Duke Ellington includes “musical sonnets” in his 12-song Shakespeare jazz suite, Such Sweet Thunder. Learn more about this 1957 milestone in the story of jazz and Shakespeare from an interview with Douglas Lanier.
Posts By: Shakespeare & Beyond
Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) is a famous example of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Try our quiz to see if you can put its lines in order.
Lena Cowen Orlin, the Folger Institute’s former Executive Director, illuminates key parts of Shakespeare’s life in her new book, from his father and his wedding to his home, will, and memorial bust; the replica of the bust shown here is at the Folger.
Interested in politics and communication? Try our quiz and rearrange the lines of Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech from Julius Caesar, a famous passage from Shakespeare’s plays and a brilliant example of political oratory.
Celebrate Halloween and Shakespeare with the remarkable story of Macbeth’s “creepiest” word — a common, simple term whose unusual use in the play was identified by data analysis in 2014 and highlighted in a recent online column.
Take our quiz on the amazing variety of animals in Shakespeare’s plays, from a mix of dogs and horses to song birds, ferocious wild animals, and much more.
“All the world’s a stage,” says Jacques in a famous speech from As You Like It about life and the passage of time. Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines that follow.
Shakespeare is woven into the culture of the British Caribbean, with a special emphasis on Caliban and The Tempest–but does he reflect the colonial past, influence anti-colonial authors, or both? Scholars Giselle Rampaul and Barrymore A. Bogues traced his complex role in a classic Shakespeare Unlimited interview.
Take this quiz to see if you can tell which characters in the plays used foreign words and phrases, including the famous three-word Latin question, “Et tu, Brutè?”
“If music be the food of love, play on.” Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines of the opening speech of Twelfth Night, with its memorable reference to a bank of violets.
