Inside Shakespeare's plays

What happens when a king loses his people’s trust? Historian Helen Castor delves into the 14th century drama behind Richard II’s fall and Henry IV’s rise, the events that inspired Shakespeare’s celebrated history plays.

Austin Tichenor takes a look at Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy. Pacino describes how central Shakespeare was to his development as a young actor.

Discover how the Folger’s new teaching guides make Shakespeare’s works more engaging, accessible, and relevant, with strategies for teaching the plays, tackling topics like race and gender, and meeting the needs of today’s students.

It may not surprise you to hear that Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s teenaged play but that might have surprised earlier readers who considered the play adolescent for other reasons.

Acclaimed Shakespearean actor Harriet Walter reimagines what the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet might have said after Juliet’s death in an excerpt from She Speaks!.

Explore how Shakespeare reshaped the tragic form with complex characters and self-deception. Rhodri Lewis dives into the evolution of Shakespearean tragedy, revealing its lasting modern impact.

Scholar Will Tosh explores the hidden queer lives in Shakespeare’s works, revealing how early modern gender fluidity and same-sex desire influenced the Bard’s plays and characters.

Explore Throughlines, a free resource offering teaching materials to help educators integrate discussions of race into Shakespeare and other premodern texts in college classrooms.

Peggy O’Brien helps us explore a giant, richly detailed fictional map filled with Shakespeare’s characters, newly created for the Folger’s exhibition spaces.

Discover how our perceptions of Juliet have evolved over centuries, as Sophie Duncan explores the lasting legacy of Shakespeare’s first tragic heroine.

These Shakespeare quotes about friendship point to the complexities of relationships between characters in the plays.

Love-in-idleness, a flower also called pansy or heartsease, plays an important role in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as Marissa Nicosia explores.