Shakespeare

2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth and the world is throwing a party in her honor all year long. We’re kicking off our celebration with a round-up of Austen stories and resources for reading and watching.

In an excerpt from Straight Acting, Will Tosh tells the story of Richard Barnfield’s meteoric rise in literary London in the 1590s and how his groundbreaking poetry influenced Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Matthew Steggle’s findings about a letter addressed to “Good Mrs Shakspaire” show the couple might have lived together in London at the time that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet and Othello, dispelling certain myths about their marriage.

This signboard, probably created in the late 1600s to the early 1700s, is based on the popular “Chandos portrait”—the only portrait of Shakespeare that may have been painted from life.