Shakespeare & Beyond

At the heart of Keith Hamilton Cobb’s one-man play American Moor are explorations of blackness, racial dynamics in American theater, “ownership” of Shakespeare, and the subtext of Othello. He has performed the play across the United States, including an off-Broadway…

Get an up-close look at the title page of one of the Folger’s 82 First Folios and learn more about it by clicking through captions that zoom in on different parts of the page.

“To be or not to be” – do you know what comes after? This quiz challenges you to drag and drop the lines of Hamlet’s famous speech into the correct order.

Why was herpetophagy (eating reptiles and amphibians) linked with madness in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”? Unpack the cultural anxieties involved in early modern English encounters with unfamiliar dietary norms.

Check out performances, conversations, classes, and podcasts available online in June from Shakespeare theaters all across the country.

Photograph by Lizzie Caswall Smith of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library. During this global pandemic, when the whole world is quarantined to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Hamlet seems like a character perfectly suited to…

Conrad Gessner. Icones animalium quadrupedum. 1560. Folger Shakespeare Library. Owls were bad omens for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The general of the French forces, facing an English emissary in Henry VI, Part 1, calls him “Thou ominous and fearful owl…

Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew showcases one of the earliest and thorniest examples of teaching in a home environment—thorny both because of the way pedagogy in the play is full of cynicism and brutality, and because, on the…

A sonnet packs a lot of meaning into a tiny space. Here are fourteen ways (one for each line) of approaching Shakespeare’s most well-known poems.

Suddenly, there’s a lot of Shakespeare available online. Here are our tips for exploring the wealth of films, Zoom readings, online classes, and more in the month of May.

William Capon. Theatre Royal Haymarket. August 1803. Folger Shakespeare Library. During a time when performing Shakespeare in London was a legal right belonging only to certain theaters, the Haymarket theater’s rise to greatness is directly linked to its struggle to…

We’ve selected some costume designs from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection, and your challenge is to determine which Shakespeare characters they depict. Pay attention to small details that will give you clues! Many of the designs are watercolors from the…