A Midsummer Night's Dream

Double-casting is a theater technique (as opposed to a literary one) that creates a meta-narrative, transforming a large-cast play into a present-tense adventure. Actors swapping costumes and changing roles (and sometimes genders) becomes part of the thrilling ride, and theater’s…

To get you ready for a summer in the Athenian woods, we wanted to share with you a guide to the variety of ways you can explore A Midsummer Nights Dream online before seeing it at the National Building Museum.

Edward Topsell. The historie of foure-footed beastes. 1607. FOLGER STC 24123 copy 1 While the global population of European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) is stable, their numbers have been rapidly declining in the UK for decades, especially in rural areas. This…

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 134 Peter Brook passed away on July 2, 2022. We remember him with fondness and gratitude for his many contributions to the theater.In this episode, we spend 40 minutes with one of the world’s most influential directors.…

Shakespeare Unlimited Episode 123 Director Casey Wilder Mott’s 2017 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sets Shakespeare’s story in modern Los Angeles, where aspiring filmmakers, eccentric artists, studio execs, and surfers bounce off one another in a riot of…

Artist Paul Glenshaw takes a close look at Titania and Bottom as he draws the scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” depicted on a Folger bas-relief.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 102 In 2011, Ben Steinfeld and Noah Brody, co-directors of New York’s Fiasco Theater, were invited to an assisted living facility and nursing home just outside New York City to work with its residents on a production…

What should you watch for in a production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” We asked some friends what they look for in this classic play.

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 90 Bernard Cornwell, a bestselling writer of historical fiction such as the Sharpe series, has turned to the world of the Elizabethan theater. His newest novel, Fools and Mortals, imagines the first production of A Midsummer Night’s…

“Fools and Mortals,” a new novel from New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, tells the story of the first production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Elizabethan England, from the perspective of William Shakespeare’s younger brother Richard.

Lewis Carroll gave this lovely 1868 edition of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with delicate cut-paper images by Paul Konewka, to his illustrator for “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” John Tenniel.

Promptbooks let us peer into the minds of some of history’s greatest theater-makers and see how they imagined Shakespeare’s plays.