Shakespeare discoveries by Folger Fellows

Our Folger Institute Fellows regularly share their work in the collection on The Collation, the Folger’s blog focused on research and exploration. Enjoy this round-up of recent posts about Shakespeare, his works, and legacy.

Drinking with Shakespeare: Early modern tavern tokens

While working on a historical novel as an Artistic Fellow at the Folger, Leah Hampton became fascinated with early modern drinking habits. She stumbled upon special coins that Shakespeare and other Elizabethans would have carried in their pockets, which united her interest in taverns and pubs and fake money.

Even them?! Loving the neighbor in Shakespeare and early modern England

Rejection always cuts deeply, but perhaps especially so when your would-be lover uses religious language to tell you that the feeling’s not mutual. Fellow Robert Kwan looks at Silvius and Phoebe in Shakespeare’s As You Like It as part of a project investigating neighborliness via Shakespeare and Shakespeare via neighborliness

C. Walter Hodges and reconstructed Shakespearean theaters

Fellow Alex Baines looks at the drawings of C. Walter Hodges—a 20th-century English artist and writer known for his illustrations and theoretical reconstructions of Elizabethan playhouses—and how they continue to impact how we imagine the Globe Theatre, including a recreation proposed for Detroit in the late 1970s.

Or else I’m a Jew | a series of abstractions

Artistic fellow Casey Carsel shares their process designing quilts in response to questions about the early modern Jewish experience, asking how do works like The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta sit at the intersection between art and the social, between the imagined and the real? To what, and for whose, purposes were characters like Shylock and Barabas put?

Delia Bacon and the water-cure in 19th-century America

Drawing on the correspondence of Delia Salter Bacon—one of the first people to develop a Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theory, Fellow Kate Doubler shares Bacon’s experiences with hydropathy, a once-popular wellness treatment using cold water, that Bacon hoped would help with migraines and other pains.

Convivial Cleopatra

What happens when we theorize Cleopatra’s racialized and sexualized queenship through the twinned frameworks of indigenous and queer conviviality? Folger Fellow Mira ‘Assaf explores the question as she composes the Oxford World Series’ Critical Introduction to Antony and Cleopatra.

Deep Dive into Gorakh Dhanda or what Partington thought of Indian Shakespeare in 1913

Looking at books in the Folger collection from India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fellow Anandi Rao shares an Urdu translation of The Comedy of Errors. The book’s early owner was Wilfred Partington, then at Anglo Indian College and later the editor of Bookman’s Journal.

Making Meaning of Adapted Shakespeare: White Femininity in Re-Imaginings of Measure for Measure

Folger Fellow Vanessa Corredera examines the use of color in adaptations of Measure for Measure, including examining Cuban director Henry Godinez’s 2022 production for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which shifts Shakespeare’s problem play from Vienna to a 1950s Havana on the cusp of revolution.