Calendar

Garden tours are offered at 10am and 11am on the first and third Saturday of each month, April through October.
The Elizabethan Garden is open year-round, Monday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm, and before most Folger performances.

Explore our garden, inspired by herbal references in Shakespeare's plays and also incorporating plants popular in his time, including lavender, creeping thyme, and English ivy; a knot garden; and Shakespearean statues by American sculptor Greg Wyatt. Folger docents offer insights into plantings, Elizabethan customs, and more.

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Dominic Dromgoole and Bill Buckhurst

Folger Theatre is the first American stop for Hamlet presented by London-based Shakespeare’s Globe, marking the company’s Washington, DC debut. Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and Globe regular Bill Buckhurst will co-direct this raw, thrillingly elemental production of Hamlet. The Daily Telegraph calls the production—with a cast of eight actors and a running time of only two-and-a-half hours—a “stripped-down Hamlet that is fast, fresh, and lucid.”

Notable writers Carol Anshaw, Louis Bayard, Dan Chaon, Ben Fountain, Major Jackson, Joyce Carol Oates, Elissa Schappell, Susan Richards Shreve, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Hilma Wolitzer read original pieces focused on the theme of “Resilience.” Calvin Trillin serves as master of ceremonies. Followed by a black-tie dinner. Proceeds from this festive evening support the endowment of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and Writers in Schools.

Carl Phillips, a critically acclaimed poet and new judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, has chosen Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning as the 2011 winner. Both Phillips and Corral read from their works. Reception and book signing to follow.

Jeffrey Eugenides reads from his most recent novel, The Marriage Plot.

Led by Artistic Director Robert Eisenstein, these lively and insightful seminars give music lovers a detailed look at the composers and their world. A light fare reception is also included.

Deborah Harkness is a prize-winning historian and novelist and a professor of history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is the the author of The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. As part of Folger Institute's fall conference and a complement to the Folger exhibition Open City: London, 1500-1700, Harkness considers what it would have felt like to move around and through the early modern city.