Lolita Chakrabarti shares historical context about pioneering 19th-century Black actor Ira Aldridge, the subject of her play Red Velvet, including a notable detail about his funeral in Poland which she learned after she’d written the play.
Posts By: Shakespeare & Beyond
Take our quiz to get matched with one of 20 books from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s virtual book club inspired by Shakespeare and the early modern era.
Director Sam Gold shares what he loves most about Macbeth, why it stands out from other Shakespeare tragedies he’s directed, and how his ideas about the play changed over time. His current Broadway production, starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, runs through July 10.
Hamlet sings! A new opera version of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is onstage now at the Metropolitan Opera, with tenor Allan Clayton resuming the title role that he played for the opera’s world premiere at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017. Read our Q&A with Allan Clayton.
Jacob Ming-Trent shares a favorite moment from his Shakespeare in the Park performance as Falstaff in “Merry Wives,” which premieres on PBS’s Great Performances May 20.
With the total lunar eclipse happening this weekend, we take a look at three of the ways Shakespeare used eclipses in his plays and poems.
“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 obscure words and allusions in the plays, and that was furnished with critical guidance as to the nature of Shakespeare’s genius,” writes Jonathan Bate (referring to the notable Shakespeare editor Samuel Johnson) in this excerpt from the preface to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s newly published second edition of the complete works of Shakespeare.
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.
Many people are familiar with the popular Shakespeare plays like “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But what about the plays that are considered more obscure? Take the quiz to test your knowledge.
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.”
