Booking and details
Dates Thu, Mar 12, 2026 at 4:30pm
Venue Great Hall
Tickets Free; no ticket required
Shakespeare and popular television. Comedy and racial formation. Early modern sodomy law in England.
Interested? Join us for the next Folger Salon.
About Folger Salon
Learn about research happening at the Folger in real time! Each month, Folger Institute scholar and artist fellows will share their most exciting finds and thought-provoking challenges, followed by casual open conversation. Arrive early to purchase food and drink from the Folger café, Quill & Crumb.
This is a free event. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Speakers
Debbie Finkelstein
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
All the World’s an Inside Stage
My research involves a comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the television program A Man on the Inside, with particular attention to the character Jaques and the monologue “All the World’s a Stage,” looking at commentary, critique, and interpretations. I will also be looking at “Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie” and “The Tale of Gamelyn,” and excerpts from Macbeth and Henry V.
Yunah Kae
2025-26 Long-term Fellow
Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy
I am currently working on my first monograph, tentatively titled, Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy. My project traces how developments in comic conventions on the early modern English stage reflect and produce a logic of race. By examining pastoral romantic comedies, city comedies, satirical plays, and tragicomedies in the 16th and 17th centuries, I argue that playwrights advance a comic racial form which structurally precludes the ignorant from ever discerning the sanctioned tenets of knowledge within their play-world. Distinguishing Race thus offers a model to think through how early modern English comedies re-negotiate what it means to ‘know,’ and further, how they interrogate a racialization of knowledge itself.
Austin Raetz
2025-26 Long-term Fellow
In a Violent Manner: Sodomy, Same-Gender Sexual Violence and the English Law, c. 1600-1800
My project is the first monographic study of sodomy in early modern England to focus on sexual violence. It starts with a legal conundrum: sodomy laws did not distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts of sodomy, and this conceptualization rendered all parties—whether consenting or not—as legally culpable and therefore punishable. Despite this, my research finds that men and boys frequently chanced self-incrimination and approached common law and naval courts to charge assailants of coercively sodomizing them. In so doing, they fought for redress and the recognition of their victimhood before legal practitioners. I argue that men and boys’ accusations of violence, and the courts’ responses to them, elucidate the nature of legal sexual victimhood in early modern England.
About Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is a center for early modern research at the Folger Shakespeare Library that brings public audiences together with researchers to explore the cultures and legacies of the early modern world. Learn more.
See what our fellows are researching
Artist Dominick Porras Reconstructs Classical Narratives of the Americas
Porras, a Folger Artist Fellow, shares what inspired him, from the Folger collection to Indigenous futurism, in the creation of his new media work, de Bry’s Slipstream.
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Take a look at our top five Collation posts from 2025. Thanks for a great year!
“Greetings from Jamaica”
Seventeenth century resonances in a twentieth century postcard sent from Jamaica.
How to be a true widow in early modern England
“Do not seek pleasure in music and singing” and other advice for widows from an early 17th-century manuscript.
Third Time’s a Charm: W. Blount Reads Sidney’s Arcadia
An examination of marginalia in the Folger’s 1593 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia