Playwright and translator Caridad Svich writes about encountering A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a child growing up in a Cuban-American community in Florida: “In Shakespeare, before he was a writer on my syllabus in high school and, therefore, part of the colonial violence of the canon that I was told I must rebel against, I… Continue Reading »
Is the July heat getting to you? Here are five items from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection that are just right for summertime. 1. A 1699 guide to swimming “In the seventeenth century, swimming was viewed not so much as a recreational pastime but more as an exercise in self-discipline and a mechanical art through… Continue Reading »
Summer Shakespeare is back. Take a look at the plays that the Folger’s theater partners have onstage this July and August.
Shakespeare wrote seven plays about kings named Henry, and it can be tricky sometimes to keep them all straight. See if you can identify each play based on a short plot description drawn from the Folger Shakespeare.
In a recent post on the Folger’s Collation blog, assistant curator Elizabeth DeBold shared a small set of photographs, newly added to the Folger collection, that document a 1933 Japanese production of Hamlet: These five photos provide a glimpse of a production of Hamlet performed at the Tsukiji Shogekijo, the “Tsukiji Little Theater,” aptly named… Continue Reading »
What did Richard III and his disability represent to Shakespeare’s original audiences? And how has this Shakespeare villain shaped the field of early modern disability studies today? Katherine Schaap Williams takes a closer look at these questions in the below excerpt from her recently published book, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English… Continue Reading »
