The Bard in the Borderlands
In 1597, the first published edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet rolled off the printing press. Only a year later, the Spanish colony...
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Arts
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare materials. Advancing knowledge and the arts. Discover it all at Shakespeare turns up in the most interesting places—not just literature...
Episodes
20 of 308 episodesShakespeare and the Law, with Len Niehoff
If you were Hamlet’s lawyer, would you advise he plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Would you consider his accidental slaying of Poloni...
Stratford Festival's Antoni Cimolino
Near the end of The Tempest, Prospero vows to retire from practicing the “rough magic” he has mastered, to break his magical staff and drown...
Shakespeare and Stephen King, with Caroline Bicks
Imagine being able to dig through Shakespeare’s manuscripts and ask him about his writing process. Did King Lear survive in the first draft?...
Shakespeare's Margaret, with Charles O'Malley and Scott W. Stern
It’s been more than 400 years since she first appeared on stage, and she’s still controversial. Margaret of Anjou appears in not one, not tw...
Scholars in Shakespeare, with Sean Keilen
Shakespeare famously never attended university. But not only has his work inspired generations of scholarship, his plays, too, are filled wi...
The Six Loves of James I, with Gareth Russell
“Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” So went the joke circulating around London in the 17th century. While Elizabeth I became an icon f...
Shakespeare and the Red Scare, with Marjorie Garber
“Is he a Communist?” During a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1938, Congressman Joe Starnes probed into the politics of a...
Jacob Ming-Trent on How Shakespeare Saved My Life
One small step into the wrong classroom becomes a giant leap into a new life as a Shakespearean actor. That’s how Jacob Ming-Trent tells it...
The Shakespeare Ladies Club
A century after Shakespeare’s death, his words were in danger of being forgotten. While plays like King Lear and Othello still played to pac...
The Translator's Art and Shakespeare, with Daniel Hahn
Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare even if every word is changed? While Shakespeare’s work is often hailed for its universality, its meter, me...
The Improvised Shakespeare Company
What is it like to create a Shakespeare play that’s never been written—and will never be performed again? The Improvised Shakespeare Company...
Adjoa Andoh on Shakespeare
Known to many as Lady Danbury in Netflix’s Bridgerton, Adjoa Andoh, MBE, is also a celebrated Shakespearean actor and director. Across her c...
Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley
Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare, Oxford sch...
The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery
When you visit a new city, one of your first stops might be a museum. It turns out that public art galleries are largely an 18th-century inv...
Whitney White and Shakespeare
Whitney White is a theatrical powerhouse. A director, writer, actor, and musician, White’s work has been seen on Broadway, Off Broadway, and...
Shakespeare and Mathematics
Many Shakespeare fans don’t think of themselves as “math people.” They’re theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms, right? But in Shakespeare’...
Spain's Golden Age of Theater
While Shakespeare was reshaping English drama, a parallel theatrical revolution was unfolding in Spain. During the Spanish Golden Age, playw...
The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary
Why does Samuel Pepys’s diary still matter 200 years after it was first published? In her new book, The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Di...
Celebrating Elizabethan Cooking, with Sam Bilton
What did people really eat in Shakespeare’s England? In her new book, Much Ado About Cooking, food historian Sam Bilton uncovers the vibrant...