Research and discovery

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.

What does Shakespeare say about ecology and its politically engaged cousin environmentalism? Neither term appears in his work—unsurprising since they hadn’t been coined yet.

Lady Mary Wroth watched Shakespeare act in his own plays, heard her relative Sir Walter Raleigh talk about founding Virginia, and almost certainly met Pocahantas and ambassadors from Morocco. Wroth’s later prose fiction echoes elements of her own life, including…