Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Othello  is the story of a tragic murder and suicide involving a dark-skinned general and his aristocratic, white-skinned bride. Who should direct it?  Who's "allowed" to? What if, say, a white director and the actor he's cast as Othello simply do not see eye-to-eye on the play's subtext, the Moor's motivations, and what the audience is supposed to take away from the production?     That conflict...

In Shakespeare's time, people talked about going to hear a play and going to see one in equal measure. So what exactly do we hear when we hear one of Shakespeare's plays? What information do we gather from its words, music, or sound effects? What if it has been adapted, updated, or translated? We ask Dr. Carla Della Gatta of Florida State University, co-editor of the new book Shakespeare and Latin...

The next time someone complains about a director changing or tampering with Shakespeare… we've got an answer for them.   The first generation of theater artists after Shakespeare weren't particularly concerned about performing Shakespeare's plays the way they appear in the First Folio. After the English Civil War, the Puritan-led government outlawed theater for eighteen years. When Charles II asce...

In her play  Where We Belong,  Mohegan director playwright, and performer Madeline Sayet recalls her 2015 journey to the UK to pursue the PhD in Shakespeare that she never ended up getting. The play, now available in a world premiere film adaptation produced by Woolly Mammoth Theater Company and the Folger, explains why she left the degree behind and explores what it means to belong in a complicat...

What would we find out about you if we got to know your neighbors? What if we took a walk around the neighborhood where you live? That's the way that Geoffrey Marsh hopes to learn more about Shakespeare in his new book,  Living with Shakespeare. Starting with a 1598 tax roll that lists Shakespeare's name among the residents of St. Helen's parish, the historian and director of the theater and perfo...

When did the concept of race develop? How far should we look back to find the attitudes that bolster white supremacy? We ask Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy, an assistant professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College, and the author of a chapter in the monumental new Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race called "Barbarian Moors: Documenting Racial Formation in Early Modern England." Dadabhoy takes us...

Over 400 years after Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in 1609, what is left to learn? All the Sonnets of Shakespeare,  a new edition of the sonnets published in 2020, takes some bold steps to help us look at the poems with new eyes. The book, co-edited by Dr. Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells, dispenses with the Sonnets' traditional numbering and arranges them in the order in which Ed...

Frannie Shepherd-Bates founded SIP in 2012. Nine years later, SIP is the signature community program of the Detroit Public Theatre, and has worked on a total of eight plays with a women's ensemble at Huron Valley Correctional Facility and a men's ensemble at Parnall Correctional Facility. Now, a suggestion from a member of the men's ensemble has inspired a new project. The man felt that SIP should...

The National Theatre's new production of Romeo and Juliet was meant to premiere in the summer of 2020. But when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Simon Godwin, the production's director, was tasked with turning it into a 90-minute film shot entirely in the National's Littleton Theatre. Now, as the film approaches its United States premiere, Godwin sees Romeo and Juliet as a play uniquely suited to our...

Today, the texts of roughly three thousand plays from the great age of Elizabethan theater are lost to us. The plays that remain constitute only a sixth of all of the drama produced during that period. How do we make sense of a swiss-cheese history with more holes than cheese? The Lost Plays Database tries to fill in those holes. It's an open-access forum for information about lost plays from Engl...

He was in a shipwreck. He was at Jamestown. He was on the Mayflower. And maybe, just maybe, he's in Shakespeare's  The Tempest.   Stephen Hopkins was the only passenger on the Mayflower who had previously been to the Americas. Eleven years before the Mayflower landed in what is now Massachusetts, Hopkins sailed aboard the Sea Venture, a ship bound for Jamestown, VA that was blown off-course by a h...

For generations, artists have been shaping and changing Shakespeare to fit their times. The best adaptations add specific textures of place and culture, or a fluidity of language that can take centuries-old work and make it brand new. Seattle Shakespeare Company is presenting one of those works: a Salvadoran-American adaptation of  Hamlet  called  house of sueños , by actor and playwright Meme Gar...

