Off the shelf

The young Virginia Woolf encounters Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and gives her opinions.

Farah Karim-Cooper explores the way that race is represented by Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello, in this excerpt from her new book, The Great White Bard.

Learn more about authorship and influence among the playwrights of Shakespeare’s day in this excerpt from a recent book by Darren Freebury-Jones.

“King Lear is about insiders who with terrible suddenness are shoved outside, and what they learn or don’t learn from finding themselves positioned there,” writes Arthur Frank.

Daniel Blank writes about Shakespeare’s presence within the early modern university sphere.

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…

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…

“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…