A movie that honors a play’s theatricality: That’s what director Joel Coen said he wanted for The Tragedy of Macbeth, his new adaptation of the Scottish play. The result is a brilliant interpretation that’s my favorite kind of Shakespeare: it combines the artifice of theater with the techniques of film, especially the use of the… Continue Reading »
This January, new productions kick off at the Atlanta Shakespeare Company and Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. Plus, streaming productions of Macbeth, a podcast returns, and a new audio play.

Eric Tucker is an off-Broadway director and Artistic Director of Bedlam Theatre. Musa Gurnis is an early modern theater scholar and actor. When we pitched our Shakespeare mash-up series BEDLAM to streaming networks we joked that we had run out of things to binge watch during the pandemic and so decided to rewrite King Lear…. Continue Reading »

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story isn’t a mere remake of the 1961 film or a filmic version of the 1957 stage musical in which a love affair between two teenagers divided by rival New York gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, ends in tragedy. Instead, it is a layering of theatrical devices, a Hollywood riff… Continue Reading »

Calling all book lovers! Some of our most popular #FolgerFinds posts on Instagram this year featured beautiful bindings of Shakespeare’s collected works or early editions of Shakespeare plays that may have slightly different plot elements than the versions we’ve come to see as standard. One of these quartos, an early edition of A Midsummer Night’s… Continue Reading »
What were the most popular stories this year on the Shakespeare & Beyond blog? Posts about love, coffee, and Ian McKellen made the top five.