Teaching the Dream, sweet and bitter
How can A Midsummer Night’s Dream speak to students today? Scholar Gail Kern Paster writes that the 400-year-old play connects to a wide range of contemporary issues that 21st-century audiences care about.
The Women Who Served the Queens of Henry VIII
Who were the ladies-in-waiting to each of Henry VIII’s six wives and what were their lives like? An excerpt from Nicola Clark’s The Waiting Game looks at these overlooked but influential figures.
Humans and monsters
In Humans: A Monstrous History, Surekha Davies shows how our multi-millennial relationship with monsters has shaped the origins of the modern world and ideas about humanness and otherness.
Shakespeare's Daughter
In an excerpt from Grace Tiffany’s imaginative novel, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, we meet Judith Shakespeare at age 61, a midwife-apothecary in war-torn 17th-century England on the run to avoid arrest for witchcraft.