Esther French

We look at three instances of love letters in Shakespeare’s plays: Orlando’s love poems to Rosalind in As You Like It, Hamlet’s passionate missive to Ophelia in Hamlet, and Proteus’s romantic letter to Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Can you match up these Shakespearean lovers? Take the quiz and challenge your friends.

Cincy Shakes and Seattle Shakespeare adapt the Henry VI plays, Nashville presents a ’90s Romeo and Juliet, and Nebraska teams up with the Omaha Symphony.

A champagne toast welcomed the return of the last First Folio to the Folger, completing a national tour in which 18 of the Folger’s 82 First Folios traveled to all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC, in 2016. This traveling…

Louis Butelli (Feste) sings the final lines in Twelfth Night, directed by Robert Richmond, Folger Theatre, 2013. Photo by Scott Suchman. Challenge thyself! Test your Shakespeare knowledge and take this quiz. You may have gotten a perfect score on our…

1. Othello and Blackface This podcast episode, which deals with race, Othello, and how the Elizabethans portrayed blackness onstage, offers a startling, new interpretation of Desdemona’s handkerchief that is changing the way scholars understand the play. Our guests are Ayanna Thompson,…

Let’s take a moment to revisit some of the biggest Shakespeare stories in the news this year, from the discoveries that grabbed headlines to the spectacular celebrations of the 400th anniversary to the celebrity performances that generated the most buzz.…

The Folger is the world’s largest Shakespeare collection. We love mining this rich archive for gems, and on social media we often share collection items using #FolgerFinds. This blog post takes us through a year of Shakespeare #FolgerFinds on Instagram. January We start…

Francine Segan is a food historian with a taste for the Renaissance. She’s the author of six cookbooks, including Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2003) and the Opera Lover’s Cookbook, which was nominated for a James Beard award. This year she’s been spending…

If you’re going to see a performance of The Winter’s Tale, perhaps you’ve read the play (or maybe just the plot summary)—or maybe you’re going in cold. So, what should you look for in this Shakespeare play?

The costumes for Alan Bates and Glenn Close in Hamlet (1990). (The Collection of Motion Picture Costume Design: Larry McQueen) Shakespeare has provided rich material for Hollywood’s film industry over the decades, from The Taming of the Shrew (1967) with…

Theater was explosively popular in California’s Gold Rush era, and miners couldn’t get enough of Shakespeare. San Francisco and Sacramento had major theaters that were repeatedly burning down and being rebuilt almost immediately. Even the small gold-mining towns had stages…