Inspired by Shakespeare

Victorians enjoyed viewing sets of engravings put out as “Galleries” of Shakespeare’s heroines as imagined by leading painters. Over the 19th century, they represented changing British ideas of feminine beauty and behavior.

Womersley shares how tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear place audiences inside difficult moral dilemmas, inviting us to wrestle with enduring questions about identity, power, and what it means to do the right thing.

In 1789, John Boydell opened a London gallery of paintings of Shakespeare scenes. It became a sensation, transforming Shakespeare into a national icon and elevating public art. Rosie Dias and Michael Dobson discuss its rise and fall.

Shakespeare as the creator of heroes is explored in Wonder Man, the newest entry in the vast Marvel Cinematic Universe. Austin Tichenor explores the series’ interest in the power of theater and storytelling over super-powered beings fighting evil.

Theater powerhouse Whitney White shares the music she hears when she reads Shakespeare— punk rock, the blues, gospel—and how the sounds and rhythms of Lady Macbeth, Emilia, Juliet, and Richard III inspired All Is But Fantasy.

Many Shakespeare fans don’t think of themselves as “math people.” But in Shakespeare’s world, math and literature were deeply intertwined. Mathematician Rob Eastaway explores how numbers, patterns, and mathematical ideas shaped Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s poetry, plots, and characters have inspired dozens of musicals, as well as numerous comic songs and even special cameos. Austin Tichenor explores the musical theater that keeps us humming and brushing up our Shakespeare.

Take a time machine back to 18th-century London and John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, visited by everyone who was anyone, from Jane Austen to the Prince of Wales. But why make a gallery devoted to Shakespeare? And who was Boydell?

Shakespeare stories in the news this fall, from the Hamnet film to a new discovery in Shakespeare Quarterly about Shakespeare’s father. Plus a surprising connection between the middle school phrase “6-7” and Richard II.

Folger Artist Fellow Missy Dunaway shares what she’s learning while working on The Birds of Shakespeare, her project to paint the 65 birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works.

Two new productions, Al Letson’s Julius X and the Q Brothers Collective’s Rome Sweet Rome, explore contemporary themes of political upheaval and personal betrayal while illuminating aspects of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar we might have missed. 

Ansel shares how her questions as an artist fellow about Fuseli’s take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth inspired her to create two abstract, large-scale oil paintings but this time from a woman’s perspective that celebrates the play’s sisterhood.