Off the shelf

Did Shakespeare give much thought to how his works would survive after his death? Margreta de Grazia argues that his sonnets show he did.

The disabled body of Richard III, a historical English king and one of Shakespeare’s most iconic villains, is the focus of a recent book by Jeffrey R. Wilson.

Chris Laoutaris explores the Shakespearean printing mystery behind the Pavier-Jaggard Quartos, published a few years before the First Folio.

White People in Shakespeare examines what part Shakespeare played in the construction of a “white people” and how his work has been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity.

"Spiritually speaking, many of us confronted with the thought of death perform the psychological equivalence of hiding in a box with our knees under our chin: Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties." Read more from Katherine Rundell in this excerpt from her new biography of the English poet John Donne, "Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne."

Shakespeare's plays provide ample opportunity for dramatic deaths onstage, and 18th-century English actors like David Garrick transformed simple stage directions in the text into "stirring set-pieces," as Laurence Senelick writes in the below excerpt from his new book, "The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage."

"Murphy may be the first person in history to subject laughter to such intensive and extensive study, at least from the perspective of a laughter professional," writes Joy Wiltenburg about the 18th-century writer's 500-page compilation of humor, in this excerpt from her book, "Laughing Histories." Murphy's commonplace book is part of the Folger collection.

In the opening scene of Jennifer Falkner's novella "Susanna Hall, Her Book," the queen of England has just arrived at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. But Susanna, the eldest daughter of William Shakespeare, has reasons for not wanting to host Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I.

Sophia Richardson explores how Gabrielle Zevin’s new novel about video games, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," is also a book about Shakespeare.

Helen Hackett explores Shakespeare's use of the soliloquy in "Hamlet," including the famous "To be or not to be" speech, in this excerpt from her new book, "The Elizabethan Mind: Searching for the Self in an Age of Uncertainty," published by Yale University Press.

Austin Tichenor recommends an adventure novel starring a young Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, who uncover a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.

"To know Shakespeare thoroughly and read him well aloud, it was necessary to have a usable edition of his works, a text that did away with printer’s errors and the vagaries of old spelling and punctuation, that explained the more obscure words and allusions in the plays, and that was furnished with critical guidance as to the nature of Shakespeare’s genius," writes Jonathan Bate (referring to the notable Shakespeare editor Samuel Johnson) in this excerpt from the preface to the Royal Shakespeare Company's newly published second edition of the complete works of Shakespeare.