Shakespeare & Beyond

Welcome to our new Shakespeare and Greek Myths series. We’re starting off with Theseus and Hippolyta–figures who are not only referred to in the plays, but are also fully formed characters in two of them: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and…

“All the world’s a stage,” says Jacques in a famous speech from As You Like It about life and the passage of time. Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines that follow.

Shakespeare is woven into the culture of the British Caribbean, with a special emphasis on Caliban and The Tempest–but does he reflect the colonial past, influence anti-colonial authors, or both? Scholars Giselle Rampaul and Barrymore A. Bogues traced his complex…

Take this quiz to see if you can tell which characters in the plays used foreign words and phrases, including the famous three-word Latin question, “Et tu, Brutè?”

This September, there’s still time to catch the final performances of some of this summer’s outdoor Shakespeare productions. Plus, watch performances online from the American Players Theatre, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and Shakespeare in…

Explore turmeric, cinnamon, mint, and sugar to learn more about plants as food, and what they reveal about the early modern age and today.

When Robert McCrum began his recovery from a life-changing stroke in the 1990s, he discovered that the only words that made sense to him were snatches of Shakespeare. The First Folio became an endless source of inspiration for “journeys of…

“If music be the food of love, play on.” Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines of the opening speech of Twelfth Night, with its memorable reference to a bank of violets.

How do Shakespeare’s plays reflect a life filled with plague outbreaks, asks Austin Tichenor — and do we see his plays in new ways now?

“My kingdom for a horse!” A titanic villain in Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard III departs the stage and this life at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Mark the battle’s anniversary with these posts and podcast episodes.

Mona Awad’s new, darkly funny novel All’s Well tells the story of a theater professor who is convinced that staging All’s Well That Ends Well will remedy all of her woes. Along the way, she meets three strange benefactors with…

Shakespeare and Forgetting by Peter Holland considers how Shakespeare explores the concept of forgetting and how forgetting functions in performance. The excerpt below focuses on the character of Sir John Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays. Why do…