Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Shakespeare famously never attended university. But not only has his work inspired generations of scholarship, his plays, too, are filled with scholarly characters. Shakespeare, it seems, took an interest in learning...

"Elizabeth was king, now James is queen." So went the joke circulating around London in the 17th century. While Elizabeth I became an icon for transgressing traditional gender roles, her successor is all too often...

"Is he a Communist?" During a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1938, Congressman Joe Starnes probed into the politics of a writer produced by the Federal Theatre Project. The playwright in question...

One small step into the wrong classroom becomes a giant leap into a new life as a Shakespearean actor. That's how Jacob Ming-Trent tells it in his remarkable one-man tour-de-force, How Shakespeare Saved My Life . As the...

A century after Shakespeare's death, his words were in danger of being forgotten. While plays like King Lear and Othello still played to packed houses across England, audiences saw only the bowdlerized...

Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare even if every word is changed? While Shakespeare's work is often hailed for its universality, its meter, metaphor, and wordplay pose special challenges for translators. How do you convey...

What is it like to create a Shakespeare play that's never been written—and will never be performed again? The Improvised Shakespeare Company is a long-running ensemble that performs entirely unscripted plays in the...

Known to many as Lady Danbury in Netflix's Bridgerton , Adjoa Andoh, MBE, is also a celebrated Shakespearean actor and director. Across her career, Andoh has returned to Shakespeare not as a fixed canon, but as a space...

Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare , Oxford scholar David Womersley suggests that the plays offer something else as well: a...

When you visit a new city, one of your first stops might be a museum. It turns out that public art galleries are largely an 18th-century invention. In London in 1789, publisher John Boydell helped shape that new...

Whitney White is a theatrical powerhouse. A director, writer, actor, and musician, White's work has been seen on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at major institutions including The Public Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of...

Many Shakespeare fans don't think of themselves as "math people." They're theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms, right? But in Shakespeare's world, math and literature were deeply intertwined. In Much Ado About...

Why does Samuel Pepys's diary still matter 200 years after it was first published? In her new book, The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary, historian Kate Loveman examines how Pepys's extraordinary consistency as a...

What did people really eat in Shakespeare's England? In her new book, Much Ado About Cooking, food historian Sam Bilton uncovers the vibrant and surprising world of early modern cuisine—where sugar was locked away like...

Hamnet, the acclaimed novel by Maggie O'Farrell, is now a major film. The story imagines the life and death of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, whose loss would later echo through one of his most famous tragedies, Hamlet...