Shakespeare & Beyond

A Polish acting troupe outwits the Nazis using Shakespeare codes and theatrical smarts in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film “To Be or Not to Be,” an audacious comedy filmed as Hitler was devastating Europe. Almost the definition of a joke told…

Recipes for plague-curing potions like “Doctor Burges’s remedy” are often found in household recipe books of Shakespeare’s time. Folger fellow Yann Ryan writes about the circulation of information and misinformation through these recipes.

Take the quiz to see if you can identify some of the Shakespeare characters who share names with characters in other plays.

As anyone who has read Shakespeare’s plays can attest, their content is not always very appropriate for children: brutal murders, bawdy jokes, incest, etc. Editions of Shakespeare’s plays that have been designed specifically for children often omit or smooth over…

Austin Tichenor makes the case for why we should say “Shakespeare is for anyone who wants him” instead of “Shakespeare is for everyone.”

While working on a dual biography of Brunhild and Fredegund, Shelley Puhak stumbled across a connection between these medieval queens and Shakespeare.

Folger fellow Peter Radford explores the history of picturing women athletes from ancient Greece to early modern Europe, how these images can be hard to find and interpret, but also why they’re so valuable and compelling.

Keith Hamilton Cobb reflects on his play American Moor and how the questions he received in response to it led to the development of the Untitled Othello Project, a deeply scrutinizing exploration of Shakespeare’s text.

A Folger fellow and former Olympian shares images and stories of 18th-century women athletes in England who competed in races, fights, cricket matches, and more.

There’s nothing intuitive about a month with 28 (sometimes 29) days and an unpredictable number of Rs in its name. But once you see what the Folger’s theater partners have onstage this month, seeing a show at a theater near…

Shakespeare’s comedies and romances are full of lovers. See if you can match each pair of lovers with the Shakespeare play in which they appear.

Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe may not be as famous as his contemporary William Shakespeare, but his death at age 29 was far more dramatic — an argument over a bill that led to a stabbing, with the killer successfully pleading…