Shakespeare & Beyond

At 19, Bullen Reymes left England for the Continent and his grand adventure began. His diaries show the making of a Renaissance man, including who he met, what he saw and heard, and what he read, including Shakespeare.

What if Shakespeare had died during the plague of 1592–93, still a young writer? Scholar Rory Loughnane imagines what Shakespeare’s place in literary history might have been if we had only his early works to recommennd him.

What are today’s audiences to make of Isabella and her 16th-century quandary? Scholar Marissa Greenberg juxtaposes Shakespeare with more recent authors to illuminate “the enduring challenge of upholding ideas against often harsh realities.”

Try out our quiz about the many Black women who engaged with Shakespeare’s works and world, from the Black women who lived in London in Shakespeare’s time to the stars, directors, and scholars of today.

“Theaters are time machines, and Shakespeare knew it,” writes Austin Tichenor. “Only in the theater can people so persuasively journey from the present to another time and place. It’s an act of collective imagination.”

The first Black actor to play a wide variety of Shakespearean roles in America, Hyman was equally loved for his portrayals of Panthro in ThunderCats and Russell Huxtable on The Cosby Show. His papers are now in the Folger collection.

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.”