Research and discovery

Folger fellow Peter Radford explores the history of picturing women athletes from ancient Greece to early modern Europe, how these images can be hard to find and interpret, but also why they’re so valuable and compelling.

Celebrate Halloween and Shakespeare with the remarkable story of Macbeth’s “creepiest” word — a common, simple term whose unusual use in the play was identified by data analysis in 2014 and highlighted in a recent online column.

The study of extant early modern plays is a painstaking business that moves along a fine line of conjectural and historicist study. With the advent of the Lost Plays Database in 2009, scattered primary and secondary materials have been brought…

What’s the most influential book for Shakespeare scholarship? The First Folio of 1623 immediately comes to mind for many. However, there’s another book, less famous but still incredibly important for Shakespeare scholars: Edward Gwynn’s set of Pavier Quartos, found in…

Iranian professor and Shakespeare scholar Ali Salami has used the Folger Shakespeare’s freely available digital texts to translate almost all of the works of Shakespeare into Persian. Read a Q&A with Salami about his translation work.

The curious and complicated history of the 16th-century play “The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine” prompts interesting conversations about the Shakespeare canon and its apocrypha.

Thomas Sheppey devoted several densely written pages of his 17th-century manuscript to the topic of sleep — how to trigger it, how to interrupt it, how to influence its depth and length, and even how to stop people talking in…

“I have had a most rare vision…” Bottom’s words in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” echo the language of Spanish conquistadors describing Aztec Mexico.

Debra Ann Byrd writes about encountering an early female Othello in the Folger collection and developing her memoir and solo show, Becoming Othello.

The Peony Pavilion. “Kunqu performance at Peking University.” Wikimedia Commons / Antonis SHEN / CC BY-SA 2.0 Could Chinese literature be more popular with English-speaking audiences if translators favored words, phrases and poetic forms that spark associations with Shakespeare? This…

The Inkhorn Controversy in the 15th and 16th centuries focused on the use of long, Latinate words as opposed to shorter, Saxon-rooted English counterparts.

One of Hannah Woolley’s books has sat hidden in plain sight at the Folger since 1990—included in the Folger online catalog, but missing from an international database that scholars often use to search for early English books. It is the…