Shakespeare & Beyond

In her new book “The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage,” Pamela Allen Brown explores the considerable impact of Italian divas on Shakespeare and other English playwrights. This excerpt looks at the character of Juliet.

“Nathan the Wise” and “The Merchant of Venice” are very different works, though religious tension is a subject in each, as is the potential for love and loss, wealth and poverty, bloodshed and peace. But it is the character of…

While doing research in the Folger collection, Dennis Duncan encountered hundreds of indexes created by early modern readers. In this excerpt from his newly published book, “Index, A History of the,” Duncan describes the fascinating variety of reader indexes he…

Take a look at what the Folger’s theater partners have on stage this March, including a long-awaited ‘Hamlet’ in Cincinnati, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ in Atlanta, and ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ with John Douglas Thompson, coming to Washington, DC.

A Polish acting troupe outwits the Nazis using Shakespeare codes and theatrical smarts in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film “To Be or Not to Be,” an audacious comedy filmed as Hitler was devastating Europe. Almost the definition of a joke told…

Recipes for plague-curing potions like “Doctor Burges’s remedy” are often found in household recipe books of Shakespeare’s time. Folger fellow Yann Ryan writes about the circulation of information and misinformation through these recipes.

Take the quiz to see if you can identify some of the Shakespeare characters who share names with characters in other plays.

As anyone who has read Shakespeare’s plays can attest, their content is not always very appropriate for children: brutal murders, bawdy jokes, incest, etc. Editions of Shakespeare’s plays that have been designed specifically for children often omit or smooth over…

Austin Tichenor makes the case for why we should say “Shakespeare is for anyone who wants him” instead of “Shakespeare is for everyone.”

While working on a dual biography of Brunhild and Fredegund, Shelley Puhak stumbled across a connection between these medieval queens and Shakespeare.

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.

Keith Hamilton Cobb reflects on his play American Moor and how the questions he received in response to it led to the development of the Untitled Othello Project, a deeply scrutinizing exploration of Shakespeare’s text.