When you think about the Harlem Renaissance, theater might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But, says Dr. Freda Scott Giles, theater played a significant role in the blossoming of Black American arts and culture of the 1920s and '30s. Of course, because there's little in the English-language theater untouched by Shakespeare, he was present in the Harlem Renaissance too. Banner Shakespear...

Dr. Naomi Miller's novel Imperfect Alchemist is about one of early modern England's most significant literary figures: a poet, playwright, translator, scientist, and colleague of writers like Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, John Donne, and Emilia Lanier Bassano. Her name was Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. We talk to Miller about how she imagined the lives and voices of these li...

Based on his knowledge of Shakespeare's  Henry VI  plays, Harvard's Dr. Jeffrey R. Wilson knew just how HBO's  Game of Thrones  would play out. Jon Snow, the illegitimate son, was a Richard III type, who would win the crown (and our hearts, in a love-to-hate-him kind of way). But Daenerys Targaryen, as a kind of Henry VII, would defeat him in battle and win it back, restoring peace and order. Turn...

Does Hamlet live in a Ptolemaic or Copernican solar system? Is Queen Mab a germ? Which falls faster: a feather or the Duke of Gloucester? In Shakespeare's time, new scientific discoveries and mathematical concepts were upending the way people looked at their world. Many of those new ideas found their ways into his plays. We speak with Dr. Natalie Elliot about how Shakespeare interpreted the scient...

Actor John Tufts was playing Hal in a production of Henry IV, Part 1 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Every night, he would call Falstaff a "roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly." Hal is calling Falstaff is gross and overstuffed, but Tufts started to think that a roast Manningtree ox actually sounded pretty good. That role inspired the actor and cook to write his own cookbook, F...

For most of the 1700s, Shakespeare was considered a very good playwright. But in the 1800s, and especially during the Victorian period, Shakespeare became a prophet. Ministers began drawing their lessons from his texts. Scholars wrote books about the scriptural resonances of his words—often while taking those words out of context. Shakespeare's works, the Victorians believed, offered religious rev...

In his classes at Binghamton University, David Sterling Brown and his students examine Shakespeare's plays through the lens of Critical Race Theory. You might have heard about Critical Race Theory lately: put simply, it's a way of looking at society and culture that focuses on the intersections of race, law, and power. Ever since George Floyd's killing by a white police officer in Minneapolis outr...

In March, theaters were beginning to cancel ongoing and upcoming productions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Glasgow-based actor Robert Myles had just lost a gig that would have taken him through April. He'd been chatting with his wife about what to do, and one night, he tweeted: In response to #Covid_19, I'm going to set up an online #Shakespeare play-reading group via Zoom or similar....

Between 1348 and the early years of the 18th century, successive waves of the plague rolled across Europe, killing millions of people and affecting every aspect of life. Despite the plague's enormous toll on early modern English life, Shakespeare's plays refer to it only tangentially. Why is that? And what did people write about the plague in early modern England? Over the past 20 years, Rebecca T...

Charlotte Cushman was one of the most famous American theater artists of the mid-19 th  century. And while she was known for her Lady Macbeth and  Oliver Twist's  Nancy, she was acclaimed for her performances as Romeo and Hamlet. The newest book about Cushman's life is Tana Wojczuk's  Lady Romeo: The Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity. Cushman's life was...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating to theater in the United States. Broadway and regional theaters are dark, and Shakespeare festivals across the country have cancelled their seasons. So it wasn't a surprise when The Public Theater decided, for the first time in 66 years, that they couldn't offer free Shakespeare in Central Park. But what they did instead made one of their scheduled produc...

In the second of two episodes about Black Americans and Shakespeare, we talk with scholars Marvin MacAllister and Ayanna Thompson about the period between the end of the Civil War and the 1950s: from Reconstruction, through the period of Jim Crow segregation, and into the Civil Rights Era. We'll take a look at landmark performances like Orson Welles's 1936 all-Black Macbeth and Paul Robeson's grou...

African American engagement with Shakespeare goes back a long way—maybe even farther than you'd imagine. And like so much else surrounding American race relations, African American performance of Shakespeare is inextricably linked to the experiences of slavery, freedom, Jim Crow segregation, and the battle for equal rights. In this episode, which we originally broadcast in 2015, we explore two per...