Shakespeare & Beyond

Patricia Akhimie, curator of the Folger exhibition To Hear Her Speak, asks: “What do Black women and Shakespeare have to do with each other?” Quite a bit over 400 years it turns out, as she shows in the catalog’s introduction.

Banning books goes back thousands of years, almost as long as people have been writing. Aaron T. Pratt, the Folger’s curator of rare books and prints, looks at one of 15 books that James I went beyond banning to publicly burn during his reign.

Shakespeare’s setting of 16th-century Vienna was a stand-in for his own London. Austin Tichenor writes that recent productions updated to the 20th century give fresh historical specificity to the play’s potentially distant and abstract ethical dilemmas.

Scholar Ruben Espinosa explores all we gain when we build a bigger bookshelf—one that includes Shakespeare and the many different voices that have followed. He sees this work as crucial to shaping our world today and in the future.

We’re previewing fall 2026’s new Shakespeare projects and there’s a lot to look forward to—from film to literature to opera and dance, and, of course, the theater.

In the theater and classroom, scholar Jean E. Howard explores how to develop “democratic practices that embrace the thoughts and talents of multitudes and recover the joy of participating with others in generous, life-affirming humanistic inquiry.”

We know John Donne as a famous poet and divine, but in the 17th century he was also celebrated as a letterwriter. It is no surprise, then, that after Donne and Anne More secretly married, he broke the news to his new father-in-law in a letter.

Sometimes called a “problem play” because of its exploration of social issues, Measure for Measure raises questions that audiences continue to debate. While the play is one of Shakespeare’s less performed plays, several quotes from it are well known.

Shakespeare lived through climate change, too. Scholar Harry R. McCarthy says characters in the plays—from Titania to Viola to the courtiers in The Tempest—show the power in catastrophic times of turning “our thoughts to the collective over the individual.”

Are you lily-livered? Try our Shakespearean insults quiz about some of the high points — or low points — in the plays.

A variety of collection items show mixed audience responses to the play, enough so that it has been described as a “problem play.” Explore responses—by a government, by a student, and by artists—over the centuries.

Scholar Paul Menzer remembers Dolly Parton (1946–2026) and the Shakespeare play that inspired her as a singer-songwriter.