Shakespeare & Beyond

Which Shakespeare plays are onstage this month? We check in with our theater partners Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Atlanta Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare in Detroit, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Gamut Theatre, The Old Globe, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Two brothers living in England in 1595 have had their playwriting careers upended by the arrival of a new guy from Stratford upon Avon, William Shakespeare. That’s the plot of Something Rotten, a new musical that opened on Broadway in…

If you search for the word “pelican” in Shakespeare’s plays, you come across three instances, in Hamlet, King Lear, and Richard II. All three refer to a symbolic meaning of the pelican that can feel remote to today’s reader or…

Lady Mary Wroth watched Shakespeare act in his own plays, heard her relative Sir Walter Raleigh talk about founding Virginia, and almost certainly met Pocahantas and ambassadors from Morocco. Wroth’s later prose fiction echoes elements of her own life, including…

This blog post spotlights five female artists whose interpretations of Shakespeare’s works are part of the Folger collection. We decided to highlight three sculptors and two book artists.

A poster in the Folger collections shows charming illustrations of Mardi Gras floats in New Orleans that represent 18 of Shakespeare’s plays.

Fake quotes have been in the news lately, from the Republican National Committee’s Abraham Lincoln flub to the bogus Winston Churchill quote about supporting funding for the arts during World War II. Such misattribution is familiar to Shakespeare enthusiasts. Every…

Shakespeare is a familiar sight in the theater and on the movie screen, but he’s permeated many other areas of American life. Advertisers have picked up on the ubiquity of Shakespeare for more than two centuries.

Ira Aldridge as Aaron in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Since their revival by David Garrick in the early eighteenth century, Shakespeare and his plays have always generated a certain aura of celebrity, sometimes referred to as “Bardolatry.” Following in the footsteps…

Which Shakespeare plays are onstage this month? We check in with our theater partners Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Atlanta Shakespeare Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

We look at three instances of love letters in Shakespeare’s plays: Orlando’s love poems to Rosalind in As You Like It, Hamlet’s passionate missive to Ophelia in Hamlet, and Proteus’s romantic letter to Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Paul Robeson was the first modern African American to perform Shakespeare—to perform Othello, and he talks in his letters and in his essays about bringing his experiences as a student in a white arena, his experiences with racism, to the…