Shakespeare & Beyond

With the golden eagle, we continue following artist Missy Dunaway on a bird-watching expedition through Shakespeare’s works. The eagle soars throughout Shakespeare’s world, Renaissance literature, and beyond – symbolizing strength, power, and the divine.

This summer, visitors to The Playhouse at the National Building Museum can enjoy an immersive installation based on a beautiful book in the Folger collection, Joanna Robson’s “A Knavish Lad.” The book visually (and wordlessly) narrates “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”…

If you’re seeing “Much Ado About Nothing” for the first time, or the hundredth time, what should you look for?

For each of these famous quotes from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” can you fill in the blank with the missing word?

Love-in-idleness, a flower also called pansy or heartsease, plays an important role in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as Marissa Nicosia explores.

Marissa Nicosia adapts an early modern recipe for heartsease cordial. This purple pansy syrup was used to “clear the heart” – to treat the chest and lungs or to reduce fever – but also for healing heartaches.

Austin Tichenor recommends an adventure novel starring a young Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, who uncover a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.

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.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom sings a tune about blackbirds to keep up his courage when he finds himself in strange circumstances.

A Folger fellow shares her research into the language of slavery in early modern England, and more specifically, the use of that language in the works of William Shakespeare.

Find out what’s onstage at Shakespeare theaters across the United States this summer.

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.