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Folger Exhibitions

Shakespeare the salesman: Advertising Coca Cola, iPhones, and chewing tobacco
Marcus Ward calendar
Shakespeare and Beyond

Shakespeare the salesman: Advertising Coca Cola, iPhones, and chewing tobacco

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Author
Esther French

Shakespeare is a familiar sight in the theater and on the movie screen, but he’s permeated many other areas of American life. Advertisers have picked up on the ubiquity of Shakespeare for more than two centuries.

The Mysterious Case of Folger First Folio 33
Collation

The Mysterious Case of Folger First Folio 33

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Author
Elizabeth DeBold

Shakespeare’s First Folio has been under the microscope for centuries, studied by historians, students of literature, and actors, as well as by those who are convinced that the works of the Bard are hiding something. As many of you may…

Sophisticating the First Folio
Collation

Sophisticating the First Folio

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Author
Caroline Duroselle-Melish

This week we will continue our discussion of the First Folios currently on display in the Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition, First Folio! Shakespeare’s American Tour. This post will look at their “sophistication.” A “sophisticated” or made-up book is a defective…

America's Shakespeare: The Bard goes west to Hollywood
Hamlet costumes
Shakespeare and Beyond

America's Shakespeare: The Bard goes west to Hollywood

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Author
Esther French

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…

Scissors inside books?
Collation

Scissors inside books?

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Author
Heather Wolfe

The rusty outline we showed in last week’s Crocodile post is, as one of our responders, Giles Bergel, correctly guessed, from a pair of scissors. It appears in Folger First Folio number 58, in Henry IV, part 1 (pp. 50-51). This First Folio…

America's Shakespeare: The Bard goes west to California’s Gold Rush mining camps
Hamlet Wagon
Shakespeare and Beyond

America's Shakespeare: The Bard goes west to California’s Gold Rush mining camps

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Author
Esther French

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…

Will and Jane go to war
Penguin Editions
Shakespeare and Beyond

Will and Jane go to war

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Author
Janine Barchas Kristina Straub

During World War I, the works of Shakespeare and Austen reached American troops on active duty through the American Library Association’s “War Service Library” program.  Between 1917 and 1920, the program collected donations of used books to help them distribute…

What turns a good writer into a superstar? 200 years and plenty of spectacle
Shakespeare and Beyond

What turns a good writer into a superstar? 200 years and plenty of spectacle

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Author
Janine Barchas Kristina Straub

In commemoration of the approximate 200th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the London actor and theatrical entrepreneur David Garrick launched the first celebration of Shakespeare as “the god of our idolatry” in 1769, helping to fashion the Bard as the larger-than-life,…

Repetition is celebrity: Shakespeare and Austen
Shakespeare and Beyond

Repetition is celebrity: Shakespeare and Austen

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Author
Janine Barchas Kristina Straub

As curators of Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity we both began our work in the archives with established interests in the connections between literary greatness and consumer culture. Janine has written about the marketing tactics…

11 actors who have played Shakespeare and Austen roles
Shakespeare and Beyond

11 actors who have played Shakespeare and Austen roles

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Author
Esther French

If you’re a fan of both Shakespeare and Jane Austen, you may have noticed some overlap in the actors who portray these classic roles in stage productions and film adaptations. As the curators of the Folger exhibition Will & Jane: Shakespeare,…

Quiz: Can you pair these Jane Austen and Shakespeare characters?
Shakespeare and Beyond

Quiz: Can you pair these Jane Austen and Shakespeare characters?

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Author
Esther French

Take this quiz and test your knowledge of Jane Austen and Shakespeare! We give you a character from a Jane Austen novel, and you pick the corresponding character from Shakespeare’s plays, based on personality or storyline. Can you pair these Shakespeare…

Will and Jane continued: adaptations, modernizations, and fan fiction
Shakespeare and Beyond

Will and Jane continued: adaptations, modernizations, and fan fiction

Posted
Author
Janine Barchas Kristina Straub

Although the Bard may have a longer history of such flattery, both Will and Jane have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous adaptations. In the 20th century, Austen joined Shakespeare in his entrance into modern media—film, television, and digital forms—as…

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