What were some of our most popular stories this year? Let’s take a look. Recipe adaptations and blog posts about food culture We published several recipes in conjunction with First Chefs: Fame and Foodways from Britain to the Americas (Jan 19 – Mar 31, 2019), including one for pirate botanist William Hughes’s hot chocolate, which… Continue Reading »
Posts By: Shakespeare & Beyond
Our top Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episodes from 2019 feature interviews with authors, directors, actors, and scholars. Happy listening! 1. Deborah Harkness: A Discovery of Witches In 1994, Deborah Harkness was doing research at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library when she stumbled across the Book of Soyga, a long-lost manuscript treatise on magic that once belonged to… Continue Reading »
Have you seen some of the smallest books in the Folger Shakespeare Library collection? We’ve been sharing miniature Folger Finds on Instagram throughout the year as these books joined a rotating display of items from the James L. Harner Collection of Miniature Books Pertaining To Shakespeare. Harner’s collection comprises books crafted by individual artists or art… Continue Reading »
Why weren’t Shakespeare’s sonnets included in the First Folio? And what was the effect on the way that later readers and critics considered Shakespeare’s total body of work? Jane Kingsley-Smith of Roehampton University, London, explores these questions in the below excerpt from her 2019 book The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, published by Cambridge University Press…. Continue Reading »
We’ve got seven Shakespeare-themed holiday gift ideas for you, selected from the Folger Shop and all less than $20. Find something for your friends, your family members, or yourself. And if you would like more ideas, see our eight present picks from last year and our five present picks from the year before. Member Holiday… Continue Reading »
Did you know that the Pilgrims have a presence in the church where William Shakespeare was baptized and buried? A stained glass window that bears the inscription, “The Gift of America to Shakespeare’s Church,” shows the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock, along with other scenes. This is just one of the many American connections to… Continue Reading »
What are the connections between traditional folktales and Shakespeare’s plays? Charlotte Artese, an English professor at Agnes Scott College in Georgia, sets out to explore these folktale sources in a new anthology of stories, Shakespeare and the Folktale, published October 22. “Both folktales and Shakespeare’s plays are cultural survivors, thriving in scores of languages and… Continue Reading »
The Folger Shakespeare Library building is filled (inside and outside) with inscriptions of quotations by famous writers praising Shakespeare. See if you can successfully fill in the blanks for these quotes
We asked our Twitter followers to share their favorite stories from outdoor Shakespeare performances: incredible actors, unexpected animal visitors, dramatic weather events, and more. Tell us your story using #SummerShakesMemories.
Bootleg Shakespeare is not your typical night at the theater: The actors show up on the day of the performance with only their lines memorized; after a few hours of rehearsals, the audience arrives. It’s a summer theater tradition for Washington’s Taffety Punk Theatre Company, which chooses a different Shakespeare play each time. This summer’s… Continue Reading »
