wars…