Research and discovery

The tale of George Saunders and his hopes for a wife.

A Folger fellow shares her research into the language of slavery in early modern England, and more specifically, the use of that language in the works of William Shakespeare.

Richard Schoch examines the first published image of William Shakespeare’s birthplace from 1769, reflecting on the transformation of a humble home into a significant tourist site in Stratford-upon-Avon.

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.

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.

Celebrate Halloween and Shakespeare with the remarkable story of Macbeth’s “creepiest” word — a common, simple term whose unusual use in the play was identified by data analysis in 2014 and highlighted in a recent online column.

The study of extant early modern plays is a painstaking business that moves along a fine line of conjectural and historicist study. With the advent of the Lost Plays Database in 2009, scattered primary and secondary materials have been brought…

What’s the most influential book for Shakespeare scholarship? The First Folio of 1623 immediately comes to mind for many. However, there’s another book, less famous but still incredibly important for Shakespeare scholars: Edward Gwynn’s set of Pavier Quartos, found in…

Iranian professor and Shakespeare scholar Ali Salami has used the Folger Shakespeare’s freely available digital texts to translate almost all of the works of Shakespeare into Persian. Read a Q&A with Salami about his translation work.

The curious and complicated history of the 16th-century play “The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine” prompts interesting conversations about the Shakespeare canon and its apocrypha.

Thomas Sheppey devoted several densely written pages of his 17th-century manuscript to the topic of sleep — how to trigger it, how to interrupt it, how to influence its depth and length, and even how to stop people talking in…

“I have had a most rare vision…” Bottom’s words in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” echo the language of Spanish conquistadors describing Aztec Mexico.