Romeo and Juliet
Three Ways to Have Fun with Shakespeare
Listening to students speaking Shakespeare is certainly my favorite part of teaching Shakespeare, but I also love watching them play games. We’ve often ended a semester with Shakespeare-based games. (Perfect for this sunny time of year!) Student favorites have been…
The (Love and) Hate U Give: Teaching Angie Thomas and William Shakespeare
I teach high school English in St. Louis, Missouri, just miles from Ferguson, Missouri. Three years ago, after the Black Lives Matter movement started, I tried to bring the conversation about power and injustice into my classroom with the classics.…
What My Students Really Think About Studying Shakespeare
At the start of our Romeo and Juliet unit, I had my students begin a Digital Shakespeare Portfolio: a blog account that would house all of their annotations, as well as a place to discuss their thoughts on the interactive…
Juliet's Answer
For nearly a century, people have been sending letters asking for advice on love and romance to Verona, Italy. The letters were all addressed to Juliet. Glenn Dixon tells us about the volunteers today, called Juliet’s secretaries, who answer these letters.
Shakespeare and YA Novels: Ryan North and Molly Booth
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 62 While print sales of adult fiction are down in the last decade, the juvenile market – which includes YA – has actually gone up 40 percent. In this episode, two YA authors talk about their writing,…
Shakespeare and Girlhood
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 60 How does Shakespeare portray girls and girlhood in his plays, and what do those portrayals tell us about life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England? Our guest for this Shakespeare Unlimited episode, Deanne Williams of York University…
Two film studios, alike in dignity...
The Folger owns a variety of printed items related to the cinematic history of Shakespeare—screenplays and manuscript drafts, pressbooks and souvenir programs, and still photographs. Generally, there’s a good chance that we also have the related film recording in some…
A carousel of tragedy
We are used to thinking of productions of Shakespeare’s plays as creating new works of art that demonstrate the vitality of the centuries-old drama. But in the right hands, books can achieve the same effect. Emily Martin’s The Tragedy of…
Charlotte Cushman: When Romeo Was a Woman
Charlotte Cushman was a 19th-century theatrical icon, so famous and beloved that, like Beyoncé today, newspapers called her by just her first name. But her fame wasn’t for conventionally Victorian feminine portrayals.
Romeo and Juliet through the Ages
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 12 Though the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet is a perennial favorite, the world around the play has changed in the four centuries since it was first performed. Shifting attitudes about taboo love and marriage,…
Seeing Double in the Romeo and Juliet Prologue
William Fox presents Theda Bara in William Shakespeare’s masterpiece Romeo and Juliet, 1916. Folger Shakespeare Library. By Julia Perlowski If the use of Shakespeare’s early modern English is under attack in some “regular” and “honors” English classrooms, just think about…
Your Backstage Pass!
Brian Dykstra (left, as Lord Capulet) and Joe Mallon (as Paris) in Romeo and Juliet. Dykstra Blog: Your Backstage Pass Hey. Dykstra here. Once again. I thought ya’ll might enjoy a tour through the mind of the actor (a semi-dangerous…