Shakespeare & Beyond

Calling all book lovers! Some of our most popular #FolgerFinds posts on Instagram this year featured beautiful bindings of Shakespeare’s collected works or early editions of Shakespeare plays that may have slightly different plot elements than the versions we’ve come…

What were the most popular stories this year on the Shakespeare & Beyond blog? Posts about love, coffee, and Ian McKellen made the top five.

Our top Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episodes from 2021 explore the British royal family, a Shakespeare-inspired novel, lost plays, and more. Happy listening! How We Hear Shakespeare’s Plays, with Carla Della Gatta In Shakespeare’s time, people talked about going to hear…

During the covid-19 pandemic, two methods of escape for me have been Shakespeare and depictions of fictional catastrophes, so you can imagine my excitement when I learned that a novel that combines both — Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven…

There is a long tradition of attempting to reconstruct the 1599 Globe, the multi-level open-air playhouse where many of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. It will always be difficult to determine various details about the 1599 Globe, which burned to…

We continue our “Shakespeare and Greek Myths” series with another major goddess of the Grecian pantheon, Athena. Also called Athene, Pallas, and Minerva (her Roman name), this patron of Athens was the deity devoted to wisdom, the law, and strategy…

In December, many of our theater partners take a break from Shakespeare to celebrate the holidays with their communities! We reached out to them to hear about holiday productions including “Cinderella,” “The Gift of the Magi,” “A Christmas Carol,” “It’s Christmas, Carol!” and…

Picking up where Shakespeare’s King Lear ends, a new novel imagines the life of Lear’s wife, who in this telling has been banished for 15 years when she receives word of her family members’ deaths. Learwife by J.R. Thorp gives…

Duke Ellington includes “musical sonnets” in his 12-song Shakespeare jazz suite, Such Sweet Thunder. Learn more about this 1957 milestone in the story of jazz and Shakespeare from an interview with Douglas Lanier.

Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) is a famous example of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Try our quiz to see if you can put its lines in order.

Austin Tichenor explores the copious Shakespearean echoes in HBO’s Succession series, in which the Shakespearean actor Brian Cox plays a key role.

One of the figures that Shakespeare and his characters frequently invoke is Aphrodite, the goddess of love, often referred to by her Roman name, Venus, both in the plays and sonnets and in Shakespeare’s popular long poem, Venus and Adonis.…