Off the shelf

“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…

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…

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…

The Bard meets the MCU in Ian Doescher’s reworking of the four Avengers films as a Shakespearean play. Read an excerpt from the epic Battle of New York scene from the first Avengers film.

This excerpt from Leonard Barkan’s new book “Reading Shakespeare Reading Me” explores Bottom’s awakening and recollection of his enchantment as a donkey in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In her new book “The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage,” Pamela Allen Brown explores the considerable impact of Italian divas on Shakespeare and other English playwrights. This excerpt looks at the character of Juliet.

While doing research in the Folger collection, Dennis Duncan encountered hundreds of indexes created by early modern readers. In this excerpt from his newly published book, “Index, A History of the,” Duncan describes the fascinating variety of reader indexes he…