Shakespeare in the world

Scholar Ruben Espinosa explores all we gain when we build a bigger bookshelf—one that includes Shakespeare and the many different voices that have followed. He sees this work as crucial to shaping our world today and in the future.

We’re previewing fall 2026’s new Shakespeare projects and there’s a lot to look forward to—from film to literature to opera and dance, and, of course, the theater.

In the theater and classroom, scholar Jean E. Howard explores how to develop “democratic practices that embrace the thoughts and talents of multitudes and recover the joy of participating with others in generous, life-affirming humanistic inquiry.”

Scholar Paul Menzer remembers Dolly Parton (1946–2026) and the Shakespeare play that inspired her as a singer-songwriter.

Arts administrator, writer, and advocate Howard Sherman recently saw The Winter’s Tale for the first time. He shares his approach to seeing Shakespeare after decades of theatergoing and the rewards of letting the production speak first.

Americans have conscripted Shakespeare in causes all the way back to Jamestown’s founding. Looking ahead, in a fractured world might Shakespeare’s talent for giving “us pause” or “time to pause. And attend” unite us in a new consensus?

Shakespeare’s plays—and plays and musicals inspired by him—are always a feature of the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival. Austin Tichenor shares some of the 40 productions playing in Scotland this August.

The word happiness had multiple meanings at the time that Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, and those different definitions also appear in Shakespeare, a writer whom Jefferson admired.

Traveling the world to see as many Shakespeare First Folios as possible, Greg Doran views an unusual copy at the Craven Museum, one in which all the comedies have been removed and which Charlotte Bronte may have read.

Scholar James Shapiro looks at how Shakespeare has always “served as a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to threats to our fragile democracy.” He offers as a recent example the 2017 production of Julius Caesar in Central Park.

For the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, we asked Shakespeare scholars what part Shakespeare may play in America’s next three centuries. Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper writes that Shakespeare and what we do with him is more essential than ever if democracy is to thrive.

60 years after the premiere of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, a new stage comedy is using Stoppard’s absurdist template to explore the fears and struggles of the two main clowns from Much Ado About Nothing.